With the state of the world as it is, we wanted to share how we have responded to the latest lockdown in New South Wales and the steps we are taking to keep our children, families, educators and communities safe.
As Early Learning Centres are considered an essential service, we continue to operate as per our usual schedule and hours. In light of the latest outbreak and lockdown in New South Wales, we have implemented additional precautions outlined in our Covid Safe Policy to ensure the safety of all children, families and educators at our services.
These additional precautions include::
- Increased Hygiene Protocols - We have increased daily cleaning and hand washing, implemented a weekly deep clean, and we require relevant clearances for children and educators if they present any symptoms.
- Wearing Masks - Our educators are wearing masks at all times, when interacting with children, families and other educators.
- Cancelled Excursions - All excursions are cancelled during this time.
- Visitor Restrictions - Our new visitor restrictions ensure that only essential visitors are allowed into the service. All visitors are required to sign in, wear a mask and social distance themselves from children and educators.
- Altered Emergency Drills - A risk assessment is taken before any emergency drill, during a pandemic additional steps are taken to ensure social distancing is maintained and ensure alternatives ways to educate children on what to do in an emergency situation are considered.
These are just a few of the measures we have taken to ensure that we keep our families, educators and communities safe. Each of our service’s have a specific COVID action plan that includes additional practices and protections that have been adopted to keep you and your child safe.
We understand that in these uncertain times, some families are choosing to keep their children home. In keeping with our mission of creating a powerful future for our children and families, we have implemented an Enrolment Freeze initiative for these families, effectively waiving the gap fee until the end of the NSW lockdown.
In order to empower families at home, we launched being@home. being@home is a curriculum designed by our teams to engage and extend a child’s learning while at home. The program provides families with resources and educates them on teaching methodology that our educators employ to extend a child’s learning in the home environment. We also have a daily check in with families participating in being@home; a wonderful way for us all to stay connected while we are unable to be together physically.
We understand that these past few weeks have been difficult for many of us that have been affected by the NSW government's stay-at-home restrictions. Since the beginning of the pandemic, our communities have shown how resilient we can be. If we all work together we can hopefully see an end to this lockdown soon.
