As we are now in Stage Three of Tasmania’s Roadmap to Recovery the Education and Care Unit (ECU) would like to provide you with information about our plans for resuming the Assessment and Rating (A&R) of education and care services in Tasmania.
We are pleased to announce that the ECU will be resuming A&R from September 2020.
The ECU has developed and shared our ECU Recovery Plan which outlines our planned approach as we move towards recovery. This email provides additional details about our approach to resuming A&R.
A focus of our work during the pandemic has been to engage with our Stakeholder Reference Group and approved providers, to gain an understanding of the challenges faced by education and care services. As a result of this consultation, the ECU has been able consider how we are resuming the A&R process, as most approved providers we consulted have advised that their services had capacity to undertake A&R before the end of this year.
An outline of the consultation and review of our A&R processes undertaken in the past months and our planned focus for September and October can be reviewed here;
In response to public health advice and information received through consultation with the SRG, providers and services, we have revised the A&R visit approach. The review process that we are using to identify, plan, test, reflect and implement our revised approach will continue to be used to review and refine as needed as we monitor and respond to the changing environment that we are currently in. We will keep you updated with any changes.
The A&R Review Cycle can be reviewed here;
From September we will commence notifying providers of A&R visits that will occur from October 2020. Throughout September we will also be conducting partial reassessments of eligible services. For further information regarding your services’ eligibility for partial re-assessments, please contact the ECU Assessment and Rating Team on 6165 5425.
The main consideration is to reduce the amount of time Authorised Officers (AOs) are onsite at services to gather evidence. As a result of our changes processes, your A&R visit will now consist of 3 parts:
- a virtual meeting before the onsite visit to sight and discuss documentation
- an onsite visit to observe practice
- a virtual meeting after the onsite visit to discuss provider and service operations
Our authorised officers will be in contact to explain the changes to the A&R structure and work with approved providers to implement the process in a way that works best for your services.
We will be conducting pilot A&R visits over the coming weeks to trial the new process where we hope to gain valuable feedback about the experience for the ECU and for services.
Further information and guidance about these changes will be shared over the coming weeks.
Thank you for your hard work and dedication during this challenging time and we look forward to resuming A&R in your services soon.