Goodstart exists for social purpose – to ensure Australia’s children get the best possible start in life – and it starts with their safety – above all else. In fact, at Goodstart, “Safety starts with each of us. Being safe is who we are and what we do. It’s part of being a Goodstarter.”

This statement forms part of Goodstart’s safety commitment and importantly, Goodstart’s strategic direction, leadership and way of working, ensures this commitment is more than words. Safety is woven across every decision, every project and every initiative, continuously improving our safety performance and culture.

Goodstart is Australia’s largest early learning provider and a not for profit social enterprise responsible for the learning and care of more than 68,000 children across more than 664 centres nationally – in every state and territory. Goodstart is operating in the ever increasing and highly competitive early learning and care sector.

Over the past 24 months, Goodstart introduced a step change approach to accelerate the pace of safety performance improvement, adopting a pioneering approach of machine learning based analytics.

In an Australian childcare industry first, it is the first time machine learning has been applied to improve safety outcomes.

The objective of this analytics approach was to identify the key controllable and non-controllable parameters that are associated with injury risk and develop a methodology to segment centres across Goodstart’s national centre footprint into risk groups.

This innovative approach to data analysis is transforming Goodstart’s way of working organisation-wide and improving safety planning and response – including more targeted preventative planning, targeted support improvement, greater operational assurance, to reducing Goodstart’s child injury rates.

This step-change approach demonstrates Goodstart’s leadership in safety improvement and aligns with its organisation’s strategic direction that seeks to create positive impact beyond Goodstart through knowledge-sharing.

With more than 1.3 million children attending early learning and care in Australia each year – Goodstart understands the enormous social impact to be achieved by planning and managing an approach to safety with an evidenced-based approach – to protect Australia’s greatest asset – our young children.

While across the childcare sector, Goodstart’s safety performance is one of the best – Goodstart is always seeking to be better. Improved safety performance is an everyday, and every team member priority.

Thus far, the impact of Goodstart’s machine learning analysis is significant – identifying unique insights and is generating significant interest within the sector and other industries including mining and water utilities.

Goodstart is now focused on expanding its evidenced-based approach of machine learning – and applying this new way of analysing and working across other business performance areas such as employee retention.

For more information about Goodstart Early Learning visit goodstart.org.au