Transcript for Hobsons Bay City Council

The Hobsons Bay City Council provides a range of children’s services including:

  • two long day care centres catering for 207 children
  • an occasional care centre with 51 children registered
  • a family day care service with 466 children registered

The children’s services team supports 50 playgroups with network meetings and training opportunities. They also support the 30 families that attend specialist playgroups.

Sharon McGrath is the Coordinator of Children’s Services at Hobsons Bay City Council. She leads a team of early childhood professionals who deliver and coordinate early childhood education and care services. Karen Carter is the team leader of the family day care service.

At Hobsons Bay Children’s Services, we’ve developed professional relationships in working together. We support each other in our services and our planning. In building professional relationships, we recognise each other’s strengths and expertise. We believe it takes time and we’ve made time to share information and develop trust.

Often professional relationships and conversations arenot valued but we understand that they’re important in developing high quality community work.

What do you see as the benefits of professional relationships?

Through our networking, we’ve strengthened our connections. We understand how each service works with children and families, sothat

  • We share information to build a continuity of learning and development for children
  • Weset ease for families in transitioning across services, and
  • We further our own professional growth.

How are you implementing the Victorian Framework?

To implement the Victorian Framework, each team read the document and started by discussing the Practice Principles.

We’re conducting a mapping process around the Practice Principles to identify our strengths and challenges. By having many ongoing conversations, we’re giving ourselves many opportunities to affirm or challenge our practices.

Our children’s services team have been able to identify with the Collaborative Practice Principle because of the groundwork we’veput into our partnerships with one another. Our children’s services are working together to support the families and children of Hobsons Bay.

One example of the way we support families and children is the relationships that we have with playgroups. Playgroups are a great way for families with young children to come into contact with others going through similar experiences and also helps to ease the isolation that can come with having young children. We find that families can be gently introduced to community, health and support services while also being involved in informal discussions about evidence-based practices that support children’s learning and development.

Another important service for families is home-based childcare, Family Day Care which is coordinated and supported by the Children Services team. The family day care team leader, Karen Carter, considers an important part of her role is to facilitate growing thinking professionals within the Family Day Care service. The coordination unit provides professional development and further study opportunities for Family Day Care professionals.

What recent differences have you noticed in the Family Day Care Service?

Some of the great differences we found in our educators since doing further study is on our home visits. Our home visits show some clear changes and some great development that’s happening within our environments. All through our home visits our educators have happy children, throughout our visits they’re happy, they’re engaged, they’re playing but now the difference has been that the educators are engaging more with the children, they’re listening to children and children are requesting things that they might be extending on their interests.

The implementation of the Victorian Framework this year has provided added stimulus for us to challenge ourselves to strengthen our professional relationships within our council-run services and with other early childhood services within the Hobsons Bay.

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