For the team at Penrith Early Learning Centre, ChildHR propelled them from good to great.

Penrith Early Learning Centre is no ordinary child care provider. Led by owner Lara Rose with the unwavering support of Director Jade Borg, it’s built around a philosophy of empathy, reflection, accountability and collaborative growth.

Located in the west of Sydney, the standalone centre has around 15 staff and 44 child care places per day. Underpinned by staff-first leadership principles, Lara has built a much-loved centre, where families value personalised care and strong, positive relationships with her staff. Always striving to make the centre even stronger, she made the decision to move to ChildHR, effectively overhauling the administration of the centre and embedding HR and compliance into the fabric of the team.

Australia’s only childcare-specific HR system, ChildHR is a best practice ‘by the industry for the industry’ platform, consolidating staff management into one secure, cloud-based solution with industry-specific legally compliant documents. The technology is transforming the way early learning service providers implement employment law and people management through streamlined documentation and consistent processes.

Seeing change as an opportunity echoed the centre’s philosophy

“Actually listening to your team is so important; hearing what they need and then going out and finding a solution. So how did I find ChildHR? I listened, I heard a need and I searched the internet until I found an appropriate solution,” Lara says. The ability to use ChildHR to streamline processes, centralise records and capture in-the-moment feedback directly supported Lara’s vision for her centre. “What made me decide to use ChildHR was that I could literally see that this could take you from an average practice to an exceeding practice, principally in QA 7. It takes you by the hand and helps you navigate your HR requirements and provides comfort to the director and to the approved provider, because someone’s got your back and is there prompting you to help get the job done well,” she explains.

A new system meant new ways of working, for the better

Moving from paper files to digital with ChildHR has meant the team spends less time searching certificates and documentation, and more time interacting with the children and focusing on excellence. Director Jade Borg has been the driving force behind implementing a range of operational efficiencies and ensuring ChildHR is simply part of the furniture at Penrith Early Learning Centre: “When it comes to policy and compliance, there are two ways to run a centre:
you tick a box, or you live by it, and in our centre, we’re living by it. It’s really important to me that everything that we’re doing on the floor is the best thing for the children, and ChildHR enables us to do that.”

“The industry is constantly evolving and so is your centre. With so many changes happening the staff need to be able to have the reassurance of a policy to refer back to. The best thing is being able to review and input our policies – I’ve uploaded 265 policies into ChildHR – and then our educators get a push notification to say that there has been a policy change.”

“Our staff love it. They are more confident and can take the time to absorb the information because it’s right there on their phone. When you’ve got passion and you get a push notification after hours that says there’s a new file to read, they’ll read it and send feedback right away,” Jade says.

For a business that’s all about its people, ChildHR elevated staff management to the next level

Lara Rose explains the culture of the centre further:

“We lean into challenges rather than lean away from them; we’re people, we’re human, we’re real. We have a philosophy called ‘SEE, which stands for Stop, Empathize, Educate’. The first thing we do is make a person, whether it be a staff member, a child, a parent, a grandparent, we stop, give them our attention, make them feel heard and understood. We empathize with whatever is going on for them at the time. We create space for them which opens the door to collaborative communication where education can occur.”

Assessing performance and continuing to educate staff is a key part of this mix,
and Lara and Jade have seen the effect ChildHR has had on that process, with a
single view of each person’s activity.

“Self-assessments are really important, and then to be able to have that final meeting and to see that collaboration of, ‘wow, you’re actually on the same page here’. And they’re getting it, they are going back into the system regularly, they are reading their policies and procedures. If there’s a need for performance, we go back into ChildHR as well. It’s great to have a system in place, and being able to keep track of everything and not having to spend hours doing an appraisal with pen and paper,” Jade says.

When it came time for a recent accreditation review, feedback from the Department Of Education reinforced how well organised and structured the centre’s administration has become.

“The assessor made a point of how easy and quick it was to locate our files, compared to centres not using ChildHR, and I think that demonstrates our exceeding practices. Even though we are only a 44-place centre, we could easily be a 180-place centre. Our systems are so important to us because we actually understand the effect that good systems has on the floor. So having systems in place, having procedures in place, having a flow means that the director can direct, the teachers can teach, the educators can educate” Lara says.

“I don’t think I could work in a centre without it now,” Jade adds.

Discover how ChildHR makes it easy for you to focus on what matters

Streamline your HR practices, ensure you’re compliant and free up your team to focus on the delivery of quality child care within your business. Talk to us today about how ChildHR can become an essential member or your team – just like at Penrith Early Learning Centre.

Learn more about ChildHR here or talk to one of our Customer Relationship Partners on

1300 410 340 for further information