Spotlight on Hawthorn Early Years: ‘Our goal is to be A&R-ready at all times’

Hawthorn Early Years (HEY) is a community-based long day care and kindergarten service with an overall Exceeding rating, and a member of Community Child Care Association (CCC). CCC recently met with HEY team members Brooke Eastwood, Nadia Burra, Carolyn Smart and Rina Papageorgiou to find out how they achieved the top rating, and their tips for other services striving to do the same. 

Can you tell us a bit about your service? 

We provide education and care across nine classrooms and take pride in providing above regulatory ratios – we have a team of sixty-eight educators and staff, with up to 150 children attending in a day. Currently, we have approximately 213 children enrolled and 180 families. HEY has been operating for eleven years! 

How do you prepare for A&R visits? 

Our goal is to be A&R-ready at all times… How this might look at our service is through active working groups with all team members – including teaching team educators, leadership groups and kitchen staff – observational visits from our educational leaders, and open communication and visual aids such as flowcharts. This tends to establish a feedback and reflective-oriented mindset so all our educators are aware of the processes and expectations to support ongoing learning.

We also have an in-depth induction day that supports all educators (including casual staff) through extensive training modules that reflect our service’s core values, and we offer regular opportunities to touch base during probation to revisit and reflect on practice and pedagogy.

How has your service philosophy supported you to achieve an overall Exceeding rating? 

Our philosophy drives most of what we do. It is also linked with our strategic plan, ensuring we are implementing practices that reflect our philosophy and vision. We ensure that we are working alongside the children and that the environment we provide is encouraging children to explore, learn through play and build upon their ideas and wonderings. A lot of what this looks like in practice is respectful care and inquiry-based learning. Currently, we are excited to be working with external facilitators and specialists to ensure we are running an adaptive high quality educational program. 

How do staff balance and prioritise quality areas? 

We find there isn’t really a ‘balance’ per se, as the quality areas are embedded in our practice. To bring these types of discussions and ways of thinking, we have regular community of practice meetings, room meetings and leadership meetings on a monthly or term basis, to be constantly reflective and engaging in the quality areas. We also have QIP meetings where we encourage educators (including those outside of leadership roles) to be present and invite a child representative of each classroom to ensure we can document and be inclusive of a range of voices and perspectives. 

What are you most proud of at HEY? 

There is no such thing as a perfect centre! We are extremely proud of all of our staff, especially their responsiveness to innovation. We are really open to trying new and different ways of doing things, whether it’s documentation, practices, strategies, culture or philosophies. This feeds our commitment to the children and continuous improvement and upskilling, which we see as our responsibility not only for our service but for the education sector. 

We are also really proud of the basic way we treat children. Children are at the heart of everything we do and this is very evident in our practices, programs, family partnerships, interactions and classrooms. 

What are your tips for other services striving to achieve an overall Exceeding rating?

The A&R process is an opportunity for meaningful reflection. It is important that educator voices are captured too – not just leadership. We believe that cultivating collaboration is vital, especially to capture everyone’s voices. Also to have real data behind what you’re saying – this evidence is there to support you and by having real data, all staff can easily see what the standards should look like in practice.

HEY is a member of the Community Child Care Association (CCC). This article was originally published in CCC’s member magazine, Roundtable, and has been reshared here with permission. Find out more about CCC membership here.