KU Macquarie Fields Preschool has been awarded the Excellent rating
Date awarded: 12 August 2022
Valid until: 11 August 2025
KU – Macquarie Fields Preschool https://www.ku.com.au/childcare/centres/kumacquariefields has been awarded the Excellent rating by the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA), the highest rating a service can achieve under the National Quality Framework.
The New South Wales based service was recognised for its:
- collaborative partnerships with professional, community or research organisations
- inclusive partnerships with children and families
- practice and environments that enhance children’s learning and growth.
Examples of exceptional practice at the service include:
- The service has made a commitment to regularly adapt and modify its physical learning environment to ensure it supports the highly diverse and complex needs and inclusion of its local community’s families and children. The physical environment is critically reflected upon regularly to ensure it is a safe and calm space where children can practice self-regulation and social-emotional skills.
- Individual Education Plans are created in consultation with each family to co-design a shared vision for the growth and development of each child. Learning trajectories and shared goals are established and meetings with internal and external specialists and inclusion agencies are scheduled to support each child’s development, learning and wellbeing.
- The service embeds the Marte Meo (On One’s Own Strength) approach to enable educators and families to notice and analyse children’s strengths and communication cues.
- The service utilises video as a tool to strengthen partnerships and relationships with families by offering strength-based video clips to showcase children’s competence and engagement within the physical learning environment. This allows families to recognise the importance of play-based learning and to adopt similar pedagogical strategies within their homes to improve each child’s outcomes.
- The service established a Healthy Eating program in response to a community-wide need. The program shares information about nutrition, safe food storage, purchasing food, ingredients, health ratings, budgeting and the importance of involving children in buying groceries and preparing meals. Family cooking lessons and the distribution of contemporary and current research, resources and handouts that highlight nutrition, recipes, and foodbank locations are incorporated into the program.
- The service hosts frequent pedagogy meetings to support dialogue around practice, ethical decision making, responsive engagement with families, and prospective professional development opportunities. Educators and staff utilise this time to discuss child observations, and to unpack and discuss specific situations and questions, while consciously developing a range of relevant and specific techniques and strategies. The service philosophy helps guide each pedagogy meeting to ensure that conversations and strategies remain relevant and supportive of all decision-making processes and incorporate the voices of each educator and staff member.
As a leader in the sector, KU – Macquarie Fields Preschool ensures its positive impact reaches beyond its children and families by tailoring its service’s practices to meet the needs of its local community.
About the Excellent rating
Services that receive ‘Exceeding National Quality Standard’ in all seven quality areas can apply to ACECQA for the Excellent rating. The Excellent rating is awarded for three years. After this time services have the option to re-apply.