What is ‘best practice’ in childcare?

For children who regularly receive care in a childcare centre it is important they are provided with a consistent and stable environment at a centre with a best practice philosophy at its heart.

The team at Child’s Play ELC constantly strive to achieve, develop and deliver new and innovative best practices by ensuring a nurturing and caring environment is provided for your child’s care at all times.

High priority is given to establishing consistent and familiar relationships between children and caregivers as the relationship a child has with their educator shapes how they see the world and may affect all areas of their development.

What is ‘best practice’?

Best practice can be described as providing the very best in all aspects of the child’s care, wellbeing, learning and development at every available opportunity whilst in residence at our centres.

Best practice focus areas

Our experience and expertise in working with children supports the following key areas of best practice we focus on here at the Child’s Play ELC Tarneit & Torquay centres.

Consistency in all areas of childcare

Our aim is to ensure your children are in the care of the same group of educators each day.

Research has shown having familiar educators as providers of continuous care and responsibility of a smaller number of children within the wider group for an extended time period is highly favourable to both parents and children alike.

By having familiar educators maintain consistent contact with the same children, the educators develop  nurturing relationship with your child.  The educators understand the children’s routines, have knowledge of the child’s medical history and/or allergies, and learns the child’s individual likes and dislikes.

The child learns to build strong relationships by seeing the same faces and this is an important aspect in helping your child to begin in care.

In providing consistency of care as a best practice, this also supports you as parents by building trust and confidence in the educators who are taking care of your child.

In the unexpected event the primary educator is unable to care for your child due to illness or leave, we look at ways to ensure the same familiar faces are in each room every day.

We also roster educator shifts a month in advance so your child knows who will be greeting them in the mornings and having playtime with them while they are waiting for mum and/or dad to pick them up.

Incursions within childcare

Incursions play an important role in the programs we offer all our children, from the very youngest right through to kindergarten age.   We believe it is important to provide children with a variety of different opportunities for learning.

Our incursion programs focus on a variety of developmental areas and interests including musical exploration, physical development and language development opportunities such as Chinese.

As children get older and more independent, we also provide external excursions to enhance learning and develop understanding of our local community and environment for further learning and development for your child.

These excursions allow your child to explore and investigate new worlds and as best practice we continually look at how we can incorporate excursions into our day to day learning.

 

Beyond the basic legal requirements

Best practice means striving beyond delivering the basic legal requirements that are required to own and run a childcare centre.  We constantly critically reflecting to review and update our qualifications, our programs, educator to child ratio and our first aid requirements.

To deliver a quality program for your child, our educators are provided with additional programming time than we are legally required to.  This gives our educators ample time to create optimal learning environments, explore various developmental areas, to communicate with parents about their child via developmental summaries and observations.

We also pride ourselves on exceeding our First Aid qualification requirements, all educators have their first aid and CPR qualifications. This ensures parents can be confident our centre staff have excellent skills in handling first aid scenarios should they arise.  The centre team are competently and fully trained in dealing with any possible first-aid emergencies.

The basic level requirement of the educator to child ratio is met, however we strive wherever possible to have additional educators.  This supports safer environments and more meaningful interactions are possible with the children and supporting their social and emotional wellbeing, whilst also developing their academic needs and preparing them for school.

Best practice is our cornerstone

Best practice is the cornerstone of the Child’s Play ELC philosophy.  The team are passionate in giving your child a highly supportive and engaging environment in all aspects of care for their healthy development at our centres. Our philosophy is simple “EVERY CHILD MATTERS!!!”

If you have any questions about your child’s care and would like to learn more about our best practice philosophy, our team would love to speak with you.