In Early Childhood Education and Outside School Hours Care Services, you are obligated to comply with regulations, laws, and be governed by best practice. This can easily lead to compliance confusion and leave you unsure of how to best meet your obligations as a service provider in Australia.
Butler Diaries is here to support you in simplifying your compliance documentation to minimise confusion and provide you with a simple to use system for staying compliant with your documentation. We do this by designing our Diaries and Resources based on the National Quality Framework and State Regulatory Authorities.
To make it easier to understand how each of our Diaries provides you a method for recording your compliance under the National Law, we have created Compliance eBooks for our diaries. Butler Diaries helps you streamline your documentation and succeed at exceeding and we have just added another tool to do just that!
Compliance in Education and Care Services
Our Compliance eBooks are designed to support you in identifying, reflecting on, and documenting how your service operations and practices are linked to:
- Frameworks,
- NQS,
- Theorists,
- Developmental Milestones, and
- Exceeding Themes.
They also include information on who the resource is designed for and how it integrates with other products to give you a system for documenting compliance. Each Compliance eBook provides you with look inside pages so you have a complete and handy resource to support you in collecting evidence. The Compliance eBook's are a great tool to print and keep with your evidence for Assessment and Rating and also as a reference for meetings on your Quality Improvement Plan.
They detail how principles, practice, and learning outcomes can be achieved through the use of the diary. It also describes what theorists were considered in the diaries' design to enable you to reflect on how theorists are at the foundation of your practices and decision making.
The Compliance eBooks are a detailed information sheet on how the Diary is meeting the National Quality Standards and which standards and elements can be met with the use of the Butler Method. This provides the perfect foundation to support you in reflecting on and adding to your Quality Improvement Plan. We also highlight how the Diaries can be used to evidence against exceeding themes.
We Stay Up to Date
One of the benefits of working with Butler Diaries is that we stay up to date with changes to ensure we can provide you with resources to support you in every area. A recent example of this is Our Culturally Responsive Year Calendar that was designed to meet the discussion notes in the 2021 NQF ALF Update that will influence any upcoming changes to Approved Learning Frameworks.
The recent review focused on Approved Learning Frameworks and highlighted changes to strengthen the connection between Learning Frameworks and the National Quality Standard in Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing. The review aims to increase the recognition of the role of early learning services, including OSHC, in advancing reconciliation. These changes include strengthening Indigenous “perspectives throughout the frameworks including the vision, principles, practices, and outcomes” and moving from cultural competence to cultural responsiveness.
To make sure you are staying up to date with new resources that meet compliance changes, sign up to our newsletter.
Evidencing the Butler Method: Brady Bunch Case Study
The Problem:
Insufficient programming and documentation system. Began using the:
- Nominated Supervisor Diary,
- Educational Leader Diary,
- Childcare Centre Diary,
- Cook Diary,
- Weekly Programming and Reflection Diary, and
- Sustainable Year Calendar.
"The system we were using had a lot of loose paper. So a lot of different reflections in different formats and in different handouts and there was a lot of just loose paper, and so it was really easy to lose bits and pieces. And then when you're trying to collect things, for assessment and rating and things like that, you've got a lot of loose paper to collate."
The Solution:
6 of their services switched to the Butler Method in 2021 for programming and documentation.
"Having the reflection in the diary, having the program in the diary, the learning story, trackers, all of that in one format just made things a lot easier. And we really did notice when we went through assessment and rating. And we could really see the difference that it made having the diaries because everything was in there together"
Assessment and Rating:
"Our last assessment was in October last year. It made it, we could definitely notice a difference between the two different formats."
"I feel like it has everything and it is so easy to understand. Like we have parents that have come in and flick through and read it. They say the same thing. Like, they know what we're writing. And everything is right there for the department and for parents."
Rating: Exceeding
You can download Compliance eBooks for each Diary by heading to the product page and opening the "What's Inside" page. To learn more about compliance in education and care services and how our diaries can be viewed under the National Quality Standards, please read our article on Compliance in Early Childhood Education and Care here. You can read more about how Brady Bunch achieved an Exceeding Rating with Butler Diaries by reading our article, Rated Exceeding "The Department Love it": A Case Study.
