Goodstart Early Learning Caloundra

I hate to write this review as I know how difficult it is to look after children and we are thankful to those educators who do work here and care for the kids day in, day out but I wish I had an insight on this centre before sending our kids there. Our kids have attended this centre for a number of years. The toddler room hasn’t had permanent staff work there longer than a few months ever since we have been there. My daughter would cry every single morning at drop off and would fight to go to daycare, we have now just started a new daycare a week ago and she is a totally different child, she’s happy and hugs her educators (she’s been there a few days and we can see a complete shift!!) We have learnt that there have been a few dramas at Goodstart Caloundra, a few I won’t get into but there was an educator working here treating the children poorly that actually made the news. She would scream, and even laid hands on them. Luckily she is not there anymore. We should’ve been told about these things, it’s our kids that they are working with, we should absolutely have been told about this. On one of the last days when we picked our children up at 3:30-4pm there was not one full time educator in sight - they were all agency workers (this centre highly relies on agency workers). I could not believe it, ANYTHING could have happened in this afternoon and we would have never known about it. Another incident was I signed a form to say not to apply the sunscreen to one of our children as she had a skin reaction to it. I got 3 phone calls in 2 weeks that someone had applied the sunscreen to her. There needs to be a duty of care for all workers who come in contact with children about allergies / they have so much staff turnover around that these things happen. New staff need to have a morning meeting before working with children. Around special occasions like Mother’s Day/father’s day/kindy graduation etc, we never got keepsakes, so seeing friends at other kindy/daycares receive special things we missed out on sucked a bit. The educators do their best with what resources they have. There are a handful of educators that are amazing, Amy and Ari - in the pre kindy room, they are patient and kind. Tamika the new director is great, she welcomes you at the door.. a couple months ago, you could walk in and nobody would bat an eye at you. We found from conversations that the educators are just being over worked, it’s unorganised and isn’t a positive work place which is resulting to educators being unhappy and leaving / burnt out. You can really just go off the vibe. I really do hope that this centre improves for the children and finds permanent staff that will stay there for a while. They have lost a lot of great educators in the last 2 years so I hope the big bosses figure out why this may be and do something about it!