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Dennis Blythin
Director, Primary OSHCare, Sydney (NSW)
I graduated from Leeds University with a BSc Hons in Mechanical Engineering in 1984 and knew pretty much then that I was never going to be a good engineer. It just didn’t interest me enough. However, it did provide me with the opportunity to learn project management and business skills that would serve me well in later life. Twenty years later, in 2004 I found myself as general manager of an engineering construction company. I had all the trappings of corporate success, but I really wanted to run my own business rather than work for other people. My partner, Suzanne, had been working in the education sector for 20 years and she suggested we set up a consultancy to advise Outside School Hours Services on how to meet the newly instigated NCAC guidelines for the OSHC sector. I countered with the proposition that we could set up our own business to do that ourselves. Suzanne would handle the childcare aspects of the service and I would handle the business side of things. And so the concept of Primary OSHCare was born.
From the outset we were determined to change the way things were done in the sector. Our assessment at the time was that the sector was extremely fragmented. Many services were being operated by voluntary committees who tended to view OSH care as ‘child minding’ rather than a real opportunity to positively impact on the lives of children and their families. Also, the educators were drastically undervalued and underappreciated.
In July 2004 we opened our first service at Dulwich Hill Primary School. This was quickly followed by services in Bondi, Gordon and Ashfield. It was all a bit chaotic and, as we acquired more services, it became clear to me that we had to get the expertise residing in Suzanne’s head down on paper. I’m a great believer in systems. In fact, I would go so far as to say that no organisation can successfully function without a clearly articulated and codified set of processes, along with an equally clearly written vision for what the organisation is about and why it exists. It never ceases to amaze me how many businesses fail to do this—and consequently fail! It wasn’t easy, but we wrote down every aspect of operating an OSHC service. We also wrote a clear set of goals for the business and we precisely defined the values that underpin our whole reason for existence. This is a critical and powerful undertaking that allowed us to understand and deliver consistent highest quality care at every service we operated. And it’s a never-ending task. We are constantly reviewing and revising how we do things as we gain more experience.
Having a set of written procedures and values is one thing, but they are of no use if nobody knows about them or adheres to them. Our job as leaders is to make these available to all our staff, train them in how to use them and constantly reinforce their implementation. We do this through a combination of cutting-edge IT systems, induction, training and, probably most importantly, leading by example. We have high expectations of people who choose to work with us. We have deliberately built a culture of excellence, which all our employees must buy into. The net result is that we are an OSHC provider in 36 schools and cater for 3500 children each week. In our most recent assessments by the regulatory authority we have been awarded 15 ‘Exceeding the Standards’ ratings. We have raised the bar in the sector and significantly improved the experience of all stakeholders who come into contact with us—children, families, school communities, regulators and our staff.
There is a persistent idea among some people that there is something inherently wrong or immoral about running OSH care as a business: that it is exploiting the children and their families. I couldn’t disagree more strongly. While there are, no doubt, some unscrupulous operators, I firmly believe that sound financial management has to underpin any operation if it is to be sustainable in the long term. It is possible to provide excellence without exploitation. We don’t charge high fees to families and we don’t skimp on resources or underpay any staff. We just constantly make sure everything we do is the best we can do. As a consequence, we now have a very successful business that is demonstrably exceeding all the standards. As we continue to grow, we are able to broaden our influence in ways we never dreamed of at the start. We are able to support local communities and charities. We are able to influence policy makers and regulators. We are able to provide children with opportunities and experiences that all too many simply do not get.
Suzanne and I sit at the top of a vibrant, dynamic organisation that genuinely improves people’s lives and hopefully contributes to improving the sector as a whole. It’s very exciting … and we are only just getting going!
Published 2017
Jane Bourne
Chief Executive Officer, Gowrie (QLD)
I have such a long history in EC and if I had enough time I would tell you all about it. It is very much a moment of ‘are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Once upon a time …’ Hopefully you as a reader will be able to do the same in 40 years’ time!
I wrote an article for Reflections magazine in 2002 and stated then that I am still learning about management and EC—I will probably never stop. And I haven’t. That was 15 years ago. Now I am the CEO of Lady Gowrie Queensland and it is one of the most amazing jobs one could have. If someone had told me 15 years ago I would be working with Lady Gowrie, I would have said ‘I wish!’
My wish came true. The best thing about this position as I look back over the years is what I have accomplished to be here. To earn my place. My whole career has been an apprenticeship for this position. An apprenticeship for understanding strategic planning and social entrepreneurship.
Looking back, there was never any doubt that I would be a teacher and I worked hard to become one. I worked in England and learnt so much from four and a half year olds who lived in a low socio-economic area in Birmingham. I thought I could change the world with these children, all 42 of them; however, it takes a lot more than a 22-year-old first-year teacher. They taught me resilience, capture the moment, hard work and unconditional love. They taught me that every moment is precious if you want to know about learning, about life. They also taught me that I was not a saviour, I was in their moment. Good advice, which has never left me.
Thirty years ago I landed on Australian shores and went to work as a kindergarten director/teacher in Brisbane. I worked eight wonderful years teaching in this community sector, where staff, families and their children are all part of a very large community and as a teacher I worked tirelessly to earn the community respect and become a pivotal part of the daily lives.
I learnt something very personal in these years. I learnt that when I worked with the children, we became one team, one experience of many (if you understand). No one, not even families, fully understand the work we all do together to make everyone’s day meaningful, joyful, inspirational, and full of trust and absolute learning. Learning about oneself, each other and the world around us, our environment and beyond. This is a pretty powerful statement to make; however, it was what I was blessed with. I am still blessed as I meet many of the same children now in their late twenties and early thirties. We laugh, we reminisce and we sing songs and recite old rhymes. This is what teaching is about. This is what we are about! There are friendships and networks made, opportunities for understanding better, what more can be done, what more I can do.
I had the opportunity in the next 15 years to work as a senior manager/leader in three management organisations. It was exciting and challenging and what was best was I could advocate for the right for children to learn at an early age—to be inspired—and I could do the same for the educators and teachers.
I worked hard to learn about the business of ‘for-profit’ childcare, the good and the not so good. I travelled all through Australia, to every major city, meeting people and making sure that all educators and teachers in the services knew me, were able to speak with me and had the opportunity to tell me their stories. I was a teacher just like them. I was also a leader who continued to test the social, cultural and environmental goals. I became an influencer (although I didn’t realise this). So, for 15 years I learnt a new profession while wielding my lifelong goal to support children in their learning.
The one sure thing about my positions was that I never forgot who I was and my professional judgment and beliefs would never be compromised. A saying that has stayed with me is, ‘you never know when you are entertaining an angel’. Everyone I met was and is important to me. They have been and are pivotal in my role then and now. Opportunities are far easier to make real if there are others by your side who listen, often speak the same language or who want to learn what EC is really all about. So then the position of CEO for Lady Gowrie Queensland was advertised.
It’s a ‘not-for-profit’ organisation who believes without question or compromise in early learning and care, working in the community for 76 years. As the stars align, this organisation has grown rapidly throughout Queensland in the past six years. We work in many different sectors: family day care, long day care, an early year’s centre and many community kindergartens. We work in the cities of Queensland and in remote areas such as Blackall, Eidsvold and Thursday Island.
Sustainability is of great importance to our success. People are important to our success, from our Board of Management, who has faith in what we do, to our employees and affiliated services, who trust our judgment and acknowledge that we work hard and advocate for social outcomes and the right of education of young children and families. What we get out of this is pride in our organisation and pride in one another. It would be a cliché to call Lady Gowrie Queensland a family affair; however, we gather community wherever it may be to believe in the rights of the family and the education of our children. This is now exactly where I want to be and where I will work to make a success out of a wonderful organisation, never forgetting that I have a role to play in influencing government and speaking up for our educators. Someone once said, ‘Teaching is the greatest Act of Optimism’. What a truly wonderful sector to be a part of—no matter which part.
Published 2017
Agnes Fox
Director, Thursday Island Child Care Centre (TICCC), Thursday Island (Queensland)
Making sure that our centre has a solid plan for the future is one of the most important things for me in my role as Director of this service. Foremost, it is essential to demonstrate best practice in the management of the service to meet the requirements of the service agreement guidelines for funding. We are required by DEEWR to have a service workplan which must be submitted to enable release of our annual financial grant from the government. Our yearly plan is aligned to this. It helps us to identify a set of priority goals and ensures that we are meeting our own expectations in terms of the service philosophy, but also includes the requirements under the National Law and Regulations for children’s services and the National Quality Standard. Our plan is quite detailed and sets out our targets and goals, who is responsible for delivering on the goals and the time frame for achieving them. We review our plan every quarter to make sure we are staying on-task.
The plan is a good way to communicate to our licensee—the local council—what we aim to achieve and to open up conversations with them about the sorts of resources we require to achieve the goals. It is an important communication tool for setting out how the council can best support us, and because it is presented professionally they are more likely to take it seriously. As a staff we talk about the plan early in the new year so we can plan for the children’s program and any professional development that we might need. The plan allows for collaborative input and consultation with Group Leaders (monthly meetings) where we look at the Quality Standards and check progress on any goals that may have potential barriers. Group leaders bring one issue of concern and the group discusses these and decides on further action. The plan also helps us to complete our quality improvement plan (QIP) and ensure that we are constantly focusing on future improvements to the centre.
At TICCC we believe in providing the highest quality of education and care. A plan is critical to sustain high-quality care. In reviewing the plan regularly we are mindful of our Mission of Sharing, Caring and Learning. The sharing of skills and knowledge, the quality caring and nurturing of children and the ongoing learning by the children, their family and the educators.
The plan keeps us focused on just how we can achieve this mission. Currently we are focusing on the National Quality Standard with a particular focus on leadership. One of our biggest challenges on TI is recruiting and retaining qualified staff. Our plan helped us to highlight this area of concern and forced us to investigate ways to increase our number of qualified staff. We gained access to funding and resources under the Indigenous Remote Area Strategy. This strategy recognises that remote communities do not a have a pool of qualified professionals immediately available to fill vacancies as they occur. Specifically, we find it difficult to find staff with group leader experience. Retention of qualified staff in any service is critical in sustaining quality of care. We have included in our plans over recent years a goal to become directly involved in training early childhood staff for these leadership positions. One of our first strategies within this was to ensure that all staff are at the least enrolled in a Certificate III in Children’s Services. We established a partnership with the local high school and introduced the Certificate II to school students so they can begin their study at school. We also offer work experience placements for these students at our centre. This has led to job opportunities and possible career pathways in children’s services and further education for many students who might otherwise not study beyond high school.
As a further part of this plan, I attained my Certificate IV in Training and Assessment and together with a local Registered Training Organisation (RTO), we can now deliver both the Certificate III Traineeship and the Diploma directly to our staff. We can also access the relevant funding to offer traineeships. I have been released from my role of Director for two days each week to teach these trainees and mentor them in the workplace. This has also provided the opportunity for one of the senior staff to move into the Acting Director’s role two days per week. This means that another person is being up-skilled and mentored in this important leadership role. The idea of this training partnership came from our annual plan. After much discussion about the difficulties we were having with recruiting qualified staff we investigated ways to resolve the problem. It is a lot of hard work but worth it if we can have high-quality staff working with our children.
Kate Ryan
Director, Halifax Street Children’s Centre & Preschool, Adelaide (South Australia)
I started my career in early childhood working as a family day care provider in the mid-eighties. I moved from there to work as an unqualified childcare worker in a casual position in LDC in a country town in South Australia. I enjoyed what I was doing and could see the benefits of getting a qualification so I initially studied for my Advanced Certificate in Child Care and later I went off to Uni SA to do a Bachelor of Teaching: Early Childhood Education. Soon after graduating I worked as leader in the 3–5 room in a new childcare centre in metropolitan Adelaide and was soon promoted to Assistant Director and periods of Acting Director and Director. I then moved to Lady Gowrie Adelaide as a Project Officer and Trainer before taking up this position as Director at Halifax Street in March 2006.
Halifax Street was in much need of rejuvenation when I arrived. Utilisation of childcare and sessional preschool was low and financial viability was a concern. Staff involvement in professional learning was mostly based around one-off sessions and regulatory training. We needed to build staff morale, staff knowledge and engage families and the community in rebuilding the centre as a high-quality early childhood setting.
I had been actively involved with a practitioner research project that had been initiated by DECS (Department of Education and Community Services) in SA and my involvement in Early Childhood Australia really helped me to keep a focus on ‘the big picture’—what research tells us makes a difference for children. I also had developed a particular interest in early childhood curriculum and planning and was keen to move our focus to children’s learning, rather than on keeping children safe and happy (of course, this is still important but shouldn’t be the dominant driver). I involved staff in professional learning focused on practitioner research that enabled them to build long-term networks with other educators in our region (LDC, preschools and schools) and to engage with current research.
I worked with the management committee, sharing research information about the impact of teachers in early childhood settings. We took some risks, first employing more staff than minimum requirements, then more qualified staff, and increased the teaching position from .5 to full time. Parents began to see the difference in our practices, our reputation grew and utilisation improved to full capacity and has remained there for some time. With day-to-day operations going well we had some time to invest in thinking big picture about improvement (continuous). I guess this was also influenced by our involvement in QIAS and later our involvement in DECS’ quality improvement system and the National Quality Standard (NQS). Both systems require involvement of all stakeholders in planning for and implementing and reviewing practices to seek improvement.
The centre had a philosophy statement that was acceptable, but could have been just as relevant for any centre. The leadership group (myself and our team leaders) had participated in some long-term professional learning with our DECS Regional Leaders around leadership. As part of this learning we began to see the importance of developing a shared vision to help us in developing our strategic plan for the future. We started by identifying our key stakeholders and asked them to identify what they considered the most important things about our service—what they wanted to keep, what they might change etc. We used tools such as Wordle to identify key words and concepts.
We researched vision statements of other educational sites and corporations that we knew of and this inspired us to have a go at writing a vision statement for our setting. We sent this draft to the management/parent group for comment. This stimulated a huge discussion among the parents about what they felt was missing—the conversations ranged from big concepts to reactions to specific wording. The management/parent group sent back comments and their suggested modifications to the leadership group. This back and forwards of suggestions continued for about three months. Each time there was a change in the vision statement it was displayed in the hallway and in the staff room and stakeholders were invited to comment. Gradually the two groups began to get closer together in what they wanted in the vision statement. It took some compromise on behalf of both groups. However, both had a really strong understanding of what the other group was thinking and why they were thinking it.
After five months each stakeholder group voted to accept the following vision, accepting that it isn’t perfect but will help in guiding the development of underpinning principles and in guiding our decision- making in the centre.
‘Working towards positive futures for our children’: Our educators are dedicated to creating best practice learning programs in a nurturing environment which will contribute to strong foundations and positive futures for our children.
Once the vision statement had been agreed on we plastered it everywhere, in newsletters, on the front door, in our play rooms and in our program documentation. We made games of trying to remember it. As we had groups working on different projects and groups working on policy reviews we asked them to keep the vision in mind. We were then able to do our strategic plan—called our Site Plan. We involved everyone who was interested to be a part of contributing and we had a particular interest in involving the children. To do this staff and parents observed children’s involvement in play and analysed their involvement to assist in planning both the day-to-day program and longer-term plans (e.g. environments, routines). With older children we have always involved children in planning discussions each morning about what they would like to do. When we were putting the vision statement together we asked the preschool children to draw and discuss what they liked about Halifax St and what they would like to see more of at the centre.
The plan guides our involvement in professional learning, staffing decisions, budgeting and educational programs. The plan, our continuous data gathering and analysis of the previous year’s plan are documented in the annual report and presented at the AGM. Copies of the report are available for parents and community members. The leadership group and management committee regularly review the plan and take action to ensure goals are met. This keeps our plan alive and keeps us focused on the big picture—positive futures for our children.