Matatu - Technology in Childcare

My role:
Product Researcher, Product Thinker.

Early learning services have a range of ownership and governance structures and offer different philosophies, languages and operating models. These differences have emerged over time in response to changing social contexts, cultural and educational aspirations, parental values and employment patterns. Diverse provision is valued in New Zealand because it offers choice to parents and whānau.

95% of children in New Zealand get some form of early childhood education, usually for 20-22 hours a week. Government funding is available for 20 hours per week for three and four year-old tamariki.

“Centres are getting bigger. Whereas centres with capacity for 80 children used to be a high number, now centres are being built with capacity for 120 children. They need to get over the 100 mark to break even.”

— Auckland kindergarten association Chief Executive Tanya Harvey

Monitoring and Reporting

The ECE centres are required to monitor and maintain records of the children’s activity and sleep and nappy and sheet change times throughout the day to meet compliance requirements as set by the Ministry of Education. These are also made visible to the parents as a report via a portal like Storypark or Educa.

Below are some quotes from the first round of interviews and some desktop research I did with ECE teachers employed by Childcare Centres.

Here I share excerpts of the interview with teachers and centre managers.

This exercise was greatly insightful for me. That meant I could use face recognition to capture the teacher’s name only against the action they perform. This uncovered the opportunity that we could allow for the specific events to be captured and totally replace the teacher’s signature with face recognition.

“People don’t realise there are a lot of repeated, mundane tasks like reporting and note-taking. There is a lot about our job that people don't realise or understand, unless they have that experience”.

— Manpreet, ECE Teacher

“We teach little people how to be people. It’s the foundation of all future learning and relationship-building for their whole lives. We teach children expectations and kaupapa around life, how to be kind, caring and respectful people, and build their social skills, physical skills, problem-solving, and building resilience.” I will be thrilled if some of the tasks can be automated so we can focus on the child better”.

— Simone, ECE Teacher

Interviews with Parents/caretakers with children enrolled in ECE centres revealed:

New parents feel anxious about leaving their infants at the centre
Parents of infants (3-12 months) have fewer apprehensions to a wearable
They love the weekly updates but have no visibility on the child’s patterns
There is no transparency over Covid-19 bubble requirements
Parents would feel a lot more assured if they had access to their child’s wellbeing throughout the day
“How can I know that my child has had a nap today without me having to call the centre in the middle of the day?”
“I hope he was Ok today, he was running a fever yesterday”

I then used the qualitative data from the interviews to summarise the findings in to personas for both, the ECE teacher and the parent of the ECE-going child.

Solution

Matatu is a scalable solution built with connected environments such as IoT, driven by user needs, compliance requirements and privacy policies.

Through Matatu, we simplify the tasks seen as ‘necessary for compliance but not the primary function of ECE teachers’, while making this data readily available with minimal latency for the parents and available at any time for ministry reviews.

(adjective) be watchful, wakeful, alert
(modifier) watchful, wakeful, alert
(modifier) enduring, endurance, standing firm

Who are Matatu’s stakeholders and how will Matatu benefit them individually.

Real time notifications of the child’s activities.
Removes ambiguity about the child's schedule in the centre.
Provides reassurance of the child’s wellbeing.
Lesser reliance on unstructured answers from teachers at the time of pick up ( as explained in the persona)
100% Automatic record of child’s attendance, feedtime, playtime, naptime and nappy change times.
As expressed in the persona, this will free up the teachers time to be able to do what teachers are truly tained to do.
100% automatic digital record keeping will simplify the manager's practice. The will no longer be required to scan and maintain paper records
Reliable data, recorded real time with no human error will be made available at the time of audits and centre reviews.
Item descriptionEasy access to records at the time of ministry reviews.
Data available will be reliable and relevant.
Ability to provide better quality experience. Better standards of compliance We believe, going forward, Matatu could affect the parent-teacher ratio going forward.
Centres may also be eligible for business improvement funding for this purpose.
Platform providers will see increased engagement from real time data. This is also an opportunity for the platform providers to make this data actionable.