Have you ever stopped to think about how you are doing in the eyes of the parents who use your service? Many services focus on their ACECQA accreditation and ensuring the best outcome from the assessment process. This is, obviously an important priority for the service and a sensible point of focus.
However, taking the time to conduct a brief survey of your parent community could be a valuable source of feedback and help you identify small areas of change which could drive significant improvements in the way you run the service.
This doesn't need to be a burdensome undertaking, a few short questions with multiple choice answers and a couple of boxes for comments and the ability to remain anonymous could help you reach parents who are reluctant to come forward with their thoughts and opinions.
If you have enough email addresses on file you could use a free program like SurveyMonkey.com to create and disseminate the survey and analyse the results. Sending home a form for parents to complete and return to you is another way to do it and will obviously be the better choice if you don't have email contact details for your parent community.
Surveying parents once or even twice a year offers you the opportunity to reach parents who are time poor and restricted in their opportunities for communication it will also help you elicit feedback from the less forthcoming parents in your group, many of who may have opinions they don't feel like saying out loud for fear of 'rocking the boat'.
When putting together think about the areas where you would most like feedback. Consider dividing the survey into sections to help you work out the questions and analyse the results. Depending on your areas of focus/ interest categories such as:
- Organisation and Administration
- Early Learning and Care Programming
- Centre Teachers
- Nutrition
- Physical Space
- Parent Involvement
This survey provides some great questions you could use as the basis for your survey. Be sure to tailor the questions for any areas on your service you would like feedback on: Got a new chef on the team? Ask about the new menus and food on offer. Thinking about updating your playground equipment? Then be sure to ask what parents would prefer, swing/slides/tunnels etc. If you are considering bringing in someone to run dancing/sport/language or music classes with the children you could ask the parents what they would prefer and whether they would be willing to pay more for these types of enrichment programs.
Habitually asking parents for their input will improve communication and ultimately improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of your service and its ability to meet the needs of families.
After you have collected and analysed the results be sure to:
Thank people for taking the time to provide feedback. Even if someone is unhappy with some aspects of the service, at least by letting you they are giving you the opportunity to fix the troublesome areas.
Try not to take things personally. You can't please everyone all the time and you should try not to take the comments to heart, but take them to your head and set about an action plan for change and improvement.
Be open to suggestions and new ideas. Your parent community is a valuable source of experiences and different worldviews. Some of the biggest improvements to your business could come from looking at things a little differently.
Be mindful of common issues. If more than one parent raises something as an area of concern then you should put that item on your 'watch list'. Remember, for every one person that writes down their thoughts there are likely to be others who remain silent but who feel the same way.
Share the results. You need to maintain confidentiality, of course, but sharing feedback with your centre's community as a whole is a great way to reassure people that they are actually being listened to, and to encourage further dialogue.
Another effective way to gauge parent satisfaction with your service is to encourage them to rate your service on the CareforKids.com.au website. Simply email your parent community a link to your service’s profile on our website and they can rate your service quickly and easily.
The great thing about the CareforKids.com.au rating system is that we have a number of safeguards built in to ensure unqualified negative comments do not go live on the website. These include a delay and approval mechanism and a 12-month minimum attendance requirement for parents wanting to rate a service.
These safeguards improve the delivery of early childhood education and care by giving providers the opportunity to contact any parents who voice a concern and address those concerns before they become a bigger issue.
Ratings which meet our criteria appear on your profile on the CareforKids.com.au website when parents search for child care providers and offer an immediate and effective indication of the high level of care being offered.
Reference:
How are you doing? Ask! By Jennifer Carsen on Daycare in Demand |
