Glen Education Centre Road

A Community of Learning 

Glen Centre Road Kindergarten Educators

Glen Centre Road Kindergarten was assessed against the National Quality Standard (NQS) in 2021 and achieved a rating of exceeding the standard in all seven areas.  We are proud of our strengths and continuously strive towards providing the best possible early childhood education and care for each and every child and family in our community.

Our Quality Improvement Plan (QIP) helps us to self-assess and document our strengths in delivering quality education and care and to recognise and plan future areas for improvement.   The QIP also documents the ways our exceeding practice in each area is embedded in our service operations and informed by critical reflection.  It also details how we ensure, what we do is shaped by meaningful engagement with families, and/or community.

At Glen Centre Road Kindergarten, we know children learn best through play.  Our dedicated, qualified team of Educators are focused on providing an innovative emergent educational program that stimulates children to find a love and excitement of learning.  Each child is supported and challenged to grow and learn at their own pace in a safe, warm, caring and most importantly, fun environment.  Our Educators work in partnership with families to ensure the kindergarten years are a positive learning experience that nurture each child.  As a part of our local community, we regularly seek connections outside of our kindergarten gates to enrich children’s experiences.  Glen Education is our Early Years Manager (EYM) and is integral to the successful operation of the kindergarten.

Here are some examples of our strengths and exceeding practices at Glen Centre Road Kindergarten across the seven areas of the NQS.

Quality Area 1: Educational Program and Practice

Learning another language helps children to improve their overall literacy ability and understanding of how language works. The children at Glen Centre Road Kindergarten have participated in our Mandarin program every Wednesday and Thursday from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm. The children are engaged in a range of activities purposefully planned by the team and Mandarin teacher Maggie, including singing songs, reading books, playing games, and learning about Chinese culture. There are Mandarin signs displayed around the centre, including numbers, colours, the routine words and the songs we have learnt.

Maggie also seeks opportunities during daily routine to engage children in learning Mandarin. For example, Maggie sits down with the children during morning tea and talks about different kind of fruit in Mandarin. When there is a cultural festival, such as Chinese New Year, Maggie introduces the culture in a range of texts and prepares different hands-on activities to for children to celebrate the festival together. The children are learning Mandarin through an intentional approach, where Maggie joins in their play and speak Mandarin along the way. For example, when the children are waiting for a turn to get on a swing, Maggie engages children in practising counting one to ten in Mandarin. The Mandarin program is organised in ways that maximise opportunities for children’s learning.

- Maggie Hua, Early Childhood Language Teacher

Quality Area 2:  Children’s Health and Safety

At Glen Centre Road Kindergarten, we believe it is important for children to engage in risky and challenging experiences.  Risky play is thrilling and exciting play for the children to explore heights, speeds, different kinds of tools and much more. It helps to push the children out of their comfort zone.

Risky play is a natural part of children's play and it provides opportunities for the children to experience more challenges to the body without compromising their safety. Risky play helps to develop children’s self-confidence, resilience, and risk management skills. In the outdoor space we encourage them to climb rope ladders and big frames, and experience speed such as on the swings as well as disappearing games such as hide and seek. We also encourage the children to jump from heights, adjusting the height of planks age-appropriately. The children can jump onto the blue mats arranged near to the jumping frame. It helps to develop, not only their physical skills but also their confidence, independence, problem-solving skills, and risk assessment abilities. Educators are supervising close to them to make sure they are safe and giving support to achieve their goals.

In the mud patch area, we provide the children with metal shovels as well as plastic ones. The metal shovels are stronger and heavier with a sharper blade that dig deeper into the dirt, providing children with real tools and an opportunity for more physical challenge to use their whole body and think carefully about their movements around others. In the outdoor kitchen area, they have an opportunity to handle real household utensils. They can carry the mud and water in big containers and move it from one place to another. In the indoor space, the children can experience real glass jars, ceramic dishes, plates, saucers, scissors, and knives for spreading cooking experiences and cutting vegetables.

- Remya Kumar, Early Childhood Educator

Quality Area 3: Physical Environment 

National Quality Standard Area 3 focuses on the physical environment in which children are educated and cared for.  We use natural wooden furniture and resources for sustainability and provide children with chances to get close to nature. The cabinets with children’s names in the foyer invite and welcome children to walk into the kindergarten. It promotes children’s independence and sense of wellbeing by putting belongings into their own lockers.

Inside the room, child-size furniture engages children in activities and the light and household furniture provide a welcoming and stimulating family atmosphere. The visibility and accessibility of space layout supply scenes of daily life and provision of resources, such as toys, books, and art materials that encourage exploration, creativity, and imagination. The resources are age-appropriate, open-ended, and reflect the diversity of children’s backgrounds.

Outdoor environments provide children with a safe and natural world and engage them in physical activities. The space is accessible, secure, open and offers a diversity of natural and cultural elements and materials. Vegetable beds encourage children to look after flowers and grow vegetables themselves, teach children to be responsible for the environment they live in.

Regular cleaning, maintenance, repair, and checking to ensure that it is safe, hygienic, and well-maintained for children’s use, and to prevent deterioration and hazards.

- Olivia Yi, Early Childhood Educator

Quality Area 4: Staffing Arrangements

Management, educators and staff at Glen Centre Road Kindergarten always work together with mutual respect and collaboratively, and challenge and learn from each other, recognising each other’s strengths and skills.

As we move from a ‘group’ teaching program (e.g. Blue, Red and Yellow groups) towards “whole service” and team-teaching model where children attend kindergarten across multiple days and different teachers, staff will need to collaborate and communicate professionally and effectively within the service. We have always done this in the past within our ‘groups’. This change means teachers and educators across the whole service will be required to get together so they can plan effectively, coordinate programs and evaluate each child’s learning. This means teachers and educators will be working together even more than they have before to ensure that our new model of teaching continues to set the standard of Exceeding in All Areas that the staff achieved in 2021.

- Jacquie Chilvers, Early Childhood Teacher

Quality Area 5:  Relationships with Children

Glen Centre Road Kindergarten has a strong connection to the families and children that attend the service, with many families sending multiple children through the kindergarten over the years. A large reason for this is the strong and trusting relationships educators and teachers develop with the children; these relationships allow children to feel safe, secure, confident and included which allows them to learn more easily.

Each child is seen as individual, with their own likes, dislikes, strengths and goals that guide educators in planning learning opportunities and experiences, allowing educators to support each child to maximise their potential. Our goal is to support all children to thrive, and this is achieved through the development and maintenance of respectful and equitable relationships with each child.

We support children to learn to be self-sufficient and independent as much as possible. We assist them to learn the skills required to do a wide range of things as diverse as opening packets of food, asking for help, and how to communicate effectively with their peers. These skills are supported through the warm, respectful, and light-hearted approach of the educators and teachers who meet each child where they are at, building on the skills each child already has. Some children require support to say goodbye to their caregiver in the morning - educators support children to wave goodbye at the “goodbye window” and help them to settle in with a book, activity of choice, or even just a cuddle on the couch, comforting them until they are ready to explore and learn. This helps children to develop self-regulation skills, and to understand that they are still surrounded by people who care for them until their grownups return at the end of the day.

Through songs, stories, jokes, small group interactions, whole group discussions, laughter, and respect for each member of the kinder, relationships with children are developed, supported, and maintained. These relationships are strong and meaningful, allowing children to feel a sense of security and belonging so that they are free to engage in play and learning within the kinder.

- Tori Cooper, Early Childhood Educator

Quality Area 6: Collaborative Partnerships

At Glen Centre Road Kindergarten, we know that families are the first and most important educators of their children and that when we work together, we are able to achieve quality outcomes.

The expertise of families is actively sought and valued during orientation, settling in and on an ongoing basis.  We love having families involved as much as possible and encourage parent participation and contribution in sharing skills or talents, their home languages, culture and traditions, reading stories, helping with cooking experiences or accompanying us on excursions.

Not all families look the same, and so at our kinder, we prefer to focus on our children’s families in a more holistic way.  One of the ways we do this is by having a Family Celebration each term, where we encourage family members to come along on the day and spend some time with their child. All are welcome and we love to have grandparents, aunts, uncles etc too.

We have long established and effective community relationships, particularly with our local primary schools.  These partnerships include reciprocal visits with foundation teachers, visits to school libraries, classrooms and playgrounds as well as invitations to be involved in other aspects of school life.  The value of these relationships is affirmed through children’s positive experiences in the transition from kinder to school.

- Megan Miller, Early Childhood Teacher

Quality Area 7: Governance and Leadership

We are very fortunate at Glen Centre Road Kindergarten to be part of Glen Education, our EYM (Early Years Management organisation), and their amazing management and leadership team. With the wonderful leadership and business skills, and the large team of professional Staff, we always feel supported in striving to maintain and deliver a high-quality learning environment and program for everyone.  The EYM team relieve the stress of the everyday management of policies, governance and health and safety within our environment and support each member of our team in every way they can.

Glen Education also provide us with information and support about opportunities like professional development of staff, grant opportunities, and keeping our service current, for example, multi-age programs and the Best Start government initiative providing 2 days of funded kindergarten to 3-year-old children in 2024.

Glen Education also provides access to funding and support to ensure an inclusive learning environment where individual learning needs are met by upgrading spaces, resourcing equipment, creating learning and maintaining updated policy and procedures to ensure each service can deliver a high-quality educational program.

- Rochelle Ancora, Early Childhood Educator