Lisa: Mentone Preschool is a single-room sessional kindergarten. We offer 70 places, 42 of those are for our four-year-old enrolments and 28 are for our three-year-olds.
[On screen text: Lisa, Educational Leader, Mentone Pre-School]
Lisa: We have a fabulous team of staff. We have a very strong, cohesive team made up of three kindergarten teachers, we have six educators, and an admin officer. We are a community-owned and community-run kinder, which puts us in quite a unique position. Well, when we as a kinder, made the decision that we were going to plan and prepare for the Pre-Prep rollout as a single room, the big question was how. How are we going to increase our hours for fours by 2026? How are we going to increase our numbers in the 3-year-old to respond to community needs? So, we actually weren't sure how we were going to do that.
[On screen text: Lucinda, Administrative Officer/ former Committee Member, Mentone Pre-School]
Lucinda: I came to the Pre-Prep discussion for Mentone Preschool as a parent that was on the committee. I needed to think about what was the best for families, what was best for children, and what would be best for our staff as well. So, the preschool committee decided to form a subcommittee to have that discussion. We worked through the process of looking at what we could do with our parcel of land that we are currently on. We also spoke to our community, so we did a bit of a questionnaire to find out what was important to them.
So, once we had that information, we had more details to be able to work out, what sort of timetable would work really well for our families and then balance that with what would work for staff.
Lisa: We started to meet frequently with our Early Childhood Improvement Branch Advisor, Meghan, who was very approachable and easy to talk to, a wealth of knowledge, just a really wonderful support, and exactly who we needed to speak to at that time.
[On screen text: Meghan, Kindergarten Improvement Advisor, Bayside Peninsula Area]
Meghan: From my perspective as a KIA (Kindergarten Improvement Advisor), I think it was important to let the service see how positive these changes could be and that there was an awful lot of support behind the scenes for them in implementing these changes. Whether that was informal conversations with colleagues at the early years learning networks or conversations at the leadership forums that were run twice a year as well. Also, the Change Management Toolkit which had a lot of ideas for how to initiate conversations with the teaching team, with the families to bring about all the changes that would be happening with Pre-Prep and also some of the building grants and infrastructure and things like that.
Lucinda: Meghan and ECIB (Early Childhood Improvement Branch) gave us, I think, three options for time tabling initially. So, we looked at multi-age groups. We looked at single age groups, but rotational, and we looked at rotational multi-age. Once we decided what rotational timetable we felt was going to work best of the three options, the subcommittee talked through that.
Lisa: When the rotational model was introduced, yes, that was an enabler to be able to meet one of the things we wanted to achieve, which was increased hours in our 3-year-old program. But then that did create a little bit of concern over whether we would be able to retain and find a place for all three of our kindergarten teachers.
Lucinda: We're obviously not a large team. We've got three teachers and six educators. So, for the committee, we wanted to come up with a solution that was going to make the community feel happy and feel like we are future-proofing the kinder, but also that we were going to retain all of our staff who were such an integral part of who we were.
Lisa: A solution to that, and most likely the only solution to that, was the suggestion of team teaching.
[On screen text: Michelle, Early Childhood Teacher, Mentone Pre-School]
Michelle: The rotational was just a big tick for us. I guess the initial trepidation would be how will we work as a team? Because you're used to working on your own, you're doing your own group, and so to work as a team was new to both of us, but we talked about it - we worked together, we communicate well, and we are two different teaching styles, but when we can communicate and reflect on what we're doing, I think, for me, it was actually, it was actually a great learning curve.
Lisa: It just takes a little while to find your stride. But like anything new, after a few weeks, it's kinder as normal, and everybody knows what to expect. My advice is to embrace change, be optimistic, be positive. When you are willing to do something new and different, it can be quite surprising in that it can open the door to some really lovely, new and exciting possibilities, new ways of working. And the biggest thing is change doesn't mean bad or wrong, change just means different, so it's worth giving it a try.
[End of transcript]
Updated