The Lookout Early Education Centre

We enrolled our two kids at The Lookout after touring the nice facilities and meeting the mostly warm and friendly staff. Six weeks in and our 3.5 yr old daughter was still having a hard time settling after drop off. She’d cry for hours, stomp her feet, kick at the classroom door and forcefully deflect hugs from teachers. The accumulated feelings (only presenting the night before and day of preschool) were a result of recently moving house and changing early education centres twice. Prior to the move, our daughter loved going to day care. After a handful of ‘aggressive’ tantrums the director called us into a meeting to discuss potential solutions. The senior preschool teacher suggested they get an occupational therapist into the classroom to observe the tantrums, which we wholeheartedly agreed to. Midst meeting we were notified that our daughter was having a tantrum that had resulted in a broken drink bottle. I walked into the classroom to find my daughter crying uncontrollably. All kids and staff were in the room watching on, which felt distressing. Apparently a teacher couldn’t take a child outside to express all their emotions “due to staff to pupil ratios”. There was no attempt to reconvene the meeting. Nor was there a follow up call to check in on our daughter and discuss next steps. Instead we received an email notifying us that our daughter’s enrolment had been paused until she had sought external occupational therapy. The email claimed that the staff had tried “all of our strategies plus their own” unsuccessfully and therefore had no other choice. I found this interesting given that one of her teachers the day prior had expressed her willingness for the team to try tactics that work for us at home that they hadn’t yet explored. Whilst I liked the center, I was shocked by how quick the director was to catastophize, label and move on a toddler who had big feelings around going to pre-school. I unenrolled both kids on the spot and haven’t looked back. It was clear that our daughter didn’t feel safe and connected in her new classroom environment. What she needed was loving support to overcome the emotions that are a very normal part of growing up. Sadly she didn’t receive it at The Lookout.