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Interview:
Brendan McAssey
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| CEO - Only About Children
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This week meet Brendan McAssey the CEO and Founder of child care success story Only About Children.
What is your role within Only About Children, what does this entail and what is your professional background?
I'm Founder and CEO of Only About Children, a role I have been in for the past 12 years. As CEO, I am constantly looking at the future of child care in Australia and ensuring that we constantly upgrade our offering to provide the absolute best in early education and care. Following a career in finance, the opportunity arose to move wholly into the child care sector, an area I value as crucial to each individual child and family that chooses child care. Bringing my vision, passion and experience to creating a high quality and financially sustainable model of childcare has been rewarding and continues to inspire and drive me.
Please tell me a little about Oac's background and history.
Over the past 12 years, Oac has grown to become one of Australia's leading child care providers, which a current portfolio of 31 centres in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. We have concentrated our efforts on delivering quality 21st century child care that includes educational and developmental focus to over 4,000 families. We have added sight, hearing and speech screening to our list of services through the Oac Health team and now have a staff of over 600 employees across our admin office and campuses.
What are Oac's primary objectives/goals within Australia's early childhood education and care sector?
Simply put, to be recognized as the world leader in the provision of early childhood education and development. We are constantly striving for excellence in delivering 21st century child care to ensure all children are encouraged to reach their full potential through providing a relevant educational curriculum, called Oac Grow and an allied health service focusing on the development of children through screening of sight, speech and hearing at milestone ages.
How is Oac working to achieve those goals?
By constantly innovating in all areas in the space. As a private operator, we are able to dedicate significant funds and resources to developing initiatives that will help us deliver best practices, environments and experiences for children and our Educators. We also have a central administration office that handles customer relations, operations, human resources, training and finance for all 31 campuses, allowing our Directors to focus on their role as pedagogical leader and as well as overseeing effective service management. Our structural model allows Directors to access technical specialists in the areas of education, development, human resources and finance – this enables Directors to focus on children, families and teams at all times with the key priority to provide outstanding education and care.
What are Oac's biggest challenges now?
Our greatest challenge is identifying new sites to bring into the Oac portfolio. Our aim is to ensure any new Campus sites meet the criteria that we believe provide outstanding education and care.
In addition, one of the key challenges of the entire sector is to ensure that the right staff are selected into critical roles. Staff retention is a recognised issue– one that we are not immune to. To combat this we have initiated a number of professional development, staff recognition and incentive programs. Oac's deliberate and extensive investment in these areas is proving positive in attracting and retaining quality staff. Oac has extensive leadership development programs, Educator traineeship programs and is rolling out in 2014 a large professional practice program that will ensure Oac educators understand critical educator delivery areas focused on early childhood education, development and environments.
What do you anticipate those challenges will be in the future?
Meeting the evolving needs of families as workforce participation profiles change, as well as coping with potential variations to the funding of childcare as the government considers the funding model once the Productivity Commission report is tabled.
Why has early childhood education and care become such a hot topic in Australia over the last few years?
Childhood education has always attracted great interest but Australians are ever more knowledgeable about the benefits of early education and discerning about quality. At the same time, there has been an increase in the demand for child care as a result of more women re-entering the workforce earlier after giving birth and accessibility is an ongoing issue affecting a large population.
What in your opinion are the biggest challenges facing the Australian sector now?
Quality, flexibility and staffing are big challenges, as is growth in demand for services that better meet the needs of today's families. We strongly believe that childcare needs to innovate to meet the needs of 21st children.
How is Australia's early childhood education and care sector changing?
Holistic services are in high demand where choice is an option and the expectations of childcare are ever growing. Uncertainty exists around the national delivery, expectation and resourcing of our sector. Over the past 5 years we have seen an increased focus on ensuring the sector raises the qualification expectations of those individuals that are working in the field.
How will these changes impact child care professionals?
At Oac, we believe that to improve the quality outcomes then staff must have certain level of qualifications to be able to work with young children. This does place pressure on the industry to be able to attract and retain qualified staff and as a result companies are required to be innovative in how they attract staff and develop them.
What, in your opinion, are the most important factors to ensure Australia has a world-class early childhood education system?
By ensuring that early education moves with the times, and leads the way forward through innovation and awareness of all the elements that affect a child's early development and subsequent long term success. We must not ignore the importance of investment in research that supports innovation.
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