Engaging with families is so important when it comes to operating a high-quality education and care service. Aside from the fact that without our families we wouldn’t even have a service, engagement with families is essential to ensure you’re addressing the needs of your community, providing families with a service which sets yours apart from the rest, and assures your service is operating within all the requirements in the law, regulations and national quality standards. And if you’re aiming for a rating of exceeding the national quality standards, you need to be sure your service can prove engagement with families and community impact decisions across all 7 quality areas.

But how does a service possibly engage with families over all seven quality areas? And how do we keep evidence of it given most of the engagement is in conversations, especially drop of and pick up times when our families might be in a rush? The answer (as it often is) is having concrete processes, and consistency in sticking to them.

Processes

There are so many ways of engaging with families, and every centre, leader and person will have a preferred way of communicating. Whatever process you choose though, you need to make sure you’re sticking to it. Here are some of our favourite processes which work for the countless services we support

• Create a bank of questions to prompt engagement. Make sure you’re noting which quality area your question pertains to, and slowly go through your questions in your newsletters, feedback gathering in the foyer or your conversations. Having a predetermined bank of questions (organised across the 7 quality areas) means you can be sure you’re prompting engagement across all 7 quality areas over time.
• Use online forms. There are lots of online form builders out there which let you create your own forms (e.g. www.cognitoforms.com, www.jotform.com, docs.google.com/forms. Online forms are great because you can tweak the questions at any time, direct families to the form in multiple ways (e.g. links in emails, or QR codes on posters) and anyone can engage at any time. Perhaps one of the most useful features though is that evidence is stored by the survey.
• Save a form to your phone. Have a form set up for ad-hoc engagement and save it to your phone or devices to log any random engagements. It’s so useful to have a recording process there ready to go whenever you have a quick conversation with someone as their walking through the centre.
• Keep a spreadsheet. They might be ugly, but they’re super useful for storing feedback. Have one column for the source (e.g. family name), one for the date, one for the feedback, one for the quality area and one for follow ups.
• Keep track of your quality areas. Get in the habit of logging the relevant quality areas against the engagement. Just setting aside 15 minutes a week to go back through the feedback and tag them with QAs will save yourself countless time and stress later on when looking for evidence of family engagement for Assessment and Rating.
• Follow up. Ensure you’re keeping track of the centre decisions any engagement leads to. It’s not enough to just receive feedback, but you need evidence of how engagement is leading to quality improvement and centre decisions, and explicitly noting this as a part of your engagement process is a super useful way of keeping yourself accountable, and providing evidence whenever you need to. If a record of engagement has been completed (with no more actionable items) just put a line through it to indicate it’s complete. And make sure to log that process as an exceeding key practice statement in your self-assessment!

Consistency

Make sure you are sticking to whatever process you’re using. Nothing is more frustrating than knowing you have engaged with a family on a specific quality area but struggling to recall the interaction or produce the evidence you’re thinking of. Platinum Education have created a whole kit to help centres engage with families, use that engagement to make centre decisions and keep concrete evidence of that engagement across all 7 quality areas. The kit even contains a walkthrough of engagement strategies and systems for each quality area, and a bank of questions to use with your families.

Engaging with families is not only essential for meeting legal and regulatory requirements but also for fostering a strong, collaborative community that enhances the quality of your service. By implementing concrete processes and maintaining consistency, you can ensure that family engagement is documented and impactful across all seven quality areas. Remember, the key to success lies in being organised and proactive. Consistency in practices will not only make the assessment and rating process smoother but will also demonstrate your commitment to excellence and continuous improvement. As always, reach out or visit our store to make sure you have all the resources needed to achieve and maintain high standards. Engage with your families, and watch your service thrive!