5 easy fixes to ensure your service is compliant and prepared for Assessment & Rating.

These 5 things keep popping up in our Mock Assessments and immediately make the service rating,

'Working Towards' the NQS'.

Make sure your service is A&R ready!

1. Ensure your Evacuation Plans (maps) PLUS your procedures (lock down and evacuation) are displayed by the exit doors. We have found that a lot of services either have just the map displayed, it's in the middle of the classroom or it's not displayed at all. Often when we get painted in the service things come off the walls and we forget to pop them back up.

2. Work on your food handling practices. Often my team and I observe educators forgetting to wash hands prior to gloving up, putting the communal spoon back into the bowl again after tapping it in children's bowls following service of seconds and the food handler helping children with their chairs or cutlery. Talk often about points of cross contamination.

3. Ensure you record who is working directly with children in the rooms at any one time. Imagine I ask you right now who is working in your rooms, who is on planning and who is on breaks? Would you have that recorded?

4. Ensure your nappy changing procedures are correctly implemented. Sometimes we get into an autopilot practice when it comes to nappy changing so it's something we can review continuously. I recommend getting every educator to observe someone else changing a nappy while reviewing the policy. This helps to embed this for their own practice. I call it 'nappy change peer review'.

5. Ensure your team are across their responsibilities in relation to child protection in your state. Sometimes educators are unable to answer our questions or say they would ask the Director then if the Director said it was fine, they wouldn't follow up. If they are mandated notifiers, they need to know how to report and to the appropriate department rather than just to the Director.

Mock Assessments are a great way to self-assess against the NQF and to set improvement goals.

You can strategically review all your practices through staff meetings, emails to the team and strong team leadership in the rooms. These are some of the things we help out with.

If you haven't booked in your Mock Assessment, and you would like to, flick us an email at training.hourglass@outlook.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Often we get the feedback that it was lucky we came to visit prior to Assessment, because the leadership teams were able to quickly support change and they were ready when the 'real thing' happened.

We review all 7 Quality Areas and provide a written recommendation report to support you to prepare your QIP and support your team to be confident with Assessment and Rating.