Centre Directors play an integral role in each centre, influencing the child, family and employee experience as well as continuously driving better outcomes and benchmarks around quality early learning.
Goodstart is continuing to invest in our Centre Directors’ leadership and coaching skills. Our national Lead2Learn program was developed last year with support from Jason Renshaw, Chief earning Officer and has two key streams - inquiry-driven leadership, and coaching skills.
As part of the inquiry-based stream, we support our Centre Directors through a quarterly process where they identify a key challenge or a key area of curiosity in their own context, and develop ideas to improve or fix something, or do something even better.
Through the inquiry process, they identify key questions, explore and research, set up experiments, and measure the outcomes. They then have the opportunity to collaborate with other Goodstart Centre Directors around Australia to compare what they’re doing, what’s working, what’s not, and to share ideas and advice. They also critically reflect and align their inquiry work to the National Quality Standards and our Goodstart Foundations for the Future.
We engage in national sharing of this through weekly Lunch & Learn2Lead webinars, where a Centre Director talks about what they investigated, the key questions they asked, how they experimented with the idea, and what they learned. A Goodstart Centre Director from WA recently shared how she grew her centre's community profile, without actually leaving the centre. By using technology and social media she was able to build strong connections with other community groups, local government representatives, Indigenous groups. The results have been fantastic and the opportunity for collaboration has increased.
Another Goodstart Centre Director from Queensland had workforce challenges - finding it harder and harder to attract the right people to her team. She collaborated with the local university and other groups to hold an education session on how to use art to support children’s learning. She discovered that by hosting a unique event and using LinkedIn to promote it she was able to attract higher quality candidates than other social media channels. The event was well attended by educators and teachers from across Brisbane. As a result, she has since hired a number of people and has built a profile for the centre as a great place to work and to develop ECEC skills and careers.
These webinars attract hundreds of Goodstart Centre Directors and centre support staff from across Australia but they are also recorded for those who can’t tune in live.
This is a great example of how Goodstart is investing in learning and development to support its people to make a difference.
If you'd like to find out more about career opportunities at Goodstart visit our careers page.