Restacking partners: Gowrie Victoria

Published

Tuesday, May 23, 2023 - 12:00 PM

Gowrie and Restacking are working dynamically, and applying an improvement approach, to ensure more children experience quality education in the years before they start school. 

Gowrie Victoria has a proud history of championing excellence in early childhood education and as a strong advocate for children. There are six Gowrie early learning centres across Melbourne delivering a vision which is strongly aligned with that of Restacking the Odds (RSTO)—Children can participate in high quality early education and care creating a foundation for life.

Gowrie Victoria has been the first early childhood education and care provider to partner on RSTO 2.0. The organisation signed on in May 2022 as an ‘early adopter’ willing to provide considerable and candid feedback to inform the development of early RSTO prototypes through co-design and testing in Gowrie centres.

The partnership is informing RSTO’s approach to data collection and reporting via the Seer platform, with Gowrie Victoria now uploading data onto the platform monthly with relative ease. The Gowrie team are also providing feedback on the presentation of data via RSTO dashboards to ensure they are clear and actionable.

The next focus for the partnership will be co-design and testing of an Improvement Support Program for early childhood education and care (ECEC) providers. The program will initially aim to build capability in data literacy and quality improvement amongst Gowrie Victoria staff to enable the use of RSTO data. It is anticipated that after prototyping and refining the program with Gowrie Victoria, it will be further tested via roll out to ECEC providers implementing RSTO.

The value of the partnership with Gowrie Victoria over the past 12 months cannot be overstated. The willingness of the Gowrie team to work with RSTO in this dynamic and learning-focused way is critical to developing an approach to collecting, presenting and using data in services (as well as communities, policy settings and systems) that is valuable, feasible and sustainable.

This way of working in not new to Gowrie Victoria, who is traditionally known for being a ‘lighthouse’. The organisation is actively involved in research and works to ensure theory is translated into practice. RSTO is benefiting greatly from Gowrie’s willingness to share their own learning and the learning of others.

In exchange, Gowrie Victoria have early access to tools and resources that can help them deliver greater impact and support the important reforms underway in the ECEC sector, while ensuring their strong focus on equity remains.

Gowrie Victoria CEO, Susan Anderson discussing the partnership with RSTO said ‘We have committed to use evidence-based practices and to measure impact in demonstrating and advocating for quality education and care. Restacking the Odds provides valuable data and capability building to support this work and the work of the sector more broadly’.