Notes from building Bloomffy
What actually shaped the product — and what we’re upfront about not having built yet.
The ratio number your rota can't see
Regulation 11 has the highest non-compliance rate of any Tusla regulation — and most of that gap isn't staffing shortfalls, it's the distance between the planned rota and who's actually in the room.
Why Bloomffy is offline-first, not offline-eventually
Crèche wifi drops in the exact rooms where logging matters most. Offline support bolted on after launch almost never covers those rooms — so we built it in from the first migration.
A learning journey with zero extra writing
A learning-journey feature with no form to fill in — built entirely from the daily notes and observations staff already write.
Registered on paper vs. the service you actually run
Tusla registration isn't a one-time certificate to file away — it's a live description of the service, and drift between the two is a compliance risk long before anyone calls it a breach.
The person in charge, and the deputy who actually covers
A named person in charge on a wall chart isn't the same thing as management responsibility that holds when they're not in the building.
A policy nobody can explain isn't a policy
The gap that actually fails an inspection usually isn't a missing document — it's a document nobody on the floor recognises as describing what they do.
The record that actually prevents the next accident
An accident report that gets filed and forgotten is a compliance box ticked. One that changes what happens next is the actual point of writing it down.
The staff file an inspector actually opens
A staff file that would survive being picked at random is a different standard than a staff file that technically contains the right paperwork.
Garda vetting: timing, validity, and the transfer myth
Vetting that arrives after someone's already working with children, or a previous employer's clearance treated as good enough, are two different ways the same rule gets broken.
FAR cover, and what happens when someone calls in sick
A First Aid Response certificate hanging in a file doesn't help a child who needs it if the certified person is the one who's out sick.
The rota is a plan, the ratio is a measurement
Regulation 11 has the highest non-compliance rate of any Tusla regulation, and most of that gap isn't a genuine staffing shortage — it's the distance between who's rostered and who's physically in the room right now.
What every staff member should be able to tell an inspector
An inspection isn't only a document review — it's a conversation, and the answers staff give on the day carry as much weight as anything in a folder.
The child record Regulation 15 actually requires
A child's file is the one record set that gets checked from more directions than any other — by an inspector, by a parent, and in an emergency, by whoever's holding the tablet at the time.
Attendance that matches the room, not just the sign-in sheet
Attendance records fail an inspection in a specific, boring way: the sign-in sheet says one thing and the children physically in the building say another.
Medication records: the details inspectors actually check
Medication is one of the few areas where the policy and the log genuinely have to say the same thing every single time, because the gap between them is a safety gap, not a paperwork one.
Aistear, Síolta, and behaviour support in daily practice
Curriculum frameworks and behaviour policies both fail the same way when they exist only as documents — the evidence has to be visible in what actually happens in the room.
Safe sleep: checks, equipment, and the ten-minute rule
A safe-sleep policy is only as good as whether the checks it describes actually happened, at the interval it claims, for every child who was actually asleep.
Fire drills, equipment, and exits that actually work
A fire drill nobody reviews afterward, and a fire extinguisher nobody's checked in a year, are the same failure wearing two different disguises.
Premises risk, outdoor areas, and insurance that holds up
Some of this is genuinely a software problem — insurance certificates and recurring hazard checks are — and some of it, honestly, isn't.
Cleaning, food safety, and outbreak plans that hold up
Infection control and food safety fail an inspection the same way almost everything else on this list does — the policy says one thing and the log, or the lack of one, says another.
NCS: funding agreements, attendance, and the Hive workflow
The National Childcare Scheme runs on a simple idea — subsidy tracks real attendance — and almost every operational rule underneath it exists to enforce that one idea honestly.
The 8/12-week rule: what under-attendance actually triggers
Under-attendance handling is the one NCS rule with a genuine state machine behind it, and most services only learn its shape the first time a family actually falls into it.
ECCE registration, Parent Statements, and the service calendar
ECCE looks simpler than NCS on the surface — one free scheme, one set of hours — but the paperwork underneath it is just as exacting, and the details are exactly where eligibility and payment go wrong.
ECCE ratios don't change just because it's free
It's an easy, wrong assumption: that a free scheme session somehow relaxes the ratio rules that apply to a fee-paying one. It doesn't — it just applies a different band.
The compliance file an inspection actually tests
There's no single official ranking of the most common way to fail a Tusla inspection. The most honest answer is a pattern, not a statistic: a mismatch between the written policy, the record, and what staff actually do.