During your trial setup, there is a "Home-Based" option (called Family Day Care of Family Child Care). This setup creates a class for each home, with a "Visiting Teacher" role role who can oversee children in a home, review stories, and provide mentorship.

The home-based setup works well for managing multiple homes under the same visiting teacher. Each home can be set up as a separate class, which is useful for sharing Plan and Form templates, as well as Policies and Resources.

Educa offers a series of default settings for home-based setups based on feedback from home-based customers. By default, home classes are private—families and home educators are not connected to other home sites. However, these settings can be customised to better suit your needs.

Here are key settings tailored for home-based/family child care:

Class Privacy is enabled by default in home-based settings. Educators can only see children in their home and visiting teachers can only see the children in homes they are assigned to. Site Administrators have access to all children across the service.

To disable Class Privacy:

Alternatively, you can create classes based on visiting teachers and assign children to home-based educators as profile children. Manage profile children from Settings > Site Settings > Teachers.

This can be useful if you have many home-based educators but few visiting teachers in your service.

By default, Teacher Messages are turned off to prevent communication between educators in different homes. This setting can only be changed by Educa Support.

If you want to foster a community where educators can share insights and updates across homes, contact Educa Support to enable this feature. More on Teacher Messages here. 

The default setting has Story Approval turned off. If you enable it, consider the implications for Site Admins—by default, Admins see all pending stories from all home educators and receive notifications for them.

You can customise this by adjusting the Site Admin’s profile settings so they only review stories from specific educators. More on Story Approval here.

By default, only Admins can use the message board, teachers cannot. However, Admins can give teachers message board rights for their classes and groups.

Another option for teachers is to share using a Group Story for their families, selecting "Day Journal" to denote it's not a learning story.

Educa provides template forms for home-based management, such as a Visiting Teacher Report in Standard Templates under Forms. There are also templates for Staff Appraisals and Individual Professional Plans. Customise these templates to fit your needs and publish them as required. More about Form options here.

Under each educator's profile, there's an option to allow Home Educators to contribute to stories as both a teacher and a parent. This dual role enables richer contributions to stories.

Consider adjusting the following settings in Site Settings:

Explore Site Settings to tailor Educa to your specific needs. We've set defaults to minimise privacy issues and align with common practices, but feel free to customise your setup. More info here.

Getting Started for Admins - more info on most popular site settings

Teacher Messages  - for communicating across a network or with home.
​Story Approval - creating a story review system.
​Teacher Forms - for tracking home-based activity, professional development.