Georgia Windred is Area Manager at Adventure OSHC, overseeing compliance across the organisation’s eight outside school hours care services in Australia. She joined the business almost five years ago when it ran a single service, and as Adventure OSHC expanded, she became the nominated supervisor responsible for compliance at every new site. Here, she shares how her team moved from paper-based checklists to real-time oversight with 1Place.

Can you tell us about your role at Adventure OSHC and how it’s evolved?

I’ve been with the company for about four and a half years, coming up on five now. We started with one service only, and since then we’ve grown pretty rapidly. Now we have eight. Because I started relatively close to the beginning of the business, I was the person trained up to move across and start our new services as we gained them. I automatically fell into the nominated supervisor role at every service, so I picked up more and more responsibility, more tasks, more paperwork.

As we added services, the workload increased and paper-based compliance wasn’t working anymore. I also live over an hour away from five of our services, so being the person in charge of overseeing those and making sure the documentation was done was really challenging. By the time we started looking at 1Place, I was starting to drown a little bit.

What was the biggest challenge with paper-based compliance across that many sites?

Coming into a service once a week or once a fortnight and seeing that a checklist hadn’t been completed, then having them backdate everything, when I could have pushed them to do it earlier had I known it wasn’t being done. I couldn’t be there every day to check. The services nearby to my house were a bit more on top of things because I could visit more often, but that visibility just wasn’t there for the rest.

Once you found 1Place, did you ease into it or commit straight away?

We jumped in head first. To be honest, I was so done with the old way of doing things that we just needed something else. As soon as we’d had a couple of meetings and gone over things, I went a bit all in and got stuck straight into it.

How did the team react to picking up a new system?

We had a little bit of pushback from educators at the beginning. I don’t think they’d realised the importance of the physical documentation they were supposed to be filling out in the first place, and honestly, half of it wasn’t getting done anyway. So when they were faced with a list of checklists on their iPads every day, it was “oh my gosh, so much admin.” But I’ll say now, it’s automatic for them. I haven’t had any complaints. As soon as they got used to it and saw it was actually beneficial to their services, they loved it.

What difference has 1Place made, both for you and for the wider team?

Oversight as part of management has been very easy, and it’s easy for me to reach out to people if tasks haven’t been done. We’ve had three or four assessment and ratings visits since implementing 1Place, and being able to print a PDF copy of a checklist on the spot is so much easier than going and finding it physically in a folder on site.

The notifications side of things has been my biggest game changer. Being able to set up notifications for kids’ medications expiring, first aid and CPR certificates, and Working with Children Check certificates for staff has been really good. I used to have this ridiculously large spreadsheet I’d check off my own back once a fortnight and just hope nothing had expired. Now, with random spot checks and compliance visits from the Department of Education, our staff feel more confident they can provide accurate, up to date documentation. They don’t have to stress about whether a Working with Children Check has expired, because we’ve been able to keep on top of it.

If you were talking to yourself just before you found 1Place, what would you say?

I’d say it’s going to buy you back a lot of time once it’s set up and everyone’s in the flow of it. It buys back time and mental capacity to think about the jobs that need doing, rather than relying on yourself so much. You’ve got a system set up that you check every day, and you know what needs doing or what’s missing.

Can you put a number on the time you’ve saved?

At least a couple of hours a week, and that’s a couple of hours a week on top of the reduced mental load. Training new staff has also been really, really good. We’ve had a couple of new coordinators come on board since starting with 1Place, and having everything there in the system makes it really easy to train new management staff. That’s been important too. Time-wise, I’d say a couple of extra hours a week saved, to be able to do more worthwhile things rather than just remembering to tick boxes.

How has this changed things for parents and families?

I’ve never had a parent get in touch to make a complaint about signing documentation or anything like that. It used to be a written form, and if a parent didn’t come in, or their child only came once a week, it would take another week or however long to get it read and signed, and by then someone had forgotten anyway. Now we can keep track and follow up. We use the same system for permission notes for excursions too. We can put a QR code on the door on the day of the excursion for parents who haven’t signed yet, even though the note went out three weeks earlier. They can sign on their phone there and then, instead of us spending all morning calling to chase them up. No real parent feedback, which is kind of good, I guess.

From backdated paper checklists across eight services to a dashboard she checks every day, Georgia and her team at Adventure OSHC have traded admin and guesswork for oversight, confidence, and a couple of hours back in the week. As she puts it, that’s time and mental capacity to focus on the jobs that actually matter.