For as long as I have been part of this incredible organisation, our mission has been to cause a powerful future for every child. To us, this means that our education empowers every child and family to create a life that they love and can live to its fullest. Recently, as we reflected on the state of the world, we started thinking about our own future and who we need to be in order to empower the present and future of every child.
Before going into more detail about why we made the decision to develop and launch a new brand, we would like to start by acknowledging our past. Our story begins in 1998 with a mother who wanted more than just average childcare for her young children. Coming from a family of teachers (and being a teacher herself), she set out to create an early learning environment that would empower her children by opening a beautiful preschool in Ermington. Thank you to Ajantha for your incredible contribution over these years. Now, we are a 70+ team operating across five locations in NSW with 300+ children accessing extraordinary early education and care from our services.
After months of pondering a name that would best reflect the organisation we were committed to becoming, we chose the name Being. The name Being alludes to a number of our key influences: ontology, our philosophy and the latest in child development and psychology. Through this frame, we recognise that a human being’s identity forms from the interplay of their biology and environment; primarily during the early years. Take a moment to be impacted by that statement. The person we know ourselves as was constructed as a result of our experiences and the stories we created during childhood. You might notice this about yourself. If you look back at who you are today, the breadcrumbs of the person you have become are a result of the stories of your past. To create your child powerfully, we are committed to empowering their being - that is, raising a confident and self-aware child, a decision-maker with the knowledge and resources to be influential in their environment and throughout their life. We want to empower children to be free of the constraints that their past would impose on their life, giving them the capacity to create a present and future of their own design. We believe children are infinitely capable and limitless and can create an extraordinary future.
Being is more than a new look for our company, it is a renewed focus on our mission to cause a powerful future for every child. Our philosophy, pedagogy, values and culture will better enable our community to deliver on this mission. I want to take a moment now to explain these four contexts.
Our Philosophy - The Powerful Human
Our philosophy sees every human being as whole, perfect and complete. It recognises that we create a model (schema) that we learn through the interplay of nature and nurture. This model acts as an interpretive framework through which we understand the world around us, and shapes who we are and how we act in life. In our philosophy document, we present a simple yet elegant example of a child called Talon. In this example, Talon learns that earthworms are “yuck” through an experience in life. After this moment, Talon continues to relate to earthworms as yuck and therefore avoid experiences involving earthworms, as well as experiences related to digging and soil, worm farming and recycling, and so on. This is seemingly benign, right? Well, how about if we extrapolate this impact? If Talon were to continue disengaging or avoiding experiences and activities of this kind, then any possibility of Talon being interested in and engaging in matters related to biology, geology and so on would be very low. This simple example draws upon decades of research and modern theorists in early education to highlight the way our cognitive model forms, and the primary influences that shape our model.
Our Pedagogy - The Powerful Child
Our vision is that children are empowered to be powerful, responsible, self-aware and empathetic leaders of their present and future. We believe that when we empower children with this context, they will be free to create their life. Our pedagogy guides the way all our educators develop relationships with and relate to your child to enable this vision. It involves our educators distinguishing their own limitations (yes, we do a lot of introspection and reflection), so that we remove the limits that operate on our lives, and identify and distinguish limits that children see for themselves. With our educators empowered to live extraordinary lives for themselves, they are able to role model care, collaboration, responsibility and power to children.
Our Values
Our values of integrity, communication, consideration, impact, curiosity, courage and selflessness are more than words, they are the skills and behaviours we nurture in the people around us. Our culture empowers our educators. We focus on hiring extraordinary educators, experts in child development, who role model the values we want to pass down to our children.
We are empowering our organisation to continue to cause a powerful future for your child.
Thank you for being part of our journey so far. Welcome to our next chapter.
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