Childcare owners devote ample energy and time to building their centers and ensuring the mental and physical well-being of children. However, just like any business, running a childcare poses a bunch of unique challenges. From being buried in paperwork to struggling with financing, there’s no dearth of problems that teachers and owners to overcome.
Thankfully, the advent of preschool apps like Illumine makes it simpler for childcare directors to address these concerns. With the help of hi-tech apps for preschool, they can free themselves to focus on delivering quality education to all.
Strengthening your preschool business will require you to take all challenges head on. That is why we’ve collated 12 top challenges faced by childcare owners, along with tips to overcome them.
Top 12 Challenges Faced by Childcare Owners
- Non-compliance in licensing
- Childcare paperwork
- Poor progress tracking
- Subpar health standards
- Lack of communication with guardians
- Ineffective incident reporting
- Safety measures not in place
- Understaffing
- Low enrollment numbers
- Low profits
- Difficult student behavior
- Administrative work
Non-compliance in licensing
Depending on an agency’s star rating, child care agencies in Tennessee are inspected 4 to 6 times each year. Each quarter, one unannounced visit is made. The objective of these visits is to make sure that providers are meeting licensing.
Without the correct levels of organization, keeping track of emergency measures, paperwork and records can get complicated.
Solution: We suggest you take the following measures to overcome this hurdle.
- Check the zoning laws of your city to ensure your childcare business is compliant with them.
- Work with a licensing agency because it will review your licensing process, business plan, and inspect your facility for a nominal fee and save you time and effort.
- Track license renewal dates to prevent any issues with record-keeping.
Childcare paperwork
Did you know filing costs 20 dollars per document on an average?
Our preschool management software helps you reduce your reliance on paper usage and save costs. Let’s take the example of attendance, for starters.
Solution: We built a contactless check-in and check-out function to ensure that students and teachers can punch in their attendance hassle-free.
Source: Illumine
This is one of the many ways Illumine’s childcare software eliminates paperwork.
Child progress tracking
Every child care center administers assessments for the children to keep all the stakeholders in the loop about how they are progressing. However, taking assessments and preparing progress reports can consume a lot of a teacher’s time and energy.
Solution: Thankfully, you can automate tracking the development areas of a child with Illumine’s assessment report feature. Detailed development report cards are of great help for everyone.
- The teacher can easily track the progress of a child against a particular learning framework and chart the progression of the entire class based on the data.
- Illumine supports standard frameworks like Montessori, EYFS, and other country-specific frameworks.
- Teachers save 4 hours monthly with our platform on assessment processes.
Subpar health standards
Source: Vanderbilt Center for Child Health Policy
The Vanderbilt Center for Child Health Policy conducted a Covid-19 poll in June 2020 and found that mental health had worsened for 1 in 7 children in the US. On top of that, food insecurity grew to 36% as free lunches children received at daycares were suspended. The results are worrying, especially in light of talks of the fourth wave of pandemics.
Solution: This is why the popularity of preschool software has risen. If you’re concerned about the child’s physical growth, you can rely on Illumine for receiving constant updates about their health. The teachers can use our app to log in the pictures and notes of the food the child eats, thus easing the stress on the parents.
Lack of communication with guardians
When it comes to picking the ideal daycare provider for their children, one of the major worries parents have is trust. Failure to communicate properly with a legal guardian is the most difficult challenge a childcare owner faces. Parents want to know about their child’s day, and any experiences they may have had. They worry about their children when there is radio silence
Solution: But, brief updates can put their minds at ease.
Source: Illumine
Illumine’s parent-teacher communication app allows you to connect directly with parents. Send messages, attach photographs, keep parents up to date on what their children are doing at school, and answer any questions or concerns they may have.
Ineffective incident reporting
If a youngster falls off the swing and twists their ankle, the parent must be informed of the occurrence.
Even small problems, such as potty accidents, violent altercations, or strange conduct, must be documented. Not only must staff disclose these incidents to legal guardians to prevent liability, but they must also continue open communication to preserve trust.
Solution: With Illumine, you can digitally record and report all incidents. By feeding it in the app, you’re creating a searchable database that you or future teachers can then access easily.
Safety measures not in place
As child care administrators strive to establish new safety-focused rules in light of Covid-19, one key process should not be overlooked: child care pick-up and drop-off.
Child care facilities will need to change their pick-up and drop-off processes to impose social separation and secure the children.
Solution: Illumine’s bus tracking app ensures student safety and also allows parents to track their children. It provides parents access to the contact number of the driver and the pickup and drops off details, which is extremely reassuring.
Illumine digital attendance app for childcare allows you to check in and check out your child using a QR scanner on your app. Only authorized pick-up and drop-off guardians are allowed to check in and checkout the child.
Understaffing
Staffing shortages and poor salaries are wreaking havoc on daycares around the US. 91 percent of child care facilities are suffering staffing shortages, according to a recent poll by the National Associations for the Education of Young Children in the USA, and 84 percent of child care centers say low pay makes it difficult to recruit workers.
Solution: To retain quality staff, treat them like an asset of your daycare business. Reduce teacher workload and burnout by empowering them through technology. Illumine automates various teacher tasks, freeing their time to spend time with the children.
Low enrolment numbers
Source: Illumine
Preschools get admission requests throughout the year, making it tough to organize and update them on an excel sheet and share with the management. Lack of proper tracking leads to low enrolments and a disappointing experience for the parents involved. The latter results in losing out on a referral, which is a crucial way to boost enrolment numbers.
Solution: Illumine has a Enquiry Management & Customer Relationship Management tool in the programme itself, so you don’t have to leave it to enter information or handle admissions independently. The online portal supports the function, and it’s simple to use. You can filter out the leads by their status, month, source (online or referral), follow-up dues, and overdues.
Low profits
Because of administrative expenses that cannot be attributed to the direct cost of providing a service, childcare services have low profits. If childcare facilities are not tracking their expenses accurately, it is difficult to identify which expenses need to be lowered to increase the margins of profit.
Solution: With our childcare billing software, you can send automatic invoices, collect online payments, and generate payment receipts and billing reports.
- Make your cash inflow predictable and reduce the stress of bookkeeping.
- Secure online payments by letting parents pay via NEFT or credit card.
- Set up auto payments to remove operational burden from school.
Source: Illumine
Once your accounting process is seamless, the profit margins are bound to increase.
Difficult student behavior
Some behaviors that childcare owners find challenging to deal with include:
- Open defiance
- Physical violence (biting and kicking)
- Excessive anger
The childcare owners have a responsibility of training childcare educators to deal with difficult behavior.
Solution: With illumine, you can track a student’s behavior and keep open communication with the parents. This way, they’ll be in the loop about the ill behavior the child is exhibiting and the measures the childcare is taking to ameliorate such behavior.
Administrative work
The average preschool teacher spends 2 hours per day on administrative work, and that time can be better utilized somewhere else. This is on top of keeping an eye on children and managing your relationships with caregivers.
Solution: We strive to provide virtual solutions to your problems.
- Once all your tasks are digitized, you’ll enhance productivity at your daycare facility.
- You will save money on operations and reduce the amount of time you’ll spend on daily administrative tasks.
- You will be able to automate invoices, student and staff attendance, and activity updates for parents–bringing all the processes on your fingertips.
Wrap Up
It takes a lot of trust to run a daycare business. When parents entrust you with their children’s safety and happiness, they also entrust you with their business.
Illumine ensures that everyone is happy, including our stakeholders at 500 schools in 25 countries. It is one step closer to realizing the dream of a profitable business.
Get a free demo of Illumine childcare software to make that dream a reality.
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