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From paper chaos to digital safety: How early childhood services are strengthening compliance with 1Place
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Fiona Alston
Sep 29, 2025
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When compliance notices arrive or regulatory audits loom, early childhood providers need confidence that their safety systems are working. Two leading services share how digital transformation strengthened their compliance and safety outcomes.
Managing compliance in early childhood education and care has become increasingly complex. Between incident reporting, regulatory documentation, and maintaining oversight across multiple classrooms, providers face mounting pressure to demonstrate they're meeting their duty of care obligations.For many services, paper-based systems have become a compliance liability rather than an asset. Forms go missing, reporting delays occur, and critical safety information gets lost in administrative backlogs.
Hawthorn Early Years and Little Locals both faced these exact challenges before implementing 1Place's digital compliance platform. Their experiences demonstrate how the right technology can transform safety management from a reactive burden into a proactive strength.
The Hidden Compliance Risks of Paper Systems
At Hawthorn Early Years, Service Director Carolyn Smart discovered gaps in their 155-place service: "At the end of the year, staff would clean out their classrooms and bring us piles of incident forms we didn't even know about. Suddenly we'd be getting a hundred forms we had no knowledge of throughout the year."
These scenarios represent significant compliance risks. When incident reports aren't captured in real-time, services lose the opportunity to:
- Address immediate safety concerns
- Report serious incidents to regulators within required timeframes
- Identify patterns that could prevent future incidents
- Demonstrate due diligence during audits or investigations
At Little Locals, a Queensland-based group with five centres and 220 employees licensed to educate 900 students, Director Jacek Gajewski faced additional compliance visibility challenges. "Previously, I would've been clueless about the current maintenance issues," he explains. "As we grow, we've got all of these educators spending all this time manually processing forms. It was problematic."
The organisation's paper-based approach was consuming close to 100,000 pieces of paper annually, with team members printing forms, scanning them, saving them "somewhere" on a computer, and physically filing them. Beyond the environmental impact, this process created compliance gaps where critical safety information could be lost or delayed.
Real-Time Visibility Transforms Safety Management
Both services found that 1Place's digital platform fundamentally changed their ability to maintain safety oversight.
"We can now have conversations immediately after seeing an incident report," explains Rina Papageorgiou, Centre Manager at Hawthorn Early Years. "The ability to see what everyone is writing on incident forms means we can ask for more clarity and provide assistance if needed."
This immediate visibility has practical safety benefits. As Carolyn Smart notes: "If we see a challenging incident reported, we think, 'That might have been difficult for the educators.' We can go to the classroom, check on them, and ensure they have what they need. We can provide support when it's needed rather than finding out months later that someone wasn't coping well."
Streamlined Regulatory Reporting
The platform's integration with childcare management systems eliminates data entry errors that can compromise compliance. "Staff no longer had to do all the data entry," explains Carolyn Smart. "With all the drop-down boxes, they don't have to think about what to say. We've created scripts for them within the system, so certain fields are mandatory, they can't proceed unless they've entered specific information."
This standardisation is crucial when dealing with compliance notices or regulatory reviews, where incomplete or inconsistent documentation can escalate enforcement action.
Data-Driven Risk Management
Beyond immediate incident management, both services discovered that 1Place's reporting capabilities enabled proactive risk management. "We can run reports to identify when incidents are happening, what types of incidents occur, and where they happen," says Carolyn Smart. "When working with a classroom on issues, we have actual data rather than assumptions. We can say, 'The incidents are showing us this pattern, what can we do to be more proactive rather than reactive?"
This shift from reactive to proactive safety management helps services address underlying risk factors before they result in serious incidents or compliance breaches.
Daily Compliance Oversight Across Multiple Sites
For multi-site operators, maintaining consistent compliance oversight presents unique challenges.
Little Locals found that 1Place's daily reporting capabilities transformed their ability to monitor compliance across all five centres. "As an offsite director, I receive a daily report for each centre in my inbox, telling me how they track their compliance," explains Jacek Gajewski. "Previously, I wouldn't have known. Now I get it daily, and I like that it's in my emails. It's there in the morning, I can see it, and it takes me 30 seconds to follow up."
This daily visibility enables immediate intervention when compliance gaps emerge. "If there are more red crosses than green ticks, I'll send a follow-up to the relevant centre manager to remind them to stay on top of the checklists," he notes. The system particularly supports high-risk activities that require specific safety protocols. For Little Locals' Bush Kindy program, which includes regular excursions, bus checklists must be signed by two people as a critical safety requirement. "Because excursions are part of our Bush Kindy program, the bus checklist is one I pay particular attention to," says Jacek. "1Place makes everyone accountable. If they're signing it, they confirm that this essential physical check has occurred."
The platform also streamlines maintenance compliance, with issues now logged through 1Place with photos for assessment. "Now I can go into 1Place and search by date, centre or priority, see the open ones and which have been resolved," explains Jacek. This visibility ensures safety- related maintenance issues are tracked and resolved systematically rather than handled ad-hoc.
Supporting Staff Compliance
One often-overlooked aspect of compliance is ensuring staff can actually complete required documentation properly. Both services found that 1Place's user-friendly design improved compliance completion rates.
At Hawthorn Early Years, where many educators come from non-English speaking backgrounds, the digital forms provided better support: "Many of our educators find it challenging to fill out forms or find the time to concentrate on paperwork while supervising children. The digital forms looked exactly the same as the paper forms they were using, just digitalised."
Little Locals found that the platform's accountability features ensure critical safety protocols are followed. With 1Place available via iPad in every room, educators can complete regular checklists and log incidents without leaving their primary focus on child supervision. "It makes everyone accountable," says Jacek Gajewski.
The Compliance Confidence Factor
Perhaps most importantly, both services report increased confidence in their compliance position. Carolyn Smart echoes this sentiment: "We needed to be responsive to parents quickly and enable them to know exactly what was happening to their child during the day. We're giving families better explanations about incidents, and we're seeing fewer escalated calls to management as a result."
Moving Forward with Digital Compliance
For providers evaluating their compliance systems, the experiences of Hawthorn Early Years and Little Locals demonstrate that digital transformation isn't just about efficiency - it's about strengthening fundamental safety and compliance outcomes.
When choosing a compliance platform, these services recommend looking for:
- Real-time incident reporting and oversight
- Daily compliance tracking and reporting capabilities
- Integration with existing childcare management systems
- Automated workflows for regulatory reporting
- Comprehensive data analysis capabilities
- Multi-site visibility for growing organisations
- User-friendly design that supports staff compliance
As Jacek Gajewski from Little Locals notes: "The investment is worthwhile. It is a niche; I'm aware of no software solution that does all of this specifically for childcare. It has to be quite specific, and it is."
As regulatory requirements continue to evolve and enforcement becomes more stringent, services need confidence that their compliance systems can meet these challenges. The shift from paper to digital isn't just operational, it's a critical step toward stronger safety outcomes and regulatory resilience.
To learn more about how 1Place can strengthen your service's compliance and safety management, visit, 1Place Childcare and explore their case studies here.
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