Mana Journeys helps you manage your full cycle of planning, from observing and assessing, to planning, implementing, and reflecting, all in one place. You can use Mana Journeys on its own (which we strongly recommend) or alongside another ECE platform.
This article will walk you through:
Understanding what a Journey in Mana is and why it matters
Setting up your Journey stages
Creating a Journey for each of your key children
Adding documentation and sharing with other systems
Understanding quality monitoring and Journey status updates
Refer to this article which walks you through the benefits of making the switch to using Mana Journeys for all of your cycle of planning needs.
Why each child needs a journey in Mana
In Mana, each Journey represents a child’s Cycle of Planning or Individual Learning Plan (ILP). A child has one active Journey open at a time. This Journey becomes the home base for all documentation about their learning and development: a clear snapshot of their growth over a specific period.
Journey = Cycle of Planning or Individual Learning Plan (ILP)
If your centre uses another system to store planning evidence or share updates with families, that’s perfectly fine. You can still use Mana for documentation and easily copy or download your work for use elsewhere.
Step 1: Match your journey stages (Centre Manager action)
Align your Journey Stages in Mana with the stages/phases/categories you already use in your current system.
For example: Observe & Assess → Plan & Implement → Evaluate & Reflect
This helps keep your process consistent across platforms.
📖 Read more: How to customise the stages of your Journey
Step 2: Create a journey for each of your children
Create a Journey for each of your key children.
We recommend setting the Journey end date to match the end date of your current planning cycle, so that everything aligns neatly.
📖 Read more: How to begin a Journey
Step 3: Use each Journey to consolidate each of the documents you develop for each of your key children
Each Journey guides you through every step of the planning cycle, with built-in coaching, AI support, and smart features to make documentation easier and more consistent.
📖 Read more: Guide to completing a Journey from start to end
Step 4: Copy & paste or download document content across to other platforms as needed
If your centre uses another platform for evidence storage or family sharing, you can easily reuse your work from Mana.
Option 1: Use Mana’s copy function to quickly transfer your writing into another platform.
Option 2: Next to the copy icon, click the Download icon to export your document as a PDF. You can then upload it to another system.
Step 5: Understand Mana's journey quality monitoring and why you might see 'falling behind' or 'overdue' in parts of Mana
Mana helps educators stay on track with each child’s learning.
If you notice a Journey marked as “Falling Behind” or tasks flagged as “Overdue”, don’t worry: this is intentional.These reminders help you identify where to focus next and keep documentation up to date.
📖 Read more: Understanding our quality monitoring feature in Mana Journeys
📖 Read more: Why do some journeys get flagged as falling behind
Need more help?
If you’re managing two systems side-by-side and want personalised support, we’re here to help!
Contact us through the
question mark icon in ManaEmail us at [email protected]
Pop-in to a weekly training session by booking here
Final thoughts
It’s completely normal for centres to use multiple systems for different purposes.
At Mana, our goal is to make your documentation and cycle of planning experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible. We like to say: if you use Instagram and TikTok, you can use Mana alongside other tools too!