An Early Years Sidekick for every educator

In November 2023, we released Sidekick in Famly’s Early Childhood Platform to support Early Years educators with spelling, grammar, and tone of their written work. 

The feedback was incredible.

“Sidekick has been a game changer as it has given staff the confidence to post to parents in more detail. I have two dyslexic staff and they are overwhelmed with the new feature. It has given them the chance to celebrate their professionalism without the worry of spelling and grammar mistakes.” ‍

Jennie McMahon, Manager, Limes Court Nursery School

Now, nearly two years later, Sidekick has been used over a million times and is one of Famly’s most-loved features. 

So we’re giving it to everyone who uses Famly for free.

How Sidekick supports Early Years educators with literacy

Famly’s Sidekick is a writing assistant for Early Years educators, right where they need it most. Sidekick can:

• Check and correct the spelling and grammar of text, such as a post to parents or an observation.
• Change the tone of text to professional, polite, observant, or conversational.
• Condense longer text by using the ‘Make it shorter’ option.’

“For a long time, we were trying to drive that quality piece, but families would see Newsfeed posts go up that wouldn't necessarily have the right tone. And instead of having to be on the ground, saying, ‘This is exactly how you should write it, ’ Sidekick gives you several options. Do you want to make it polite? Do you want to make it professional? And if it's not right, you can Sidekick it again. It offers opportunities like a training tool for the team to be able to see the alternative ways they could have written it.”

Ciara Reilly, People and Quality Manager, Kido

The clever part is, Sidekick doesn’t just correct writing automatically. When using Sidekick, you can view the suggested changes alongside your original text to see where the corrections in spelling and grammar are made. This allows educators to improve their writing over time, based on the prompted improvements.

“They can see the changes so they think, ‘Next time, I’m going to write it this way,’” says James Goodeve, manager of Ladybird Nursery. “It’s having a knock-on effect as it’s teaching them how they could word it.

How Sidekick saves you time

You can also use Sidekick to tidy up your quick notes, so you can get back to more important things. Here’s a post I wrote on our demo platform, as an example of some quick updates, after a meeting:

I asked Sidekick to ‘make it conversational’ and look at how much better the post is now, in no time at all:

Happy educators, happy managers, happy parents

The Early Years are the most important in a child’s life, and some of the most anxious for their parents, especially when they’re leaving their child in a setting for the first time. Needless spelling and grammar errors in communication with parents and carers can seem unprofessional and careless, regardless of how amazing the care really is. 

For some managers or leaders, the worry of poor spelling or grammar on a post to parents means checking all communication before it goes out. And, while Famly has approval flows for things like observations or accident forms, reading and correcting educators’ writing takes hours. 

“It took an awful lot of time,” says James Goodeve, “Every child has at least one observation a month, and we have 60 children on roll. Having to read through every observation took time out of what I was doing, and then the feedback took an entire day each month.”

But now, James’ team just use Sidekick and can rest assured that each parent or carer is getting the quality communication they deserve.

“Since we began using Sidekick, I haven't had to write out long feedback. All the observations are perfect, so I’m able to just praise them for an amazing job.”

“Having Sidekick for my team is a huge confidence boost. We see so many staff who didn't post very many observations, they didn't engage too much with families. Now, because of Sidekick, they can do that, and they can interact with families directly with absolute confidence. Without having to worry about whether their spelling or grammar is correct, or whether they're actually using the right word, or the tone of it is right. They just have fun with it.”

Tom Richardson, Operations Director, Naturally Learning

Why give your most popular feature away for free?

In short, it’s just too useful not to have available across all packages. Something that relieves so much stress and improves accessibility shouldn’t be only available to some Famly users. It’s our way of giving a little bit back to the sector.

Of course, we can’t give everything away for free. The money that settings and groups pay to use Famly enables us to develop new features, provide support, create resources, and maintain performance and security across the platform. We want to keep making Famly better to fulfil our aim of a better start for every child.

“When we released Sidekick nearly two years ago, we hoped it would enable educators to quickly catch mistakes in their writing. However, the impact has been far bigger than we could have imagined. The feedback we got was that by taking away that fear of making mistakes, educators in settings are calmer, more confident and, most importantly, have more time to spend with the children. That’s simply too powerful an effect not to share with all our customers.”

Anders Laustsen, CEO, Famly