Frequently Asked Questions

By building the people. There isn’t another way, and anyone who tells you a service can be documented its way to Exceeding hasn’t sat through an assessment and rating visit.

An Authorised Officer isn’t reading your folder. They’re watching an educator respond to a child, listening to how a room leader talks about a family, asking a Centre Manager to explain a decision. Exceeding is a description of practice, and practice comes from capability, confidence, and a team that knows why they do things the way they do.

So that’s where the work goes.

THE CENTRE MANAGER FIRST. They set the ceiling for the whole service. We work with them directly and regularly on pedagogical leadership, on managing a team, on reading their own numbers, on holding a hard conversation, on running a service commercially as well as educationally. A strong Centre Manager will keep lifting a service after we’ve gone. A weak one will let it slide back no matter what systems we’ve left behind.

THEN THE EDUCATORS. Structured, ongoing professional development rather than a compliance box. Induction and orientation that actually sets someone up. Practice coaching on the floor, not just theory in a staff meeting. Mentoring for the ones with potential to step up. Support for educators studying, because the sector’s future depends on it and because a team that’s learning behaves differently to a team that’s marking time.

THEN THE EVIDENCE. Once the practice is genuinely there, documenting it is the easy part. Doing it in the other order is why so many services sit at Meeting and can’t work out why.

You’re not starting from scratch on any of this. You get our curriculum frameworks, our quality improvement methodology, our training materials, our policies and our operating systems, all of it built and tested across a group of seventeen campuses, and all of it kept current for you rather than by you.

We’ll answer this properly, because most people won’t.

First, a distinction that matters. A lot of services come to us already rated Working Towards. That’s often the reason for the call. In those cases the rating is the starting point and the whole engagement is built around lifting it. We’ll tell you honestly what we think is achievable and roughly how long it will take, and we’d rather be conservative in that conversation than win the work on an optimistic promise.

WHAT THAT HAS LOOKED LIKE IN PRACTICE.

One service came to us carrying serious non-compliance. They were a focused service for the regulator, under close observation, with conditions on their service approval. Engaging a management company was something the regulator had encouraged them to do.

We didn’t take it on straight away. We met the owner, then we met the leadership team, because we wanted to understand what had actually been happening and where the failings sat before we committed to anything. We won’t take on a service we don’t believe we can help. Saying yes to one we can’t fix helps nobody, least of all the children in it.

Once we understood the gaps, we built a strategic action plan across all seven quality areas, and ran a skills matrix across the team to see where the knowledge, qualifications and experience gaps were and which roles we needed to recruit into.

From there:

• A team building plan targeting knowledge, skills and experience
• An operations plan to get policies, procedures and quality assurance measures in place, embedded, and actually being followed
• A team training plan
• A facilities review, provided to the owner, setting out the improvements the building itself needed to meet the standard
• A targeted quality assurance review, with our people in the service observing practice, mentoring and guiding educators through every quality area that needed to lift

We only requested an assessment and rating from the Department once we were satisfied the systems, processes and policies were genuinely embedded. Not before.

The team then worked extremely hard on the Quality Improvement Plan, going through every area where the service wasn’t meeting the National Quality Standard and documenting exactly what had been done to change it, including the work with children, families, educators and the wider community. They went through the assessment supported by our quality practices team and their Regional Manager.

Every quality area was rated Meeting. Two were rated Exceeding.

If a rating comes back Working Towards while we’re managing, our response is investigation before explanation.

We go back through it properly. Which elements were rated and why, what the Authorised Officer actually saw and heard on the day, what evidence was available and what wasn’t, and whether the gap was a system that failed or a practice that didn’t match the system. Those are two completely different problems with two completely different fixes, and most services never work out which one they had.

You then get a detailed action plan. Not a summary. Element by element, what changes, who’s responsible, by when, and what evidence will prove it. We work that plan with you through to a re-rating application when the evidence genuinely supports one, and not before.

We’ll also be straight with you about something the rest of the industry won’t say out loud, and it’s written into our agreement rather than hidden in it. We build the systems, we implement the policies, we deliver the training and we give the direction. What we can’t do is stand in every room every day, and the National Law doesn’t put your team’s day to day supervision in our hands. It puts it with your nominated supervisor and your responsible persons. Occasionally an educator or a Centre Manager doesn’t follow the direction they’ve been given, and an assessment can turn on a single moment an officer happens to observe.

That’s not an excuse and we don’t offer it as one. It’s precisely why we’re systematic about training, induction and supervision frameworks rather than trusting to goodwill, and it’s why the action plan always deals with why something happened rather than just what happened. Where the cause is a performance issue, we bring it to you as one and manage it through properly.

Everything Little Scholars has.

Not a watered down version and not a summary. Your team accesses all of our professional development, all of our quality assurance processes, and every quality project we run across the group. We share our strategic plan with you. When something works at one of our seventeen campuses, whether it’s a practice, a system, a piece of curriculum thinking or a solution to a problem the whole sector is wrestling with, it goes to every service we manage.

That’s the real economics of this arrangement. A single service can’t fund the research, the trialling and the failures that produce that thinking. A group of seventeen can, and does, continuously. What you’re buying is access to it.

HOW IT REACHES YOU. We run a shared operational structure across both organisations. Your service is allocated a dedicated Regional Manager, so you have a named person who knows your centre, your team and your community rather than a rotating account contact. Every Regional Manager across Little Scholars and Scholars Group meets weekly and works as one team. That means the person supporting your service sits in the room where the group’s problems get solved, and brings the answers straight back to you.

WHAT WE WON’T DO IS TURN YOUR SERVICE INTO OURS. This matters and we want to be clear about it. You’re not buying a franchise, and we have no interest in making every service look the same. We actively encourage the services we manage to hold on to their point of difference. Your service should reflect your community, your demographic and the families actually walking through your door, and your operations should be built around them. What we bring is the thinking, the systems and the standard. What you keep is who you are.