Explore and Develop North Ryde uses technology to help children thrive

The New South Wales Department of Education recently interviewed Explore & Develop North Ryde about the way in which it uses technology and innovative practices to support children in the early years. 

An extract of the conversation appears below. To read the full conversation, please see here. 

Service owner Libby Klingberg described the way in which the service embraces technology and uses it to achieve important health and safety markers, boost visibility of compliance and enhance real time collaboration with parents. 

“We have a team of highly knowledgeable and experienced leaders and building this platform from the ground up has allowed us to deliver that collective expertise into the hands of our staff,” she explained.

The service has built custom checklists on  iAuditor which “removes the guesswork from transitions and keeps our systems seamless,” added Nominated Supervisor Jessica McKay.

Innovation is a core value at Explore and Develop North Ryde, and Ms Klingberg says that streamlined, transparent record keeping allows the team to extend their practice while ensuring that children’s health and safety are always maintained.

“Our excursion program called Beyond the Classroom requires a significant amount of training for staff, children and families, along with compliance checks and the ability to respond to whatever might happen when we’re out and about,” she continued. 

From a practical standpoint, the introduction of the platform has meant the service has been able to eliminate 15-20 paper forms, turning them into “a logic driven checklist” that can be  built by multiple people in real time. First aid checks, accident and illness responses and headcounts are transparent online. 

The service uses Xplor to build communication plans for families, so that they can access, comment and update with new information. Staff are alerted any time an edit is made, so parents and educators always have the same information, and if changes occur there is total transparency.

After recognising that diverse and conflicting cultural, experiential and personal paradigms were influencing infant feeding expectations, the team built a specific training package for all birth to two educators to streamline practice. The success of this initiative then led the service to create additional training for safe sleep and primary care giving.

Since introducing the training package both Ms Klingberg and Ms McKay have seen a marked improvement in relationships between families and the service as they were invited to collaborate on, and review, this training package.

“Our platforms become a conduit for quality care in the home. We share our research and learning, recognising that parents also have a wealth of expertise”.