Goodstart corporate
A "deadly” week of celebration for National Reconciliation Week
Goodstart and its 16,000 early learning educators, teachers and other professionals including cooks,...
Living by the principle of “more money, more mission” is fundamental to our long-term financial sustainability. It’s intrinsic to our ability to deliver ongoing, positive social impact for Australia’s children and their life-long outcomes.
Adopting new and more agile ways of working is an important enabler for us to help realise our 2025 ambitions for our children, families and communities. We are excited about the future and the opportunities this presents.
Safety is part of being a Goodstarter. It’s this mindset that is the cornerstone of our success in ensuring we create safe working environments for our children and our people to grow and thrive.
Goodstart is a catalyst of positive change in the early years in Australia, bringing local and international academics in early childhood together to collaborate and translate evidence into practice to make the biggest impact to Australia’s children.
We are using our unique strengths every day to improve the lives of children and families – within Goodstart and beyond. That’s why I love belonging to Goodstart.
Cultivating a workplace where Goodstarters are curious and inspired to keep learning, amplifies their potential, brings our vision to life and delivers better outcomes for children.
Gains won in early childhood accumulate; disadvantage compounds
They take everyday responsibility for leading our organisation’s strategic direction – our roadmap for the ongoing delivery of social impact – to give Australia’s children the best possible start in life.
Fostering high quality early learning experiences within every centre, creating a great place to work for our people and ensuring great experiences for our families and children in our care – are all in a day’s work for our executive team.
Our Chief Executive Officer
PhD; LLB; BSW; BA
Our CEO has dedicated her career to advancing early intervention and education for all Australia’s children.
Ros is a leading Australian education executive who has spent the last 25 years working and partnering around the idea that early intervention and education are the keys to addressing intergenerational disadvantage. Since starting her career as a frontline social worker in child protection, Ros has worked across government and with partners in the community and research sectors to maximise understanding, investment and effective interventions for children and families. Before joining Goodstart, Ros was the Deputy Secretary for the Australian Government Department of Education and former First Assistant Secretary, Social Policy Division of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
With a strong background in public policy as both a leader and policy analyst, in addition to consultancy experience, Ros brings a deep understanding of issues affecting children, families and the sector, benefitting Goodstart’s vision and purpose and ongoing focus to deliver on our strategic goals. In designing solutions, Ros is an advocate of partnering closely with families, educators and early learning services who know and understand children the best. With four children of her own, she believes that every person is different and differently capable, and that everyone has the right to a great start in life.
Our Deputy Chief Executive Officer
BBus; FCPA; MAICD
Jeff provides both a strategic and day-to-day focus over our operational functions.
Jeff provides both a strategic and day-to-day focus over our operational functions and the delivery of our strategic goals, purpose and vision. Jeff joined Goodstart in 2014 as the Chief Financial Officer bringing many years of experience in senior commercial finance roles across not-for-profit, private and public sectors. During his tenure at Goodstart, Jeff has secured our financial sustainability to help us achieve maximum social impact – with our social purpose investments increasing from $12.5M to more than $47.3M in 2022. Jeff has been instrumental in leading our centre growth strategy and executing sector-leading capital projects, to helping establish our charitable cause the Early Learning Fund with Uniting (NSW/ACT) and The Benevolent Society, and overseeing the strategy and implementation of our child safeguarding framework.
Jeff became the Chief Operating Officer role in early 2019 and led the transformation of a new way of working at Goodstart, placing centres at the centre of everything we do. In early 2023 Jeff was appointed Deputy CEO, a role to which he brings his strong leadership focus to create a thriving organisation where all children and Goodstarters feel a strong sense of belonging.
Our Social Impact General Manager
BEd; BBus
Myra oversees Goodstart's social impact strategy, policy, measurement, research and evaluation and social inclusion programs and initiatives such as EChO (Enhancing Children’s Outcomes) and Family Connections. Myra and her team amplify the delivery of Goodstart’s social purpose and impact across the country.
Myra brings significant experience to Goodstart, as a driving force of social policy and reform that has helped transform and improve the quality of life of Australians. She has been the senior social policy advisor to two Australian prime ministers and has worked across early childhood education and care, schools, community services and health policy at state and national levels. Myra’s career began as a teacher in the northern suburbs of Brisbane. She is deeply committed to supporting those Goodstarters working closest with children and is a passionate believer in the power of early learning to transform children’s lives. Myra co-wrote Preschool – Two Years are Better Than One with Dr Stacey Fox at the Mitchell Institute which aimed to help compel Australia to pursue a national commitment to ensuring all three-year-olds have access to high-quality early childhood education by offering a second year of preschool. Myra has also been a Goodstart mum, with her children attending Goodstart Kedron.
Our Chief Safety Officer
BA (Psychology; Sociology); GAICD
Ensuring safety is wrapped around everything we do at Goodstart is driven by Matthew – who harnesses his extensive safety expertise and behavioural psychology and change management to embed a behaviour-based safety culture alongside his team of safety, health and wellbeing professionals.
Matthew Little joins Goodstart with deep expertise in health and safety, having worked for global organisations in a range of sectors including power manufacturing, engineering, retail, construction and entertainment. By combining his commercial and strategic skills with a hands-on approach to leadership – Matthew takes pride in supporting organisations to enhance their safety performance through cultural safety and engagement. He believes that every leader has a responsibility to improve safety performance one conversation at a time, by being present and employing high quality engagement skills. At Goodstart, Matthew takes great pride in ensuring Goodstart’s safety commitment is lived and breathed across its centre network nationally. He maintains a strong and unwavering focus on our people and their wellbeing with this deep understanding of its critical nature and connection to health, safety and engagement outcomes for our people, children, families and communities.
Our Chief Culture Officer
BA; Dip TDD; Dip VET
Keeping pace with the digital age, organisational transformation and employee capability build, are all in a day’s work for Jason. Jason is about supporting the here and now and the future – ensuring workplace learning is woven across everything we do. By laying the foundations of how we learn, lead and work, Jason and his team are fostering a strong Goodstart culture - intrinsic to a thriving organisation.
Jason is a highly accomplished learning and development executive who joined Goodstart in 2020, bringing more than 20 years’ experience in transforming organisations’ leadership and learning approaches to be more strategic and agile to achieve high-impact outcomes. Jason has led major learning transformations for a number of large and complex organisations including Australian Unity, Australian School of Applied Management, the National Excellence in School Leadership Initiative and the University of Melbourne. He is recognised for creating and embedding best and next practice approaches to build strong learning cultures. His experience spans education, strategy, change management, leadership and culture development, partnerships and large-scale capability uplift initiatives.
Our Pedagogy and Practice General Manager
BEd; FCCT
Sue leads a range of work and initiatives to bring our ambition of becoming a world leader in early years pedagogy and practice to life. This sees Sue and her colleagues on any given day working closely with educators in our centres, the sector, academics and national and international thought leaders to translate and embed early learning evidence into practice.
Sue is an international thought leader in early childhood pedagogy and OBE (Order of the British Empire). Prior to joining Goodstart, Sue was the Head of Early Learning at Action for Children in the United Kingdom (UK). As a complement to her role at Action for Children, Sue provided specialist advisory services on early years and childcare policy and quality to the UK Government and relevant Ministers. In her early career, Sue spent 14 years as a teacher, including three years in the British School, Athens, and six years as Early Years and Infant Lead in the British School in Manila, Philippines. She has also been a school principal and held the regulatory role of lead inspector for the Early Years Foundation Stage (the UK version of Australia’s Early Years Learning Framework).
Our General Manager of Network Operations
PostGradCert (Business & Marketing)
With a strong background in all areas of business operations – marketing, logistics to procurement and finance – Paul has a deep understanding of what is needed to support teams and centres to be their best to deliver great children’s outcomes.
Paul is a highly accomplished executive with 40 years’ experience working for major national organisations as well as 20 years of board experience and strong operational and leadership expertise as the State Manager for Goodstart’s Victoria and Tasmania region – overseeing more than 170 Goodstart centres. Paul has a deep understanding of managing diverse organisational footprints and people and an unrelenting focus for Goodstart’s vision and purpose. He is highly passionate about people and making a difference in the communities we all live in – benefiting Goodstart communities and beyond as a volunteer and fundraiser for several charities across the nation.
Our Chief Orchestration Officer
BSc – (Mathematics & Physics)
As our Chief Orchestration Officer, Lynne is supporting the creation of an organisation where rapid and sustainable transformation is our new normal, enabling Goodstart’s short and longer-term ambitions.
Lynne has over 20 years of experience in operations and business transformation, working globally for Amex, Dell and IBM. Before joining Goodstart, Lynne was Vice President of Services and Infrastructure Transformation at American Express Global Business Travel. Lynne has a strong track record of leading complex change across workforces, requiring process redesign, implementation of new technologies, workforce capability rebuild, and new ways of team-based problem solving. At Goodstart, Lynne oversees organisational transformation, ensuring leadership and resources are optimised to realise Goodstart’s 2025 ambitions.
Goodstart corporate
Goodstart corporate
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