In this article, educators refers to home-based educators (not visiting teachers).
​Visiting teachers are referred to explicitly where relevant.

Who this article is for

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 Visiting Teacher, depending on your management preference.

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

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

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

Educators 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 Educators 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:

Use this if you want to see which children sit under each Visiting Teacher.

Educator View of all assigned children

Use this if you want to see which children belong to each home or Educator.

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

When the Home-Based option is enabled, Educator Messages are turned off by default. This gives you control over whether Educators can post updates for other Educators to see.

To turn Educator Messages back on:

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 Educators can post stories themselves. If you enable it, all Site Admins will, by default, see pending stories from all Educators and receive notifications when submitted for approval.

You can assign up to 3 approvers per Educator, which is usually their Visiting Teacher.

More on Story Approval here.

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 Educators 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).

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.

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

Explore Site Settings to tailor Educa to your specific needs.