Director guide · Australia and Aotearoa
ACECQA's process page says regulatory authorities generally provide one to five days' notice that a site visit will occur, and an assessment that starts in response to compliance issues may start with no notice at all. That is the real constraint. Nobody rebuilds a term of documentation in five days, so the evidence either exists by then or it does not. This page sets out what to have ready and where the gaps usually are.
Start with what actually happened: one action, quote, attempt, change, or question. A polished observation is never required.
StoryLoop drafts and checks. The educator reviews, edits, decides what is true, and chooses whether anything is shared.
Reviewed 22 September 2026 · Written by Leo, who builds StoryLoop, in Ōtautahi Christchurch
What StoryLoop does with a note
A real note an educator typed, and the start of the draft StoryLoop wrote from it, unedited, with the EYLF V2.0 links, learning and next steps to follow.
Jack sorted the bear counters by colour into the cups. Then lined up the red ones and counted 8. Put 2 blue ones on the end and said 'now it's ten'.
Sorting and making ten
Jack sorted the bear counters by colour into the cups. After sorting, he lined up the red bears and counted them. Jack counted 8 red bears, then added 2 blue bears to the end of the line and said, “now it's ten”.
What learning we noticed
Jack used sorting, counting and adding in one clear sequence. He noticed the colours, organised the bears into groups, counted the red bears, and then changed the set by adding two more. When Jack said, “now it's ten”, he showed that he was thinking about the total, not just naming the colours or counting by rote.
Type what you saw today. StoryLoop writes the draft here, with EYLF V2.0 links, and shows you exactly what it is built on.
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Your draft appears here, with EYLF V2.0 links that only claim what your note shows, usually in under a minute.
Tip: what the child did, one thing they said, and what happened next. Three lines is plenty.
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One to five days for a site visit, or for a conversation in place of a visit where a partial assessment does not need one. A draft report follows three to five weeks after the visit, and the provider can respond to factual inaccuracies with evidence. So there is a second window, but only for correcting the record, not for creating documentation that should already have existed.
Element 1.3.1 asks whether the assessment and planning cycle is happening for each child. 1.3.2 asks whether critical reflection drives planning. 1.3.3 asks whether families are informed about the program and their child's progress. ACECQA is explicit that there is no required format. Assessors look for the cycle, not a template.
Coverage: the quiet children have far less recorded than the confident ones, and a roll call of documentation makes it obvious. Unclosed loops: next steps written at the bottom of a story and never mentioned again. Unrecorded reflection: the thinking happened in a conversation and was never written down. Family input living in a messaging app instead of in the child's documentation.
Day one, list every child and when they were last documented, and give the thinnest names to the educators who know them. Day two, walk the open next steps and record what was actually tried. Day three, write the reflections that only exist as conversations. Day four, bring family voice back into the records it belongs in. Day five, read it as an assessor would and prepare to talk through one child's cycle end to end.
ERO reviews early childhood services against Te Whariki and works from the service's own internal evaluation. The documentation questions land in the same place: can you show what you noticed about a child, what you did in response, what happened, and how whanau contributed. A service prepared for one conversation is largely prepared for the other.
Ask a director what they remember about their last assessment and rating visit and you will usually hear about the fortnight before it, not the day itself. That fortnight is spent assembling: pulling stories out of folders, chasing educators for the reflection they know happened, checking whether every child has anything recorded at all.
The uncomfortable part is that the fortnight is often imaginary. ACECQA's process page says regulatory authorities generally provide one to five days' notice that a site visit will occur, and an assessment that begins in response to compliance issues may begin with no notice. Services that felt prepared usually were prepared already; services that planned to prepare found out that five days is not enough time to create a term of evidence, and creating it after the fact is not what anybody should be doing anyway.
So the useful question is not how to prepare faster. It is what the documentation would show if the call came tomorrow.
A rating conversation about Standard 1.3 tends to come down to one child. An assessor picks a name and asks an educator to walk through it: what did you notice, what did you make of it, what did you plan, what happened when you tried it, what did the family say, and what would you do next.
Every part of that answer either exists in your records or it does not. The observation almost always does. The analysis usually does. What goes missing is the middle of the cycle, the part where a plan met a real day and either worked or did not, and the part where a family's knowledge changed what an educator did.
This is why a pile of beautifully written stories can still sit uncomfortably in an assessment. Volume is not the cycle. Twenty stories with no next step revisited say less than six that show the loop closing.
The child who asks for attention gets documented. The child who plays quietly at the edge of the mat, who never causes a fuss and never asks for anything, can go a very long time without a single recorded moment. No educator intends this and every educator recognises it.
It surfaces badly under assessment, because coverage is the easiest thing in the world for an outsider to check. It is a list of names and a list of dates. If four children in a room have nothing recorded this term, that is visible in about ninety seconds, and it is a hard finding to talk your way around.
It is also the most fixable gap, and the only one that has to be found before the visit rather than during it. A roll of every child with the date they were last documented, read once a month, prevents the entire category of problem.
Worth having: a list of every child and when they were last documented; a handful of stories where a next step was planned, tried and reflected on, so an educator can walk the full cycle without hunting; reflection written down somewhere, even as short jottings, with a line about what changed because of it; family contributions sitting in the child's documentation rather than in a messaging app; and your QIP honest about the areas you already know need work.
Not worth doing: rewriting old documentation to sound better, producing a new template in the week of the visit, or generating anything after the fact. Assessors are experienced readers and documentation that appeared last Tuesday reads like documentation that appeared last Tuesday. Self-assessment that names a real weakness is treated far better than a file that claims none.
StoryLoop is where the writing happens: an educator turns a quick note into a draft with the evidence visible, edits it, and signs it off. Each story carries its next steps, and educators mark them as planned, tried or worth continuing, which is the part of the cycle that usually goes unrecorded.
On a centre plan, the evidence pack assembles what is there into one page: every child's coverage and last documented date, how many next steps were written and how many were revisited, where reflection and family voice are recorded, the curriculum links across the period, and the gaps named before anything else. It prints. It costs nothing to run, calls no model, and cannot invent evidence, which matters more here than anywhere else in the product.
What it does not do is tell you whether your service meets the standard. It counts your own records and shows you the holes. The practice, the professional judgement and the rating stay exactly where they belong.
Official references
These sources inform this guide. StoryLoop is independent and does not claim endorsement.
FAQ
ACECQA's process page says regulatory authorities generally provide one to five days' notice that a site visit will occur. Where a partial assessment does not require a visit, the same one to five days' notice may be given for a conversation instead. An assessment that commences in response to compliance issues may commence without notice.
The regulatory authority provides a draft report three to five weeks after the visit. The provider can give feedback on factual inaccuracies and supply evidence supporting that feedback. The final report follows, and ratings are published once the review period ends.
The QIP records your self-assessment: strengths and the areas you have identified for improvement. It is not the documentation evidence for Standard 1.3. An assessor reading a QIP will still ask to see how the planning cycle runs for individual children.
No. ACECQA's guidance states there is no one way to meet documentation requirements under the NQF, and services choose methods that suit their children, families and community. What is assessed is whether the cycle is visible, not which template produced it.
No, and be wary of anything that claims it can. Software can count what your team recorded and show you where the gaps are before someone else finds them. The professional judgement, the practice and the rating remain yours.
No. StoryLoop supports drafting and structure, while educators remain responsible for observation, interpretation, reflection, final editing, and sign-off.
Yes. Stories are editable after generation and saved in history, so educators can add context, adjust wording, copy, export, or regenerate from the original observation.
StoryLoop is designed to avoid generic, poetic AI wording. It asks for real observations, keeps claims evidence-based, and links curriculum only when the observation supports it.
The free plan includes 3 learning stories per month. Upgrade prompts are dismissible, and existing history remains available even if the free limit is reached.