Alfred Road Kindergarten

A beautiful, close knit, community kinder! The children are at the core of everything the excellent teaching team does. My children have loved... A beautiful, close knit, community kinder! The children are at the core of everything the excellent teaching team does. My children have loved attending over the past few years - ARK has given them a solid foundation to start their education, we can’t thank the kindergarten enough! Read more

Amanda Alexopoulos

Nov, 2023

I really hope things have changed since we had our experiences 6 years ago. The parent-centric sterile environment and vastly unused "... I really hope things have changed since we had our experiences 6 years ago. The parent-centric sterile environment and vastly unused " garden" was all for show for parents, whilst children would be consistently ignored by underqualified staff who were not supported by the kinder, with no professional development offered by the committee at any stage. I'd witness teachers stand around inactively supervising children rather than teaching. Staring at the ceiling even. As educators ourselves, we were shocked at the toxic working environment that saw staff bored , uninspired and unsupported. Staff and committee were actually proud of having one incursion a year, and there were no excursions at all at the time. More focus on end result products that were supposedly made by the kids, to show to parents, than on the actual experience had by the children. Little encouragement for children to explore ( or move on beyond parallel play) , who were if anything, held back from exploring unless it was preplanned and sterile. Little to no reporting or feedback. When questioned why some children had up to 3 times more documentation/feedback than others, (in particular for the kids with high profile parents), I had a defensive projecting response from a worker... who I had seen, many times, sitting around texting on her phone whilst apparently teaching kids, ignoring many social learning opportunities happening in front of her. Parents were apathetic and always " too busy". It was hard to garner volunteering, so its no wonder that problems were easily dismissed and ignored. As long as they got a clean kid and a cute picture or book full of photos at the end of the day, they assumed everything was hunky dory. Any events clearly had parent satisfaction as priority, and not child focused. Fundraising money was spent on the committee to have lovely dinners for their meetings. Meanwhile, said committee couldn't find the funds or time to pick up a phone and organize any interactive education incursions or excursions. The one committee "meeting" I attended could have single handedly funded every kinder group to go on an excursion. Being on the committee seemed to be for little more than to show status. I quickly quit said committee, and moved my child to another kinder as soon as I had the opportunity. All the dodgy fund handling, staff inexperience and parent apathy aside, it was definitely NOT a space were kids would come out covered in muck and bruises (without some present to take home to show mummy why she should make a tax deductible donation to the kinder), because they were too busy getting dirty exploring their world. I really hope it has changed for the better though, and that all the empty talk turned into action. Each kinder has a different philosophy& pedagogical approach and style, which is fine, but any lack of support and PD for staff and funds mismanagement, is never something to be comfortable with, no matter what philosophy is being adhered to. Read more

Hania Trzaskowski

Aug, 2023