How to Write a Quality Improvement Plan (QIP) for Childcare and OSHC

What is a Quality Improvement Plan?

A Quality Improvement Plan, commonly referred to as a QIP, is a document used by education and care services to assess their current practices and plan ongoing improvements.

Under the National Quality Framework, approved providers must ensure a QIP is in place for each service. A QIP should include an assessment of the service’s practices against the National Quality Standard and relevant regulatory requirements, areas requiring improvement, and the service’s statement of philosophy.

A QIP should also capture and celebrate the strengths of the service. For a new service, the QIP must be prepared within three months of service approval. It must then be reviewed and revised at least annually, as well as when directed by the regulatory authority.

Thinking about the QIP as something that simply needs to be updated once a year misses its real purpose. The QIP should tell the story of your service’s ongoing improvement.

Start with self-assessment, not the QIP

One of the easiest mistakes to make is opening your QIP and immediately trying to think of things to write. Instead, start with self-assessment.

Self-assessment means critically considering your current practices against the National Quality Standard and regulatory requirements. Ask: What are we doing well? How do we know? What could be better? What are children and families experiencing? Are our practices achieving the outcomes we intend? Where are there inconsistencies between what we say we do and what happens in practice?

Self-assessment is the first step in the quality improvement planning process. Your findings should inform the priorities included in your QIP.

Your self-assessment can be broad and detailed. Your QIP does not need to contain every observation, discussion or possible improvement identified during that process. It should capture the key priorities your service has decided to work on.

Consider all seven Quality Areas

Your self-assessment should consider practice across the seven Quality Areas of the National Quality Standard.

• Quality Area 1 — Educational program and practice
• Quality Area 2 — Children’s health and safety
• Quality Area 3 — Physical environment
• Quality Area 4 — Staffing arrangements
• Quality Area 5 — Relationships with children
• Quality Area 6 — Collaborative partnerships with families and communities
• Quality Area 7 — Governance and leadership
• There is no requirement for every Standard and Element to be addressed in the QIP at the same time. Prioritise the areas most relevant to your current context.

Document meaningful service strengths

Your QIP should not only focus on problems. It should also capture what your service does particularly well. The key is to make strengths specific and evidence-based.

A broad statement such as “We have strong relationships with families” tells the reader very little. A stronger version describes the actual practice: educators have established consistent two-way communication through daily conversations, digital communication and regular opportunities for feedback, and family contributions are actively considered during program planning.

When documenting a strength, consider three questions: What do we do? Why do we do it? How do we know it is effective? Consider observations, feedback, participation, documentation or other evidence demonstrating its impact.

Identify the improvements that actually matter

Continuous improvement does not mean creating the longest possible list of things to fix. A better QIP focuses attention on meaningful priorities.

An improvement might emerge from educator reflection, family or child feedback, incidents or trends, assessment and rating feedback, changes within the community, observations of children’s experiences, audits or compliance reviews, staff discussions, changes to environments or routines, professional learning, new research or guidance, or areas where practice is inconsistent.

Once you identify something that could improve, go deeper than the initial problem. If family participation in feedback surveys is low, investigate whether surveys are too long, families prefer informal conversations, they do not understand how their feedback is used, or the service does not communicate what changed as a result.

The real improvement opportunity may be making consultation more accessible and demonstrating that family contributions lead to action, rather than simply increasing a survey response percentage.

Write a clear improvement goal

Once you have identified a priority, describe the outcome you want to achieve. Avoid goals that are so broad they can never really be completed.

Instead of “Improve sustainability”, write a goal such as: “Strengthen children’s active involvement in sustainable practices by embedding opportunities for children to identify, lead and evaluate sustainability initiatives within the program.”

Instead of “Improve staff professional development”, write: “Establish a consistent professional learning process that links educator development priorities to observations of practice, individual goals and service QIP priorities.”

A useful goal should answer: What will be different if this improvement succeeds? If you cannot answer that clearly, the goal probably needs more work.

Break the goal into practical actions

The goal describes the destination. Your actions describe how you intend to get there.

For example, an OSHC service might set the goal: Increase children’s influence over the design and use of indoor and outdoor environments.

• Introduce regular opportunities for children to provide feedback about existing play spaces.
• Review feedback with educators and identify common themes.
• Establish a process where children can propose changes or new areas within the environment.
• Trial selected changes and document children’s responses.
• Review the effectiveness of the changes with children and educators after six weeks.

Give improvements ownership

A QIP can quickly lose momentum when every action belongs to “the team”. Collective responsibility is valuable, but someone should still be responsible for moving an action forward.

For each improvement, record who is responsible, when it should happen, the current status, what evidence will demonstrate progress, and when it will be reviewed. The person responsible does not need to complete every part of the work themselves; they are responsible for ensuring it keeps moving.

Collect evidence as the improvement happens

Evidence should not be something you try to reconstruct six months later. Capture it as the improvement develops.

Depending on the goal, evidence might include photographs, educator reflections, meeting discussions, family feedback, children’s feedback, observations, survey findings, updated procedures, planning documentation, professional learning records or examples of changed practice.

Distinguish between evidence that an action happened and evidence that an improvement worked. A photograph of a children’s planning meeting demonstrates that the action occurred, but stronger evidence may show that children’s suggestions influenced the program, educators changed their planning approach, and children increasingly initiated or led experiences.

Ask: What evidence would convince us that practice has genuinely improved? That question usually produces better evidence than simply asking what you can upload to the QIP.

Record progress, not just completion

Quality improvement is rarely “Not started” to “Completed”. There is usually a lot happening in between, and those developments are valuable because they show the thinking behind the improvement.

Record when educators discussed current practices, when feedback was gathered, when a new approach was trialled and what observations showed. Even when a strategy does not work, documenting what was learnt and what will happen next demonstrates genuine reflection.

Involve educators, children and families

The QIP should not belong exclusively to the nominated supervisor, educational leader or management team. A collaborative process can involve children, families, educators, staff, management and relevant members of the community.

Children may contribute through discussions, drawings, meetings, surveys or observations. Families may contribute through conversations, feedback, surveys, committees or events. Educators may contribute through team meetings, critical reflection, observations and professional discussions.

The important part is that these perspectives influence improvement decisions. Consultation should not simply be something you can say occurred. It should change something.

Keep your QIP current

Although a QIP must be reviewed and revised at least annually, a useful QIP should be updated naturally as improvement work occurs.

Rather than scheduling one enormous annual review, build smaller reviews into existing team meetings, leadership meetings, programming discussions or professional development sessions. A simple ongoing cycle is: Reflect → Identify → Prioritise → Plan → Act → Gather evidence → Review → Adjust. Then repeat.

Some goals will eventually be completed. Some will evolve. Some will reveal a different issue entirely. Occasionally you will decide that an original strategy simply did not work. That is continuous improvement.

Your QIP does not have to use the ACECQA template

ACECQA provides a QIP template and Self-assessment Tool, and both can be useful resources. However, neither format is mandatory.

Services can choose a process and format that works for their particular context, provided the required QIP information is included. That might mean using the ACECQA template, your own documents or a digital QIP management platform.

The format matters less than whether your system helps your service genuinely self-assess, prioritise improvements and demonstrate its ongoing improvement journey.

What does a good QIP look like?

A good QIP does not need to be enormous. It should be current, specific and useful.

Someone reading it should be able to understand what your service does well, what you are trying to improve, why those improvements matter, what actions are being taken, who is responsible, what progress has occurred, what evidence supports that progress, and what you have learnt along the way.

Most importantly, your educators should recognise the service described in the QIP. The strongest QIPs reflect improvement that is actually happening.

Making QIP management simpler

The challenge for many services is not coming up with improvement ideas. It is keeping track of them. Improvement actions can end up spread between a QIP document, meeting minutes, emails, folders, photographs, staff notes and someone’s mental to-do list.

QIPify was created to make that process easier for ECEC and OSHC services. It gives you one place to manage your Quality Areas, strengths, improvement priorities, actions, responsibilities, due dates and supporting evidence as your QIP develops.

The aim is simple: spend less time managing the document and more time managing the improvement.

Important information

This article provides general information about Quality Improvement Plans under the National Quality Framework. Services should refer to current ACECQA guidance and the legislation applying in their jurisdiction when determining their regulatory obligations.