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Settings for Educa's Home-Based Version

Discover Educa's Home-Based version, designed for family day care and home groups managing multiple homes under a single site URL.

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Written by Educa
Updated this week

Who this article is for

  • Site Admins running home-based services (family day care / family child care / home groups).

  • Visiting Teachers and Educators who want to understand how the home-based setup works.

  • Teams considering switching an existing site to Educa’s Home-Based option.

🔒 Site Admins only: Only Site Admins can change Site Settings. If you don’t see the settings mentioned here, ask a Site Admin at your service to help.

Overview of Educa's Home-Based Option

Educa Support can enable the Home-Based option on your site at any time – during your trial or on an existing site. This setup is often used for Family Day Care or Family Child Care services and lets you create a class for each home with a Visiting Teacher role to oversee children, 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 or you can organise by

By default, Educa applies home-based settings based on feedback from home-based customers:

  • Home classes are private – families and home educators are not connected to other homes.

  • Site Admins can see all children and classes in the service.
    You can customise these settings at any time to suit your needs.

Home-Based Settings to Consider

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

Assigning Visiting Teachers and Setting up Classes

When the Home-Based option is enabled, you'll see these 2 options for adding Teachers, use the corresponding button to invite Teachers to Educa as a Teacher or Visiting Teacher.

how to invite a visiting teacher

Teacher can be converted to Visiting Teachers if needed by editing their profile and ticking the Visiting Teacher option.

Teachers will only be able to see the children that they have been assigned as their profile teacher. See Assigning Profile Children to Teachers for step-by-step instructions.

Once profile Teachers are set up, you can use classes to organise which children Visiting Teachers can see. There are two common options and this will change how you see children organised under all children:

Option 1 – One class per Visiting Teacher
Use this if you want to see which children sit under each Visiting Teacher.

  • Create one class for each Visiting Teacher.

  • Add all children supported by that Visiting Teacher to this class.

Option 2 – One class per home/Teacher
Use this if you want to see which children belong to each home or Teacher.

  • Create one class for each home or Teacher.

  • Add the children who are in this home to the class.

  • Assign the relevant Visiting Teacher to each home/educator class.

For more ways to organise and manage your classes, see Class Management.

Story Approval Settings

Story approval is a great way for you to oversee the stories your teachers are posting and provide mentoring.

The default setting has Story Approval turned off, meaning all Teacher can post stories themselves. If you enable it, all Site Admins will, by default, see pending stories from all Teachers and receive notifications when submitted for approval.

You can assign approvers to each Teacher and this usually their Visiting Teacher, but you can set up to 3 approvers per Teacher.

More on Story Approval here.

Managing Messaging Rights

By default, only Site Admins can use the Message Board. Site Admins can give teachers Message Board rights for their classes and groups if needed.

Another option for teachers is to share a Group Story and mark it as a Day Journal when the update is not part of the child’s learning journey (for example, notes or daily routines).

🔎 Important: Stories marked as Day Journal do not appear in a child’s profile download. Use Day Journals only for information you don’t need to include in the child’s long-term learning record.

Utilising Other Documentation

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. You can customise these templates to fit your service and publish them as needed. Learn more about Forms here.

Additional Settings

Consider adjusting the following Site Settings for home-based services:

  • Change the learning story reflection questions to match your home-based philosophy.

  • Add a third reflection box and/or make it private for educator-only notes.

  • Customise the About Me questions on the child profile page to gather the information you need from home-based families.

  • Set up alerts for overdue learning stories to support regular documentation in each home.

  • If any Teachers are also a parent of any children in their care, you can mark them as a parent under their Teacher account.

Explore Site Settings to tailor Educa to your specific needs.

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