Xplor Education’s childcare management platform continues to improve with insights from ECE experts

Xplor Education was honoured to be named The Sector’s 2023 Most Improved CCMS—but it wasn’t enough. Always seeking to innovate and improve, Xplor Education is working on improving its all-in-one childcare management platform in ways that matter to the Early Years Education sector. Each improvement aligns with early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector needs and has been shaped through collaboration with sector experts. 

Transforming documentation—One Post at a time 

The first improvement was to the Playground platform for educators, which was released in June 2024. Our sector experts identified areas for improvement to Observations in Playground. The renamed feature, Posts, has been re-imagined to make it quicker, easier and more flexible. Posts are now cloud-based, meaning you can access them on any device. With this, educators can start a Post on one device and finish it later on another, picking up exactly where they left off.  

An educator only needs to enter a title and a room to create a Post. This makes capturing a learning moment much faster. You can also add up to five minutes of audio, images and videos to each Post. Additionally, educators can find children more quickly and tag them more confidently with the new filtering and tagging capabilities. 

To deliver a better experience to families, educators can review Posts before sharing to ensure they’re error-free. Additionally, settings can create a safe and respectful space for families by enabling, disabling and moderating comments. By tracking Post views and reactions, settings can gain valuable insights into family engagement. 

Game-changing updates for ECEC booking and occupancy management in Office  

In Office, Xplor Education’s platform for admins, our sector experts identified improvements to bookings and occupancy management. Also released in June 2024, families can make contract and casual bookings, as well as cancel bookings using Xplor Education’s free family platform, Home. This will help increase bookings, especially for ECEC providers. 

You can set up several booking rules, including daily room capacities, booking cut-off times and cancellation notice periods. With the Home app, families will be able to make multiple ad hoc bookings, add recurring booking patterns and manage cancellations effortlessly. Families will also receive notifications for processed requests. They will have more flexibility and efficiency in setting their ECEC plans with these changes. 

Families will also be able to quickly apply setting promo codes to their bookings. This efficient system not only helps boost family satisfaction but also helps settings drive higher occupancy and maximise revenue potential. In addition, settings will be able to easily monitor and analyse promo code usage to help identify booking patterns and make more data-driven decisions. 

Consulting with experts from the Early Years community—our way forward 

Passionate about better meeting the needs of the Early Years sector, Xplor Education consulted with five sector experts. We sought to understand what admins and educators most need from their ECEC management platforms. The goal was to identify innovations and improvements within the Xplor Education ecosystem that could better support educators day-to-day. 

The 4-hour face-to-face session identified several possible areas for improvement. More importantly, the session was so productive that it led to the formation of the Education Advisory Group (EAG). This will help inform future developments to the Xplor Education childcare management platform. The EAG is bringing together the best minds in the Early Years sector to discuss key topics impacting educational leaders in practical ways.  

We’re only halfway through the year—there’s so much more to come 

As we approach the halfway mark of 2024, Xplor Education is far from done. More improvements are on the horizon for our childcare management platform. We aim to further reduce admin, streamline processes and give ECEC admins and educators more tools to provide quality care.  

Based on discussions during our initial workshop and in collaboration with the EAG, planned changes for this year include:  

Innovating for all—continued security enhancements and global integrations 

As an all-in-one ecosystem with a core platform that caters to the needs of both individual and multi-setting providers, Xplor Education continues to innovate. Single Sign-On for Office and Playground enables customers to integrate their own Active Directory with Xplor Education’s authentication and authorisation engine. We are planning further enhancements to the SSO integration. This includes partnering with Okta to provide customers with more ways to integrate with Xplor Education. 

As a global ECEC provider, some customers have complex international data and reporting needs. With Xplor Education’s Data as a Service (DaaS) platform, we are leveraging our global scale and expertise. We strive to deliver an advanced reporting solution for customers spanning multiple settings and countries. 

Check out our Bookings and Occupancy Management page for more information on our childcare management platform’s latest changes and updates. Xplor Education looks forward to serving you better in the second half of 2024 and into 2025.