Acceptable Time For OOSH Admin To Complete Tasks

[tecomagirl]

Can someone give me a guide to what the acceptable time is for oshc admin, I get 3.5 hours per week, which is paid in my face to face childcare time, just discovered this today

[Lorina]

Are you referring to completing documentation such as programming and planning etc. In this case, as per the Children's Service Award you can have up to 2 hours per week "off the floor time" to complete necessary documentation in regards to children's learning. However, I'm not too sure what are the requirements if you are specifically referring to admin tasks such as dealing with emails, parent inquiries, fees etc. I think it depends on how big your service is and the ratios etc and if your needed to be working with the children as well. This makes it a little tough... Maybe an hour a day or so??

,
Lorina

[indego]

I coordinate a 90 place Out of School Hours Care program, with 250 children enrolled. I've also coordinated through Camp Australia.

With Camp Australia, I managed just by coming in half an hour before set up each day, and staying 10 minutes late to mark rolls... But I had 40 children enrolled and averaged 25 a day, and to be brutally honest, we probably would have only just scrapped through accreditation.
So it worked out to around 3 hours of admin. (This was in addition to the 3-6 shifts.)

I'm now coordinating an independent service. We have 249 children enrolled, and average high 40s for before care, and low 80s for after care. The school expects a very high quality service, and we received the Exceeding rating at accreditation and we're looking to apply for the Excellence rating early next year.

I am paid for 10 hours of admin, and my assistant coordinator is paid for 5 hours admin.
On an average week, I do about 12 hours admin, and my assistant coordinator dose about 8. We're also really lucky that two of our assistants put in 2-3 hours of planning and room set up each a week.

The majority of that time goes towards obs, reflection, planning, and individualized behavior guidance plans. We also menu plan, do the grocery shopping, and manage payments. (Our Obs are probably a little overboard... Every one of our 249 children has a child profile, and has been assessed to see how they're meeting the outcomes. And then we do 1 learning story in our admin time each day, and one of the assistants completes a learning story with the kids.)
I've just spent 5 hours this week updating policies, and will be rewriting job descriptions in the coming weeks as I've just noticed they're still quoting old regs, and haven't been updated this millennia.

From the people I've talked to at PDs and networks, the work is really closely tied into the number of students. Regardless of what people are paid for, the work load seems to break down to around an hour per 10 children. (Until you hit 100 kids, then it seems to jump up... But then it levels out in the 200s.)

[indego]

I should also point out that we're pretty lucky with our admin time, and this is very much not the norm, unfortunately.

[Lorina]

Hi Indego,

Thanks for raking the time to share your experience. I can see why your service got "exceeding" during your accreditation. If you are given the time, you can do so much planning for the children and you also have great support staff to assist you. You're one of the lucky ones!

I've read so many posts on the forum here, where educators struggle to get even 2 hours per week and that's their legal time they should receive. Sometimes so much is expected of us in regards to documentation and planning but how are we supposed to do this without anytime! It's hard, it really is...

,
Lorina