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KU Children’s Services partnership with Storypark flourishes as it enters 5th year
Jason Roberts
Jun 30, 2021
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KU Children’s Services and Storypark’s partnership has now entered its fifth year as two of the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector’s best known for-purpose organisations continue to work collaboratively to improve outcomes for children and their families.
“Our partnership with Storypark began in 2016 after an extensive period of research by our team to try and find partners that could help us improve how we as an organisation recorded and articulated children’s individual learning on a day to day basis,” KU Children’s Services CEO Chris Legg said.“At that point Storypark was not at all well known in Australia but we were so impressed with how deeply they understood children’s learning and how they had incorporated their knowledge and values into their product,” she continued.
“It was a game changer for KU, our children and their families and we are proud to have been one of the first large organisations in Australia to sign up.”
Storypark’s impact was immediate with educators and families welcoming the move
Soon after Storypark was rolled out in 2016 the team at KU Children’s Services began to notice a shift in how educators were approaching their programming across the organisation and how Storypark was facilitating that movement. “Adopting a digital tool to support what has historically been a manual process was a key focus for us in the initial roll out of Storypark,” Ms Legg said.
“We knew that the implementation of the National Quality Framework meant a greater emphasis on ensuring programming was anchored in the Quality Standards and we, and our educators, were very encouraged by Storypark’s efforts to create a system that enabled quality programming to occur without the system becoming completely automated.”
“And from a parents perspective the positive feedback was almost immediate. At last they had a direct line of sight as to what was happening in our services. We were able to show exactly what play based learning really was and how their children’s learning journeys were unfolding.”
“So overall our partnership with Storypark has been very successful. Their commitment to innovation has helped us maintain our sector leading National Quality Standards ratings, deepen family engagement and support high quality pedagogy and practice across all of our KU sites and services.”
Trust, values and vision have laid foundation for deepening partnership
Looking to the future Ms Legg and her team continue to view Storypark as a trusted partner of the organisation with a shared set of values and aligned vision that makes further cooperation both strategically and operationally consistent with the Group’s objectives.
“Alignment of values between us and all of our partner’s is a non-negotiable for KU. Our strategic plan is very clear that all of the decisions we make must be based on our values without exception,” Ms Legg said.
“That’s one of the reasons why our Storypark partnership has sustained over the years and also why we recently agreed to partner with them in their new Storypark Manage child care management system (CCMS).”
“It’s a big decision for an organisation of our size and complexity to shift to a brand new CCMS system but given the levels of trust in Storypark, and the quality of their platform partners, it wasn't a particularly difficult one.”
More information about the work undertaken by KU Children’s Services may be found here, with information about Storypark Manage available here.
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