Abstract

There’s an easy way to provide childcare for school age children, and there’s a hard way. The easy way involves knowing what you’ve always known and doing what you’ve always done – and getting the same results that you’ve always got. The hard way is to keep current (or even one step ahead!) – making your setting sustainable by enabling it to develop and grow with the changing world around you. Why is this hard? It’s hard because it involves so many (and often too many!) variables. Everything changes – from governments to children and everything in between, nothing stays the same for very long in our world.

This ever-changing environment of out of school childcare presents several challenges. How do we keep ourselves updated with new information? How do we know what is the ‘right’ thing to do as a result of finding out about it? And how can we find more time, resources and energy to make sure we keep our heads above water when everything changes again?

How This Connects to the Sustainability Theme

This keynote will present a novel solution to these last two questions. Shelly will argue that the key to making out of school childcare sustainable is to start with effective practice – or in other words, consistently good practice which does what it says on the tin. There is no ‘one size fits all’ in out of school care – whether you run sports clubs, play clubs or chess clubs, the most important factor is to know what type of effective practice you should be providing and working out how that is sustained across your setting. Shelly will present some useful tools which contribute to establishing consistent effective practice and also discuss the internal and external benefits of effective practice to improve the sustainability of your setting.

Biography

Dr Shelly Newstead has worked in the playwork field for more than thirty years as a practitioner, trainer, author, editor, publisher and researcher, currently an Adjunct Research Fellow at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. She is the Managing Editor of International Journal of Playwork Practice and the Series Editor for the Routledge Advances in Playwork Research series.

Shelly is also the President of the International Council for Children’s Play (ICCP) and the Managing Director of Common Threads, a social enterprise which develops playwork theory and practice internationally Shelly is the world’s only Doctor of Playwork and her doctoral research resulted in the creation of the PARS model of playwork practice, which is now being used in more than 20 countries around the world.