Overview
The KPS nursery planning software is a Python/Django programme accessible via a web browser, designed to manage childcare places. It enables nursery managers to plan staff rota on a day-to-day basis and to provide the optimal number of childcare places. This is based on the KiBiz staff hours calculator. Furthermore, it can automatically allocate children to available places, ensuring an even distribution across all families. It can be used on most web hosting platforms and is therefore cost-effective to maintain. By installing an SSL certificate and accessing the site via https, all data is transmitted in encrypted form.
The KPS – Nursery Planning Software offers a split planning interface. On one side, you can see all carers in your centre, including available qualified staff, support staff and management hours, as well as other hours. On the other side, you can see all children, grouped by family, including group membership, age and care contract.
Using a timeline, you can select any date for which the schedule is to be created.
A summary shows the current target and actual staffing ratios.
The notes function allows you to leave notes for your colleagues for each day. This enables you to store important information centrally and share the planning workload.
In planning mode, you can allocate individual families or children to the available childcare places. You can do this manually – by selecting or deselecting the child or family. Alternatively, you can use the automatic allocation function. This allocates the children to the available places in the best possible way, taking into account previous offers of places. This ensures an even and fair distribution of places among all children, in line with the requirements of the Youth Welfare Office. Additionally, you also have the option to assign priorities, for example to working parents, provided this applies to your facility.
Based on the reservation status, you can see at a glance which families are taking up the childcare offer and which families wish to give up their place.
It goes without saying that various security measures have been put in place to ensure the safe handling of personal data. These include not only compliance with browser security standards, but also a groups/roles/permissions framework.
The Django framework used prevents typical attacks such as SQL injections. The application is configured to achieve an A+ rating on ssllabs.com.
The application itself requires only the most essential information to be used. For example, it is not necessary to store the complete details of all children, families or carers. To improve clarity, whilst this is possible, it is not required (principle of data minimisation).
The application will be installed on a server managed by you, in accordance with your requirements. Alternatively, you may choose an external service provider (ADV required) and enter into a service contract for maintenance tasks. The application and its data remain entirely under your control; it does not require any connection to external sites. There is no monthly licence fee and no dependency on an external service provider. There are no hidden costs and, of course, no nonsensical per-child, per-user or per-anything licensing model. You have plenty of time to test the programme and can then purchase a licence for your organisation. You can then decide for yourself whether to manage the application yourself or commission an external service provider to do so. Bugs are fixed as part of maintenance, and requests for enhancements are implemented on an individual basis.