Goodstart is Australia’s largest early learning and care provider and has an unrelenting focus on its vision for all Australia’s children to get the best possible start in life.

Goodstart employs more than 15,000 educators and early learning professionals who deliver exceptional early learning and teaching to more than 61,400 children in more than 654 communities. As a not-for-profit early learning provider, Goodstart’s surplus is reinvested into our people, practices, and programs to continue supporting the best outcomes for children.

At the heart of Goodstart’s success is its centre-led approach. Goodstart is unique in its approach as a centre-led organisation, empowering centre directors to make decisions that benefit children, their teams, and their communities. This approach places centre directors in control, making them central to the success of their early learning services. However, accessing relevant performance data can be challenging due to the volume and complexity of information available.

To address this challenge, Goodstart redesigned its centre performance scorecards, which have supported the following:

• Data-driven insights: Centre Directors can now understand centre performance in a data-driven yet intuitive way, allowing them to identify emerging trends and areas for improvement.
• Continuous improvement: The new scorecards empower front-line leaders to drive their own continuous improvement plans, enhancing the overall quality of service.
• Timely access to information: The redesigned scorecard enables leaders to easily access additional information in a timely manner, ensuring they have the information they need when they need it.

This redesign was driven by a commitment to improving the experience and abilities of front-line leaders in managing their centres. The new design also streamlines the information flow, making the performance scorecard the main source for key performance information, with additional supporting reports linked to relevant performance data.

Throughout the redesign process, a human-centred design approach was employed. Centre directors were involved in the development process to ensure the scorecards were tailored to their needs and easy to use. This approach was crucial in understanding the needs of centre directors, who were found to be more intuitive than analytical in their approach to data.

Overall, the redesigned centre performance scorecards aim to provide centre directors with the tools and insights they need to focus on what matters most—ensuring that children and families are at the heart of all Goodstart does.

Since its release, it has been the most accessed report at Goodstart, with an average of over 650 unique views at the peak of its weekly release. Centre directors were very aware and open to the need for change and had high confidence in the scorecard’s ability to help implement the required skills and behaviours of high-performing centre directors. It is a key tool for centre directors to confidently manage their centres more autonomously, improving business acumen through practical and intuitive usage of the tool. From a report enhancement perspective, the technology used (PowerBI) enables the report developers to diagnose usage better and work together with cross-functional departments and centres to provide focused value-added enhancements to the centre report.

For information about Goodstart Early Learning, visit goodstart.org.au