吃瓜不打烊

12 November 2019

, Roxburgh Park, was a finalist in the 2019 Victorian Early Years Awards under Category 4: Promoting Children’s Health and Wellbeing.

The school, in partnership with Hume City Council, DPV Health, Foundation Health, Community Hubs Australia and North West 吃瓜不打烊 Primary Health Network, developed ASPIRE.

The project aims to support students and their families by providing earlier access to a range of early childhood education, health and development support services.

‘We recognised that to achieve better outcomes for the children we needed to do things differently. We needed to broaden our vision beyond what happens once a child is enrolled at our school, but also impact upon what happens before a child starts school’, said principal, Mr Paul Sedunary.

This innovative research-based approach is a deliberate and strategic attempt to create a new family-centred and easily accessible service model that integrates a range of early childhood development services within an education setting.

ASPIRE has facilitated the dialogue between school staff, parents and allied health and medical professionals, and increased the school’s capacity to deliver better services. The project has helped parents to understand the range of services they can draw on and significantly increased the rate at which the school identifies and addresses areas of developmental and wellbeing needs for children.

Through involvement in the project, Good Samaritan Catholic Primary School has recognised that there is a need to explore new ways of reaching families and supporting them to access health and development services.

‘We are taking risks, doing things in new ways, disrupting existing approaches where necessary. Our aspiration is for all children in our community to have a life fully lived’, Mr Sedunary added.