Children’s service consultancy
Expert support to help your early childhood or OSHC service grow and thrive
Our experienced and passionate consultants can provide practical support to help your long day care, kindergarten, pre-prep, outside school hours care (OSHC) or family day care service to achieve your goals. Whether that’s creating a foolproof business plan, balancing your budget, setting up a new service, or anything you want to improve on.
What we can help with
New and existing early childhood and OSHC services, we have you covered! We provide practical advice and tools, informed by best practices in education and care, which will support you to reach your business goals and meet and exceed the National Quality Standards. You can rest assured, knowing our professional and targeted solutions will be led by your own philosophy, and will satisfy all regulatory, legal and compliance requirements.
Our areas of specialisation include:
Service capacity-building
- Budget review and development
- Business planning for children’s services
- Facilities audit
- Feasibility studies
- Kindergarten, pre-prep and service modelling
- Municipal early and middle years planning
- Operational modelling and reviews
- Strategic planning including service philosophy, objectives, vision, mission and guiding principles
Compliance
- Assessment and rating support
- Policy review and customisation
- Quality improvement uplift programs
- Approved provider support.
People and culture
- Enhancing workplace culture
- Human resources support
- Industrial relations support
- Multi-employer bargaining
- Organisational workforce planning
- Recruitment support
- Staff engagement surveys and analysis
- Succession planning.
What makes our consultants different?
Our consultants live and breathe education and care, combining specialist management, operational, governance and strategic knowledge with real-world experience. We understand:
- The real issues providers, management and staff face every day
- How to navigate the maze of education and care regulations in a highly competitive market
- The unique context, challenges and needs of each different service type including kindergarten, pre-prep, long day care, family day care and OSHC.
Why It Takes A Village (ITAV)?
- Specialised support, not generic advice – we tailor our support to your service with judgement-free, collaborative and flexible consulting based on your unique needs.
- Guidance from people who get it – we’ve been successfully supporting and championing services like yours for over 50 years.
- Virtual or in-person consultancy – we work Australia-wide. No matter where you are, we can come to you or offer virtual support.
- Expert knowledge you can trust – As the national voice of community-based education and care services and the Australian Government’s chosen provider of the Victorian Inclusion Agency, we have a high profile in the sector and a reputation you can trust.
- Discounts for members – ITAV members enjoy a 20% discount on consultancy. Become a member now.
Case study: Guiding a centre’s management from uncertain to strong and stable
Warrandyte Child Care Centre was struggling with high turnover. Next, their much-loved director of 35 years announced her retirement. So how did we help the centre establish a new order?
In 2020, our long-time member Warrandyte Child Care Centre reached out because they were experiencing a high turnover of volunteer parents on their committee of management.
We provided a tailored session and roundtable discussion on efficient management and planning for committees to figure out why committee members were leaving. In the process, we discovered some overarching issues with the centre’s operations that needed to be addressed. So, we supported staff to regroup, refine the service philosophy and begin the process of strategic planning to ensure the stability of the committee in the future.
The centre’s leadership team then attended a series of quality improvement plan and strategic planning sessions, which we tailored to the centre. We also helped the centre set up an employee assistance program through Access EAP to support staff wellbeing. As members, the centre was able to access this program at a discounted rate.
All the while, our expert consultants provided high-level management advice to both the centre committee and director through our helpline and Committee Member Support Facebook page.
Just when things were looking stable at the centre, April 2021 saw the director of 35 years announce her retirement, promising enormous change ahead. Staff and committee members were anxious about the centre’s next steps, uncertain who could possibly fill their much-loved director’s shoes.
Our team worked closely with the committee through intensive succession planning, which resulted in the successful recruitment of a new director. We then supported the new director to establish a fresh model of operating – a model which truly supports the committee in their duties as Approved Providers and empowers the director to make continuous improvements to the service with ease.
This large body of work has had positive impacts on every aspect of the centre. The committee of management is effective, the new director feels supported, and educators can seamlessly achieve goals and plan for higher quality programs for children in the Warrandyte community.
‘We are truly grateful for the work you have done with us! We now have a really clear model to work to, and a reference point for how we should be operating moving forward’
– Gaynor Stanicic, Chairperson, Warrandyte Child Care Centre
Let’s chat about your new project
Want to speak to somebody right away? Call our friendly team on (03) 9486 3455