Roster Procedure on Woodlands Campus
This guide aims to support the Woodlands Campus Leadership Teams to follow the correct procedures when it comes to filling gaps in rosters on a day-to-day basis.
Tier 1: Casual Pool and Part-time Educators
- Campuses will ideally have a replenished casual pool which can be shared between campuses in close proximity. Campuses are to exhaust all available casual educators.
- If a campus has employed any part-time educators, please ask if they are willing to help out as a once-off.
Tier 2: Contact another campus
- If all casual educators have been engaged for the day, please contact another campus. This can be done by calling the campus and speaking with the leadership team. Alternatively, you can communicate this on slack using the channel #woodlandteam.
- If contacted by another campus for support staff, please help them out as much as possible. This is by either sending out communications to your team or passing on phone numbers that may help.
Tier 3: Contact Recruitment Team
- The recruitment team may have another avenue to go down and may have additional contacts.
Tier 4: Roofline Ratio
- Ratios are calculated across the whole service (not by individual rooms). This gives providers the flexibility to respond to ensure educators are allocated appropriately based on the age and needs of children in the service. In a mixed age group of children, maintaining the ratio for each age range of children does not mean the educator to child ratio for the youngest age range must be applied to all children in an older age range. An educator who is caring for one age range of children can also be counted against another age range of children, as long as the ratio for each age range is maintained and adequate supervision is maintained at all times. Educators must be working directly with children to be counted in the educator to child ratios. (https://www.acecqa.gov.au/nqf/educator-to-child-ratios)
Roof line ratios can be confusing and misguided. It does not mean that we leave one 30+ children but we can be flexible with how many children are in one group compared to the number of educators directly working with those children.
You need to ensure that adequate supervision is maintained at all times.
For example:
- There are 18 children in the kindergarten room with 2 educators. The room has high visibility, sharing windows with the room next door as well as a shared children’s bathroom. The room next door has 20 children with 2 educators. Today the nursery has 6 babies with 2 educators, but 5 of those 6 babies have recently started and are very unsettled. The nursery educators are struggling to calm the babies and provide them enough emotional support with just the two of them, even though they are “meeting ratio.” The kindergarten group of children are all settled and engaged in activities. The campus manager asks one of the kindergarten teachers if they would be ok if the other educator helps out the nursery for an hour or two. That educator is fine and understands that if they require additional support they can communicate this easily with the room next door who will assist.
- This instance is showing that the educators directly working with the children for that day are being allocated where the children's needs are, not just to “meet ratio.”
- This process can also be used for lunch/tea break cover, as long as the ratio across the service is being met.
Tier 5: Agency Staff
- This is a very last point of call. All agency staff engagement will need to be approved by the Operations Team (contact to be devised at a later date). The cost of agency staff is very high and we want to exhaust all possible avenues before engaging this service. In saying that, we completely understand that ratio must be met and will carefully consider all individual requests to engage this service.
Keep in mind
- Although all educators have signed a contract stating that they may be requested to travel to other campuses from time to time, we cannot enforce that they do this. It must be a reasonable request and we must take individual circumstances into account.
- Casual educators have the luxury of choosing when and where they work. We cannot force them to work.
- Roof line ratio is to be used on those rare occasions where we are very stuck for the day. If you require further support or assistance around how this may look at your campus, please reach out to the recruitment team for further clarification.
- Keep in mind the wellbeing of your educators.