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| Child care person in the spotlight
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Jenny Kable is a children's services advisor with Only About Children (Oac) she also runs the very popular blog, Let the Children Play, which has more than 20,000 subscribers and a Facebook following of 50,000. She is a real guru who shares and inspires with her amazing playscapes and learning environments.
What is your full name?
I am called Jennifer, Jenny, Jen or Mum - take your pick and I am 49.
Which centre do you work in? How many staff and children are in the centre?
As a children's services advisor with Oac, I have the pleasure and privilege of working with not just one, but nine of our campuses in Sydney's north and northern beaches, along with their inspiring Directors, educators and of course children.
What is your professional background and career experience?
A late bloomer career wise, I was 26 and a mature age student when I commenced my Bachelor of Early Childhood Education at Macquarie University in Sydney, having spent my early twenties working and travelling with Qantas. Despite the late start, once I began I knew that this was where my passion would lie.
Not long after graduating, I threw myself into the deep end by opening my own 38-place long day care centre in Surry Hills. The learning curve was steep, the hours were long and I was running on adrenaline for the first few years but I wouldn't have done it any differently.
Selling the business to spend time with my children when they were young, I thought I was stepping away from the profession for a while but discovered that "once a teacher always a teacher" as I served on the Board of Directors and the Education Committee headed up the marketing committee, and ran the playgroup at Kinma, a small progressive parent run school.
Kinma gave me the position of part time teacher in their 26 place mixed age group preschool and I loved every minute of the 5 years I spent learning alongside an amazing bunch of educators, children and families. It was during this time, nestled in the beautiful bushland of Terrey Hills, that my interest in outdoor play, outdoor playscapes and connecting children to the natural world was ignited and remains a key element of my personal philosophy of early childhood education today.
What attracted you to a career in early childhood education and care?
I honestly believe that I was born a teacher, drawn to the opportunity to help other people, and the ability to continually learn and grow.
Children are joyous, complicated, complex, challenging, funny, diverse, unexpected beings who are going through a period of such rapid growth and development that it should make our heads spin, and that makes every day different, exciting and incredibly rewarding.
The more experience I had in early childhood settings, the more aligned I find myself becoming with Anita Old's beautiful words reminding us of the importance of the work we do and what can happen when we see the world through the eyes of a child:
Children are miracles.
Believing that every child is a miracle can transform the way we design for children's care.
When we invite a miracle into our lives we prepare ourselves and the environment around us.
We may set out flowers or special offerings.
We may cleanse ourselves, the space, or our thoughts of everything but the love inside us.
We make it our job to create, with reverence and gratitude, a space that is worthy of a miracle!
Action follows thought.
We can choose to change.
We can choose to design spaces for miracles, not minimums.
What does a 'normal' day look like for you?
The beauty of my job as a children's services advisor is that there is no 'normal' day. Recently, I spent two days in Canberra designing outdoor play spaces at our Yarralumla and Bruce campuses; time in the office writing an educators guide for our exciting new Oac Grow Curriculum; worked with team at Cremorne campus planning the set up and resourcing of their new preschool rooms and visited Warriewood campus to work with the Director and team on writing their quality improvement plan.
Each week I aim to visit three - four campuses, collaborating with the Director on putting their vision and philosophy into practice. This might involve spending time in the rooms alongside room leaders; one on one time with the Director or mentoring a room leader on documenting the program.
What makes your organisation unique?
Oac is a growing organisation. Just this year we have seen the addition of five new campuses. In a profession where educators can become isolated in their own centres, at Oac we have a ready-made network of inspiring and innovative Directors and educators at our fingertips. Adults, like children, learn best in a social context of sharing ideas, information, passions and challenges and celebrating successes. An important aspect of my job is enabling educators to tap into our learning community and ignite their passions, motivation and enthusiasm by learning from, and with each other.
At Oac we firmly believe in the value of 'one team' or working together with all the people within the organisation and supporting and respecting each other in all avenues of our work and life. As a children's services advisor, I see one of my roles as supporting this process by connecting our teams, and creating opportunities to grow and learn as a community.
What are some of the advantages of working in the early childhood education and care sector?
With passion and motivation, a person working within the child care sector can take themselves wherever they want to go. It may be a room leader, a 2IC, a Director, an educational leader, a mentor or the owner of your own centre.
The challenge of continual improvement within an early childhood setting means that we can't sit on our laurels and say "that's that finished" or "this is the way we have always done it." We need to be constantly asking ourselves "What's next?" peeling back the layers to go deeper; being creative and innovative and thinking outside the box. This makes working in child care exciting, challenging and above all else, rewarding.
What are some of the biggest challenges facing the early childhood education and care sector?
The shortage of experienced and qualified educators, the copious amounts of documenting educators are required to do, the removal of reasonable risk and challenge in child care environments due in part to our "cotton wool" approach to child rearing and the struggle to be recognized as professionals rather than babysitters or child minders and low rates of pay when compared to other professions spring readily to mind.
How has your centre changed to deal with these challenges?
At Oac we are actively looking at ways to retain our dedicated team members through programs such as Oac Aspire, which is all about recognising and celebrating the exceptional efforts and contributions that team members make each and every day in educating and caring for children in our care. Oac Achieve is another initiative that allows managers to reward team members for going above and beyond caring and educating children.
Oac also offers opportunities for team members to grow professionally by formal study in the Early Childhood Industry and offers an excellent traineeship program for those wanting to start out in the early childhood profession.
How does the industry need to change to adapt to these challenges?
Wouldn't it be nice if there was an easy answer to this question?
I think in our culture, we spend far too much time racing – fast food, fast music, fast television, and we want fast results. We spend so much time focusing on a quick fix and not enough time considering the long term. When we look at education as a race, it also implies that there are winners and losers. If we are truly to make a greater impact on the necessary changes in education, it cannot be a race. It cannot be a competition; we all need to be in this together, we need to enjoy the process, and we need to be in it for the long haul.
We expend so much of our energy concentrating on the end product that we forget that it is not the product that is important, but the process that means so much more. We need to spend less time looking at the answers and more time asking the questions.
What advice would you offer someone thinking about a career or looking for a promotion in child care?
You are a teacher, but you are a learner first. Being informed, inspired and motivated by the experiences, research, writings and practices of others in the field and sharing your knowledge with your colleagues, families and community is the first step to reflecting on, and transforming your own practice and promoting early childhood education as a profession. A person who is willing to look for solutions to challenges – and there are always challenges – to show initiative, to try new things and to support their team members will always be a valuable member of any early childhood setting.
As teachers, one of our responsibilities is to advocate for children's right to learn through play. I took the leap into the blogoshere and created "Let the Children Play" as a platform to celebrate, and advocate the importance of play in the lives and education of our children by sharing my own experiences in a play-based preschool and providing inspiration, tips and information to help parents and teachers alike put the play back into childhood.
Since first pushing "publish" about five years ago, Let the Children Play has grown to almost 20 000 subscribers world wide, and has almost 55 000 followers on Facebook. The blogging community around the world has one thing in common - we are all very willing and eager to share our information and ideas. The "world wide blogo-sphere" is well respected as being a generous and supportive community and I believe it is testament to the passion and enthusiasm educators have for their chosen profession.
I encourage our teams not only to trust in their professional knowledge and experience to advocate for a play based program, but also to plug into the worlds of blogging and social media as avenues to share information, ask questions and continually reflect, learn and grow. I know that I am inspired and inspire others on a daily basis by connecting with hundreds of other people in the field that I would have never had the opportunity to connect with previously.
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