What assessment and rating actually asks you to evidence
Seven quality areas, fifteen standards, forty elements. Services doing the work still lose ground at rating on the documentary half, Quality Area 7 especially.
The Gwenda Team · · 2 min read
Assessment and rating is a judgement about practice. An authorised officer observes, talks to educators and families, and reads documentation. Two of those three are about what your service actually does day to day, and no software can substitute for them.
The third is where services lose ground unnecessarily.
The structure
Seven quality areas, fifteen standards, forty elements:
- QA1 Educational program and practice
- QA2 Children's health and safety
- QA3 Physical environment
- QA4 Staffing arrangements
- QA5 Relationships with children
- QA6 Collaborative partnerships with families and communities
- QA7 Governance and leadership
Quality Area 7 is the document-heavy one
It is also where services most often sit at Working Towards. QA7 asks about governance, the Quality Improvement Plan, and a culture of continuous improvement, all of which are demonstrated substantially through records.
The parts that are pass-or-fail
Two different things get called compliance, and it pays to keep them separate.
The National Regulations are matters of record: ratios, qualifications, clearances, policies, notifications. A service can be rated Meeting the Standard and still be in breach of these, and they carry different consequences.
The National Quality Standard is a judgement about quality, made on evidence.
Gwenda tracks both, because they draw on the same underlying records (rostering, attendance, staff files, the incident log) and because a service has to satisfy both regardless of which one is being assessed this year.
What to keep continuously
- Working with children checks, first aid, anaphylaxis and asthma qualifications, tracked to expiry rather than reviewed annually
- Educator-to-child ratios per room and per session, from rostering against attendance
- Policy currency and educator acknowledgement of the current version
- Incidents, injuries and complaints, with notification timeframes tracked from the moment they are recorded
- A QIP whose actions have owners and dates that are actually being met
Related
See where you actually stand.
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