Components of the SIP
Service Profile (centre-based services only)
The purpose of the Service Profile is to build a profile of the service for the IA to understand their inclusion needs and practices of the service. In the Service Profile, the service provides information on the number of children enrolled in the service broken down by the cohorts the program supports.
Services detail their capacity and capability to include children with additional needs and develop a community outreach strategy, through responding to the following key questions:
- How does your service promote learning experiences, interactions and participation to build on children’s strengths and encourage involvement?
- How will your service engage with families in the community who do not currently access ECEC services?
Care Environment
A care environment is a specific setting, room or grouping of children in care. For FDC services, this is the FDC educator seeking inclusion support.
Each care environment will contain an inclusion profile and identifies the barriers and strategies to inclusion for each care environment. FDC services will also be required to complete an Educator Profile. Over time, the inclusion profile, barriers and strategies will demonstrate the progress the service has made in improving their inclusive capacity and capability.
Educator Profile (FDC only)
The Educator Profile applies only to FDC services and must be completed for FDC services accessing ISP. The Educator Profile identifies the FDC educator’s capacity and capability to include children with additional needs. It also identifies the FDC educator’s inclusion practices and community outreach strategies, through responding to the following key questions:
- How does the educator promote learning experiences, interactions and participation to build on children’s strengths and encourage involvement?
- How will the educator engage with families in the community who do not currently access ECEC services?
Inclusion Profile
The Inclusion Profile outlines the context of the care environment. A separate Inclusion Profile must be completed for each care environment the service is requiring inclusion support for. The Inclusion Profile will identify:
- The number and age of children in the care environment
- The number of educators in the care environment
- Educators’ confidence to include children with additional needs. The service should consider, on average, the confidence of all educators to include children with additional needs for the majority of time.
Barriers and Strategies
Barriers and Strategies will be completed by all services accessing ISP. The service will identify the barriers that impact their capacity to include children with additional needs alongside typically developing peers. Services will be able to choose from a list of pre-defined barriers or identify a custom barrier as required.
For each barrier identified, the service must propose a strategy to overcome the barrier to inclusion. Services will be able to choose from a list of pre-defined strategies or develop custom strategies as required. These will be saved to the service’s list of strategies on the SIP.
Actions
Each strategy should have at least one action that will outline how the service will implement the strategy and what resources will be used. This provides further specific detail of what educators will do in the care environment.
Please note: The information in the Strategic Inclusion Plan will help to determine if an additional educator is required to increase the educator to child ratio in the care environment, and if so for how many hours or days each week.
Children
Where a service requires support from the IDF for an Additional Educator, Immediate/Time Limited Support and FDC Top Up, the service is required to include information about the specific child/children requiring inclusion support through the IDF.
Information about the eligible child or children will be added by the service to the SIP on the Children page. This child can then be added to an IS case as required. This approach enables the service to re-use and update information about children as needed. Once a child has been added to an IS Case, the child cannot be deleted from the SIP, however the child status on the SIP can be made inactive.
Reviews
There are three types of reviews of the SIP that will be completed by the IA:
- Service Profile Review
- Care Environment Review
- Yearly SIP Review
The purpose of the yearly review is for the service to reflect on the changes they have applied through implementing the SIP. ECEC services should consider their current inclusive capacity and how this has helped progress the strategies in place to address the inclusion barriers identified for the care environment.