Melbourne Museum opens $5.8 million Pauline Gandel Children’s Gallery

MELBOURNE Museum’s new children’s gallery opens for business today and its developers and testers were as young as just a few months old.
         
               

The new $5.8 million Pauline Gandel Children’s Gallery is designed for children from birth to age five and more than 500 tiny tots helped developers fine tune the final inclusions.

Melbourne Museum education and community programs manager Georgie Meyer said children from local childcare centres, kinders and other groups took part in workshops, design, development and testing of the new 2000sq.m space.

“This new space is very much dedicated to the learning needs and play space for the very young child, from babies to five-year-olds,” Ms Meyer said.

“The original children’s gallery was built when the Museum was built in 2000 so it was 16 years old and time for a refresh.

“That space was aimed at three to eight year olds but so much more is now understood about how learning occurs from birth and how a child’s brain develops from birth and the importance of coming to cultural institutions and making them welcoming for babies and toddlers.”

The new outdoor area includes a dinosaur skeleton stretching across two fully-accessible sandpits, seating and picnic areas, a rock garden featuring geologically important rock types from across Victoria, a crystal cave, growing cubby houses fashioned from apple trees, and other hiding spaces.

Philanthropists Pauline and John Gandel donated $1 million toward the project, with Mrs Gandel describing the new space as “a true game changer in the field of early childhood development and education.”

“Children are our future and we must do everything we can to give them the best possible start in life,” Mrs Gandel said. “Enabling them to have fun while they learn is at the core of the new Children’s Gallery and they are in for a real treat.”

Nursery teacher shortage 'risks children's learning'

A chronic shortage of fully qualified teachers in England's private and voluntary nurseries is risking young children's education, warns a charity.
Last year more than a quarter of a million under-fives attended non-state nurseries without a qualified teacher, says a report by Save the Children.
Applications for early years teacher training have plummeted, leaving nurseries struggling, say the authors.
                 

The government said staff quality was already good and continued to improve.
Contact with highly qualified staff is crucial to young children's development, says the report.

The researchers focused on privately run, voluntary and other independent childcare settings as opposed to state-run nurseries, which tend to be attached to primary schools and are more likely to employ qualified teachers.
They looked at three- and four-year-olds, 95% of whom attend some form of childcare each week.

The report, based on new analysis of official figures, also found that in the academic year to July 2016, half of all three- and four-year-olds or more than 280,000 children, had attended a private, voluntary or independent setting without a teacher who held a degree-level early years qualification working directly with them.

Overall, just half of independent nurseries in England employed a qualified teacher last year, says the report.
But this masked wide variations between local authorities: 86% of young children in Sunderland were in childcare settings with qualified teachers, but only 16% in the London borough of Newham.

And the report quotes National College of Teaching and Leadership figures showing a fall in early years teacher trainee numbers.

Family day care rorts cost our children’s educational future dearly

Many Australian parents choose family daycare for its flexible hours of operation and homelike environment, and so they can keep siblings together. Which is why the rorting of this system by some operators is so concerning: to the Turnbull government, the states and territories, to honest, high-quality family daycare educators and to taxpayers.

We all have a role to play in ensuring the important work family daycare provides is of a high quality, that it supports children and uses taxpayer funding for the right reasons.

During the past three years the Coalition has acted. Some have criticised this action but there is no question it has strengthened the sector and empowered those genuine, high-quality services. But there is clearly more to do.

The facts and figures from public reports through the years have been repeated in the media again this week and call attention to the loopholes and flaws that have existed and that the Coalition has been closing since 2013.

We’ve been closing those loopholes as quickly as we find them but we are partners in this process and it is up to the states and territories to fulfil their responsibilities as the level of government primarily responsible for regulating childcare providers to ensure quality and compliance.

Each dollar that is rorted from the system is a dollar of waste that our budget simply can’t sustain when we are already stretching to find every dollar possible to ensure that children are well prepared for the start of their educational journey.

And it is not acceptable for an operator to withhold key information about significant incidents among educators that may make them unsuitable to look after children.

While all of these things have been expected all along, sadly it now needs to be spelled out in black and white so that an element of our society no longer flouts expectations.

May's grammar school plans 'put six years of educational progress at risk'

heresa May’s plans to open new grammar schools could put at risk years of progress towards a rigorous education for all children, the Conservative former education secretary Nicky Morgan has said.

        

The MP, who performed the role under David Cameron until July, said plans to increase academic selection were at best a distraction and at worst “risk actively undermining six years of progressive education reform”.

Morgan is the most senior Tory to speak out against May’s plans, although Neil Carmichael, the Conservative chair of the education select committee, has also expressed reservations.

But, she added: “I believe that an increase in pupil segregation on the basis of academic selection would be at best a distraction from crucial reforms to raise standards and narrow the attainment gap, and at worse risks actively undermining six years of progressive education reform.

The Department for Education’s white paper was published under Morgan’s leadership earlier this year. The plans had no provisions for the return of grammar schools, and May has been criticised for appearing to introduce a policy not present in the Tory’s 2015 election manifesto.

It’s A Violation of A Child’s Right to Quality Education

The chairperson of the Karnataka State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Kripa Amar Alva, has termed the ongoing process of redeployment of additional teachers in schools as violation of a child’s right to quality education.

         

Ms. Alva told reporters here on Saturday that she had fixed an appointment with the Chief Minister on Wednesday. “Following that meeting, the commission will take a stand for the welfare of children,” she said.Ms. Alva said the commission has received nearly 300 complaints from Dakshina Kannada and other parts of the State questioning the process of redeployment of teachers.

Instead of wielding the stick right away, Ms. Alva said the commission had discussions with teachers, School Development and Monitoring Committee members and activists. She also had a detailed meeting with Primary Education Minister Tanvir Sait. Ms. Alva said that the formula on which the number of additional teachers was calculated is as per the RTE Act that prescribes one teacher for 30 students.

The commission was concerned over problems caused to students because of redeployment. “Unfortunately the Principal Secretary (for Primary Education) is not understanding it,” she said. Ms. Alva said that with the redeployment of teachers, the State government has defeated the efforts put in by the commission in enrolling new students to government schools. She said that the commission has so far not received orders of the Chairman of Child Welfare Committee, Udupi, ordering status quo in the process of redeployment of additional teachers from a few schools in Udupi.