ELLEN FANNING:
Now I am now going to introduce four people to the stage who are going to participate in our panel discussion and they'll come on to the stage as I introduce them, give them a big round of applause. I think they have been volunteered for this panel discussion. Rachel Mackay is the state lead practice partner, Victorian Tasmania for Goodstart Early Learning.
Hi Rachel. If you want to go over to the class side, Sunil Kumari is the educational leader. Goodstart Early Learning at Clayton, welcome Sunil. Good day. Elfie Taylor is the Director of Services, Early Years at Our Place. Hi there. And Kristie Dowell is the educational leader at Gowrie Carlton Learning Precincts. And we thank them all very much for being here. And I'll start by telling you what I tell people on the Drum before we actually go to air. And I never tell sitting politicians, Just because I ask you a question doesn't mean you have to answer that question. There's nothing I can do about it if you don't. Yeah, don't tell anyone I told you that. So I've been thinking about what you're all going to say to us today, particularly reflecting on what we've heard from the keynote speakers, because I think it'll dovetail really nicely. Let's start with you, Rachel, and I'll ask the same thing of everybody. Just give us a sense of yourself, your role in the organisation and what you're bringing to us today.
RACHEL MACKAY:
Sure. So, hi, everyone. My name's Rachel and I am the lead practice partner for Goodstart Early Learning for VIC/TAS. So my role is focused on improving children's outcomes through high quality early learning programs across 180 centres, over 180 centres in Victoria, and an extra nine down in Tassie. I have a team of practice partners who work directly with educational leaders and early childhood teachers, really doing some coaching and mentoring capability, build that sort of stuff to help them reflect on their pedagogical practices.
ELLEN FANNING:
And we heard Iram say earlier that Goodstart is focused on learning in place, learning in the centre. Just explain that for me.
RACHEL MACKAY:
Yeah, absolutely. So we will talk a little bit more about ERS or as Iram explained earlier, we're moving to calling them clickers or QRS But yeah, that's a very big tool that we use in our practice in our centres.
ELLEN FANNING:
And I know I'm being naughty in not asking questions on the thing.
RACHEL MACKAY:
Don't go off script on me.
ELLEN FANNING:
I know and everybody else is sitting there going she said she's stay on script, but I did say there's nothing.. You can always just say no comment or something, If it gets truly terrible. But you guys are really serious about this stuff, right? You've put a lot of work into this over the last few years.
RACHEL MACKAY:
Yes, definitely. It was something that we rolled out across all of our services. A massive amount of work went into it to really build our understanding of what the scales could offer to our educational programs and hopefully see a real uplift across the whole network.
ELLEN FANNING:
OK, I'll stop torturing you. Thank you for that. Haha, Sunil, it's your turn. Tell me about Goodstart Early Learning at Clayton.
SUNIL KUMARI:
So my name is Sunil and I work at Goodstart Clayton as an educational leader and I'm also an early childhood teacher in a 3 to 5 year old kinder room, working alongside three other qualified teachers. So Goodstart Clayton is a 65 play centre that.. a long day care centre that has been serving a vast, culturally diverse community for past 19 years. At our service, we firmly believe that it takes a village to raise a child, and we strive for a strong community partnerships and build deep cultural connections so that we can provide quality care and the best educational outcomes for all our children. We also believe, like every child, is unique and competent learners. So we offer a warm, welcoming, supportive and inclusive learning environment that foster overall growth of the children across all developmental areas.
ELLEN FANNING:
Yeah. And that's very much what we've been hearing today, isn't it? Involving the community. Involving the family. How do you make kids where they are? And I won't torture you too much, I promise. But you know, when Iram said children are not born with equal opportunities and it's when they get into the educational setting that they get a second chance. That's very much what you guys feel, isn't it?
SUNIL KUMARI:
Yeah. So we are really strong in building, like connection with the families, building that trust and collaborate with the families and our local communities so that we can provide the high quality education.
ELLEN FANNING:
Yeah, and that's amazing to be doing that in that area and providing those kids with that opportunity. So, Elfie, tell me about Our Place. You're the director of services, early years there.
ELFIE TAYLOR:
Yeah, yeah. Hi. So I'm Elfie. So I've had a long career in early childhood. I was an educator for about 18 years in both long daycare and sessional kinder and I'm really passionate about early, early, early years, but also about particularly educational leadership. So I'm really excited to be here. And I've also worked with the Department of Education in various roles, but I've recently been appointed as Director of Services, Early Years with Our Place, and it's just an exciting opportunity. My role there is really to support sustainable implementation of high quality in the early sector for Our Place and be an advocate for a high quality, more broadly. So that's, yeah, an exciting opportunity. There are currently 10 Our Place sites across Victoria and we partner with the Victorian State Government to bring good relationships and facilitate partnerships across our thoughts. And our thoughts are on really disadvantaged areas working there, ensuring that children have the best outcomes that they deserve regardless of, as we talked about before, regardless of where they're born into or where they going to school or early learning, they deserve the best outcomes. So it's a holistic approach, including early years, the school sector and health and wellbeing. And the staff at Our Place, including myself, refer to us as the glue where we help facilitate the partnerships between the schools, local government, allied health providers, other services, the local community families to really bring the right support and services that that particular community need at the time that they need it.
ELLEN FANNING:
And just one extra question. One of the things that Aaron and I were talking about off stage was the need, how siloed we very easily become, and I'm sure it's not an Australian thing, but, you know, a federation is a tricky bit of business. You know, if you were starting again, you might not have done it. So how much is it all about joining up those services. Joining up all of it so that things are happening in silos?
ELFIE TAYLOR:
That's a large part of it, and that is where we're building that system, those relationships, that sustainable practice to take away those silos. So that does take a team, but it takes the team to have a shared vision. And that's really the role of Our Place to really create that shared vision, to realise that we might be in allied health, we might be in early learning, we might be in school education, but we're actually on the same vision, and that's best outcomes for children. So how do we do that together rather than have the gaps where we don't need the gaps, fill those gaps with the services that we have there?
ELLEN FANNING:
Yeah, and particularly as everybody's facing the same challenge, right? So the schools are crying out..
ELFIE TAYLOR:
That's right, yeah.
ELLEN FANNING:
..for more evidence based practice. Schools are crying out for, you know, rather than the individual feeling that they have to be the repository of all knowledge fighting against an inert system, you know, they're all paddling in that same direction as well. So the timing is really good for all of this, isn't it?
ELFIE TAYLOR:
Yeah, absolutely it is. It is the time to realise and to realise too, like we're in a room full of early childhood educational leaders, that it starts early, too, so that, you know, we need to get that collaboration right from the early start, from birth, all the way through to school. And how do we collaborate with all the partners in that school?
ELLEN FANNING:
Yeah, OK. Kristie, you are at the Gowrie Carlton Learning Precinct as an educational leader. Tell me about what you do there.
KRISTIE DOWELL:
I work for Gowrie Victoria. We are a not for profit early childhood education and care organisation. And we have six sites across Melbourne. I'm an educational leader at one of our services in Carlton and we share a site with Carlton Primary School. The city of Melbourne, maternal health nurses and Our Place also an Our Place site as well. The Our Place site is instrumental in, in the work that we do as well as the maternal health nurses and then also the team at Carlton Primary School. So we provide long daycare and sessional kindergarten for the people in our community. And yeah.
ELLEN FANNING:
And what does that mean? if somebody has done the six week health check on a child and then you've got the child in an early learning setting and then you've got a child in the primary, like what is the.. Is there an actual benefit to doing that? And can you say what that is?
KRISTIE DOWELL:
Yeah, the benefit is it cannot be underestimated because often we find even children who are on that very first part of the journey of being diagnosed with developmental delay or something else, it's a very vulnerable time for that family. And often they slip through the cracks. So...
ELLEN FANNING:
They're not cracks. No big chasms.
KRISTIE DOWELL:
No. ELLEN FANNING: They are chasms. They are chasms. They are chasms.
ELLEN FANNING:
That's like saying at the start of the Grand Canyon, mind the cracks.
KRISTIE DOWELL:
Yeah, exactly. And they disappear. Yeah, they disappear. Particularly if the information is very difficult for families to process. So then we can we can therefore, you know, touch base with the maternal health nurse. The family support workers from Our Place are just brilliant and understand their community much more than we do. So we can just have a conversation about have you seen this family around? You know, we haven't seen them for a week. We can access allied health professionals so that we can upskill our educators in strategies for the family and for the child so that that reciprocal, the reciprocal information is like key to holding the family at central to that, you know, that child's life.
ELLEN FANNING:
And just before we go, does everybody know where Carlton and Clayton are or do you want me to ask that question? You have to tell me. You know? It's just me that doesn't know.
OK, no worries. So, sorry about your microphone, Rachel. It just yeah, it just wasn't a good one. Tell me in some detail then, how you support educational leaders because you've been on this journey with Goodstart to say, "OK." How could we put the scaffolds in place to really emphasise this and do this to, you know, industry best standard. So what have you done to achieve that?
KRISTIE DOWELL:
Absolutely, I would love to tell you about that. So my team is part of the broader teaching and learning team at Woodstock. Very uncomfortable holding this microphone. So bear with me. So we provide around centre support through coaching and mentoring, like I said, of educational leaders and early childhood teachers. One of the main tools we've used to see a real improvement in our practice is the environmental rating scales that we spoke about before and Iram spoke about this morning, the real, I guess the focus of this was for educational leaders to have a tool and early childhood teachers to have a tool that allowed them to self-reflect on their environments, their interactions, the pedagogy that was evidence based as the whole day to day has been talking about evidence based practice. So as a large provider in particular, it's particularly important for us to make sure that the feedback our teams are getting, the expectations we're setting for our teams are consistent with what the evidence says about what high quality early learning looks like. And we were very lucky to work in partnership with Iram in that process. So the work of the practice partners in my team is really to empower the teams, help them to understand the scales and to utilise the data that they collect on the quality of their programs to consistently look for opportunities for continuous improvement through continual reflection. The fact that the environmental rating scales are so closely aligned to the national quality standards, the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development framework, it really helped for our educators to see that this is not additional work that we're asking of them. This is the core work of high quality early childhood education and care. So yep, we're still on the journey. There's still a lot of work to be done, but as I said, it's a continual process and we hope that that will be ongoing for a very long time. Just double check my notes.
ELLEN FANNING:
Go for it. You know, I'm going to torture you with my questions.
KRISTIE DOWELL:
I know, I am waiting for it.
ELLEN FANNING:
I didn't give any personal undertaking. I would stick to the script
(LAUGHS)
if I got that impression. I didn't get it from me.
KRISTIE DOWELL:
I was misled. Sorry. Like I said the ERS tools are closely aligned to our proof learning frameworks and the national quality standards. So it really helped us to kind of align our focus. It allowed educators to dive more deeply into what some of the elements of the national quality standard were and obviously learning outcomes from both the EYLF and the Victorian framework. And it really just helped us to ensure that educators were continually using evidence rather than just, you know, general feedback or opinions from visitors to the centre, really was based on evidence to improve practice. So my team, along with the coaches that are available through school readiness funding, there's a plug for the VIC Government guys. We're able to really support our teams to, you know, further support the educational leaders in rolling this out across our network. And I'm really excited to have Sunil here from Clayton to talk a little bit about what that looked like in her centre specifically, because I think Clayton was a great example of a team that took those resources that were available to them, took the coaching and training opportunities at every chance they got. And it really did have a dramatic impact on the quality of their programs and outcomes for children. So.
ELLEN FANNING:
Do you want to talk to that now, Sunil? Would that make some sense to you, to tell us how you use that?
SUNIL KUMARI:
Yeah. So to provide the high quality education and support learning outcomes of all children as well as to reflect and evaluate our own pedagogy. So we moved from using only adult observations to improve our planning cycle with evidence informed tools so that along with our observational matters. So in our centre we used different tools like everybody knows to support and improve our learning, our teaching strategies and improve our pedagogical practices. And we use SSTEW to assess the quality of all five of the child domains. And last year we also introduced MOVERS, which is the movement environment rating scale, to assess children's physical learning experiences as well as the pedagogy and the environmental quality of those physical experiences. And there's another tool they started last year as well, ACC, which is All Children Communicate. So it's an early communication assessment tool for the children and for us as a teacher to plan and create the language-rich environment that you're talking. And yeah, and to collaborate with the families and like what are teaching strategies that we can implement at the centre as well as at the home as well. So we work together to support the children's early communication. While like MOVERS and ACC are still new and we are still continuing to integrate these tools into our teaching practices. ECERS and SSTEW was incorporated and embedded in our practice since 2019. When our organisation launched this tool in 2019, we had a trained ERS observer who visited our centre for the assessment that visits outcome and the feedback from the observer really supported and assisted the educators to critically reflect on the learning environment and scaffold a clear pathway for the educators towards measurable practice improvements in the service. So from then onwards we started using ECERS and SSTEW, the tools to assess the quality of our education that we are providing at Goodstart Clayton to reflect on what we are doing well, what is not working, and brainstorming the ideas like how we can improve our practices to reach and maintain the high standards like education standards possible.
ELLEN FANNING:
And is it possible to say and again, I know I have, I'm asking for anecdote, right? Can you see that making a difference to individual children? If you assess them and their communication ability, you come up with an issue that you might have sensed, but now you have firm evidence for exactly what the challenges for that child. Can you think of an example of when that's made a difference to an individual child? So as we all know, pedagogy is developed and informed when we continually reflect on the impact. So, during this the whole journey, the critical reflection was the key to evaluate how ECERS and SSTEW was making the difference in our centre. So yeah, like.. So after embedding the ECERS and SSTEW we could see there was a continuity in practices and we can see there was a common language that we could use all across the rooms. Yes.
SUNIL KUMARI:
So previously our planning cycle was just know, just about knowing the child's learning, but with these tools, after embedding these tools our planning cycle was informed with teaching learning, teacher learning lens as well. So we could see like these tools helped us to improve our teaching strategies and help us to how to improve on our interactions. So the interactions like the SSTEW, like how does the interactions between the educators and the children became enriched and they were more responsive. That included like children's ideas and thoughts and like where they were generally valued and solved So I'll give you an example from are kinder room. So one of our kinder child found a snail in our vegie patch outside in the garden when were having outdoor play so that, just that sparked the open ended discussion between the educators and the children and engaging the children in the sustained conversation to extend the thinking and learning of snails. So questions like what do the snails like to eat or where do they live and whether or not they're good for our garden. So like and also and the throw the reflective practice conversation it helps us to think about like that this was a, this learning experience was focused on STEM and the learning they were keen to explore was about the habitats of the snail. So this opportunity provided the educator and I'll link it to the ECERS. So there's an item in the ECERS like item 12B, which talks about the science activities like living processes and the world around us. And this led the educator to extend the child's learning and from that conversation with the children, it helped the educator to put the children's voice in the planning cycle as well, and incorporating them in setting up the learning experiences. So previously we would have just like, you know, thought about like, it's just they're just learning about snails But after like with the evidence informed tools, we could actually focus on the children voices and how to extend their curiosities. So this has really helped us to build like, you know, the learning strategies and how to use them in our planning cycle to make the learning experiences more meaningful.
ELLEN FANNING:
Could we have a round of applause for that? That is absolutely wonderful. If you found out your child (CROSSTALK).
SUNIL KUMARI:
So following on from that, like the habitat like, you know, the project, so we could see like it was clear for us as an educator that we need to improve on how we can plan and support the children in the natural environment because these days not really common, like, you know, because busy life.
ELLEN FANNING:
Yeah.
SUNIL KUMARI:
So, and also how to use the natural materials in our learning and learning environments as well instead of the plastic toys that dictate the play of the children and introducing more natural environments in the spaces to fit in the different learning areas.
ELLEN FANNING:
And that's drawing together what you're almost telling us about giving children what they need when they need it. What Jane was talking about, about child centred. But it also takes us back to what Uncle Bill was saying at the very beginning, which is children love place and stories and nature and always have, and that sense of connection and if learning is growing out of that, which is what he was saying to us at the very beginning of today, then you have a rich and meaningful environment. So that's a wonderful. Thank you so much for telling me that. Telling us all that. OK, let's turn to you. So you're providing, in a sense, a bit of the glue in providing the educational leadership. So just to explain the difference to me about what you're doing, that's slightly different to Goodstart and how it is that you're supporting educational leadership.
ELFIE TAYLOR:
Yeah, I probably preface that with, our place isn't a service provider, so we, we sit alongside services and partner with services in schools and allied health and other stakeholders at a local place based approach. So and our role in that is setting up foundations for lifelong learning. So starting, you know, obviously pre-birth actually and right through to adult education. And the glue is that that partnership is offering sometimes the resources, sometimes it's the people, sometimes it's the space a large part of what our place does is offer the research and the evidence from the sites themselves, the data that's collected from the sites to inform the programs or the educational programs that are happening in that service. So there's various aspects. A large part of Our place too is advocating and really promoting the infrastructure as well around that. So it's a one door approach, one door to access early years, one door to access schools, one door to access any service you need. And so we work really hard on that. And that being the glue for what really sustains a community and the school being that that hub of that community. But the whole concept or the whole approach to Our Place is evidenced by that and strongly evidence based. And it's continually being research using tools as well in the early years to really promote high quality in the early years.
Yeah, a strong backbone of what Our Place does. What Our Place offers, the sites from some practical resources. So we have community facilitators on the ten sites across Victoria that are actually there to implement the evidence based strategies of engaging the community to, you know, a lot of people in those particular communities. We're talking about very highly disadvantaged communities, can have a great experience with education. So it is just that warm and friendly face, which doesn't sound like rocket science, but it is and evidence based strategy and we have partnership managers on each site that really promote and lead the implementation of the evidence strategies. And then like I said, back at Central, we have a research and evaluation team that provide that research and data are an example of that is the continuity of learning work that we do in Our Place. So working with a site like Carlton and Kristie's team really working on the continuum of learning that's happening within the early years through to the school. So I know at Carlton, for example, they're having fortnightly meetings and the way we're talking about pedagogy and they're talking about curriculum and practices across the two sites, early learning services is highly engaged with the playgroup and this continuity of learning was happening, what's happening with the families and the naught to threes by the time they come to kinders as well. So there's a lot of that, is the glue and I guess if you like the analogy of the glue, you know, if you think about PVA, it's white and you sprinkle it everywhere. Eventually it's clear and it's no longer seen. And that's obviously the aim that we're you know, everything is set up and the structures are there and we're no longer saying that the systems become just embedded within that school.
ELLEN FANNING:
So that effective teaching.. You know, there's a quote I read in the Productivity Commission. And again, it relates to schools, but it might be interesting for you to hear. So this was the productivity reflecting on school education in Australia. It has become increasingly difficult to make effective teaching practices the automatic standard in Australian schools. Instead, results rely too heavily on the skills and commitment of individual teachers to overcome systemic problems. So I guess that's part of the story that you're telling us today of how do you affect the system, to make change, right? Because you have, I mean, you're 11,000 short for where you need to be in Victoria for this ambition of two years of preschool education. But you have the skill group of people in the system already. How do you make the systemic changes to ensure that that they that they have the opportunity to develop their individual practice? Kristie, let's talk to you. what tools does Gowrie use to collect evidence in the service
(CROSSTALK) like that I asked it off the sheet.
KRISTIE DOWELL:
Thank you so much. ELLEN FANNING: No worries. I do appreciate it. ELLEN FANNING: Not at all. But it does link to what you're saying in terms of the skill of the teams that we work with. But at Gowrie, we decide on which evidence based tools to use by bringing it back to our core values and the purpose that we have. So for our work with children, we collect information for families and allied health professionals and also from the really close relationships that educators build with the children. And then we collate that information and write the formative assessment at the beginning of the year, and then a summative assessment towards the end of the year. And both of those tools support the learning journey at that particular stage of the, I guess, the evidence or the data collection, we choose to use face to face meetings and paper based communication techniques because of our underlying value placed on relationships. So at that point it's all about people. And Gowrie is very .. has a significant investment in relationships with people. Then we sort of move on to the understanding that skilled and nuanced interactions between children and adults that are rich with language have lifelong implications for children's educational outcomes, and the research supports this. So we move on to a class tool which is an evidence based tool, and it assesses the frequency and quality of interactions between children and adults. And the data then is we use the data to look for areas of educator strengths and then to build capacity in educators, because we understand that teaching through interactions is the most powerful form of early childhood education. So, yeah. So it's really value based evidence tools.
ELLEN FANNING:
And challenges when you're supporting the team to connect with the evidence. And I think Jane gave us a great oversight of that. You know? Wo has enough time?
KRISTIE DOWELL:
Yeah, yeah.
ELLEN FANNING:
Talk to that one for me.
KRISTIE DOWELL:
Well, I mean, the tools that we choose to use at Gowrie, the class tool is the overall assessment of educator. So it's for the adults, basically. And then we use another tool called 3A, which is about strategies for parents and for educators about how to utilise and increase the quality of education and content within interactions. And the challenge there is it's about behaviour change of individuals. So it's not actually a time challenge. It's about the fact that as adults, we all have a very fairly set way of operation in the world and to make a conscious shift towards interactions with more content, you actually have to have a level of persistence, practice, awkwardness, and that's probably a big challenge. We also have a huge amount of information presented to us on a daily basis as early childhood professionals. So often you do a very high quality PD and then you'll get back into your workplace and it sort of just gets washed away in the tide of additional information. So keeping that purpose and that focus can be difficult at times.
ELLEN FANNING:
You may not have a view on this, but when you're almost talking about that New South Wales study, remember where you started in February and went through to May and then assessed the kids in November and got the reflections of educators family and observations of children. She was kind of talking about the positive reflection of those people who'd been through that PD, I guess because they've had such a structured amount of time and sort of time out to, to, to get that work under way.
KRISTIE DOWELL:
Yeah, there's a big thinking component expected of early childhood educators and that's very difficult when our day is broken up into bite sized chunks. So often we look at things like, you know, this is going off track a little bit, but we look at things like hours allocated for planning and we might see an across the week allocation of hours for planning, but that could be broken up depending on staffing needs, Who's away that day, what's happening in the room. So we don't have good chunks of time for this thinking work and that can be a barrier to making long term sustained change.
ELLEN FANNING:
And then just on the positive side, not that that's not positive, that's real. But what are the observations of your educators, you know, when they're putting themselves in that awkward place and doing that juggle, what are they getting out of it professionally?
KRISTIE DOWELL:
I think the shift in children is really obvious and really significant. So with a shift in interaction, you can change the trajectory of a child's behaviour, both in the moment and over a certain amount of time, particularly for children who have difficult behaviour challenges or issues that require sustained thoughtful interactions. So the rewards are huge because you're not just surviving the moment, you're actually seeing this incredible unfolding of a child's potential. And as an organisation, we're very supported to keep reflecting on that and keep revisiting those strategies so that that's the outcome that we achieve.
ELLEN FANNING:
And Sunil, can I turn to you and maybe think about one key challenge when supporting the team to connect with the evidence. What would you say that is?
SUNIL KUMARI:
So as an educational leader like biggest challenge for us was to bring the entire team on the board in the process because as we said, it was like paper, like it's more additional work, like more documentation and extra pressure on the team. So and ensuring that they comprehend, the overall concept and the purpose behind like implementing the evidence based tools into the practice. So and they understand like why are we doing it? So to overcome that challenge, we tried to like, we tried three strategies. So we, first thing we did was take it as a slow process. Instead of just giving them and here we go and we work together as a team to unpack the ECERS and SSTEW resources in our monthly staff meeting. It was like we picked one ECERS or SSTEW item for each monthly staff meeting and we reflected on it together to understand what it means and how does it look like in our centre? What are we already doing from those scales and what we need to work on? The second thing we did at our centre, we collaborate using the strength based approach. So rather than like looking at the educators weaknesses, we aim to perceive individual holistically and explore what the strengths, the interest and their abilities So, use these strengths to improve our overall teaching practice. So, for example, we have one of the room leaders, she was instrumental in setting up the learning spaces with using like open ended and natural resources. So she will share her information or knowledge during our staff meeting, like she'll do a PowerPoint presentation for the whole team. So why is it important to use the open ended or natural materials in the learning spaces? How does it help children to achieve their learning outcomes and yeah. So this brings the consistency throughout our whole service. And yeah, like yeah, and improve the like the whole centre practices. So the third thing we did was like performance appraisals like to support educators pedagogy and professional practice. So educational leader and educators will collaborate together to draw a biannual coaching plan that covers educator strengths, what still they want, like to achieve. So take it as a .. The educator take the ownership in decision making. Like we don't tell them like what skill they need to improve. They will reflect on themselves. They will take the ownership in decision making and they will decide what skill they want to improve on or work on. And when we implemented like ECERS and SSTEW at our service our educators participated in the PD's and trainings to understand what actually it means and how we can use it, implement it, and embedded it in our practice more effectively. So currently, 70 to 80% of our educators are trained in ECERS and SSTEW they are confident to use the items and yeah, in their learning environments and practices.
ELLEN FANNING:
We have a minute left one and I give 30 seconds to Rachel and Alfie. Rachel, do you want to go first? Do you have any thoughts running all this out? I mean that is a determined approach that's being taken that says this is about your professional journey. Yes. It's about outcomes for community and all the rest of it. But we're investing in people here in a respectful way over time. And we're serious about it. I mean, do you see differences in your retention? Do you see differences in staff satisfaction and all the rest of that that goes with that?
RACHEL MACKAY:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that the mission that we're on, this process really has helped educators to see us as investing back in them and about the pedagogy and practice over time. And I think the relationship piece can't be understated. It's the, you know, we are lucky to be a part of a big network. I know that's not true of everyone in this room, that it's hard when you're in a standalone centre. But I do think that it's a real strength of our approach is that it's about the relationships with people. There's always someone there to coach, mentor, reflect with, and it's that collaboration that makes all of the programs stronger eventually.
ELLEN FANNING:
And final thoughts, Elfie, on this, particularly the sense of, you know, there are many ways to do this and that and that approaching it from a community point of view and drawing a community to get that idea of one door rather than, oh, you'll need to go ten doors down that way and then three up that way.
ELFIE TAYLOR:
Yeah, well Today's theme's been amazing around that the evidence based, but the evidence based information you have that is contextual on your community, it's really important that you understand your community and then having a program that meets the needs of your community and sharing your information, your data with the services that are interacting with you, whether you're in Our Place or not. There's a responsibility there to work with your local schools and other community members to be on the one vision for the children in your service. Yeah.
ELLEN FANNING:
This has been a wonderful panel. Please thank the panellists some so much. Rachel, Sunil, Alfie and Kristie, thank you so much for that. That was some really wonderful I had to stop myself doing that the whole way through, thinking about what wonderful things you do for kids, giving them every opportunity in life. It's such a wonderful vocation and profession that you all have.
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