Our people

At Goodstart, we know great people are key to the delivery of quality teaching and learning.

It’s our centre directors, centre leadership teams, centre admins, teachers, educators, cooks and support teams that make all the difference for children in those crucial early years.

We’re for helping our people grow.

In 2020, Goodstart invested more than $15 million into professional development, giving our people access to cutting-edge learning materials and online learning communities.

We are also supporting educators to upgrade their qualifications to Diploma and Bachelor levels. To date, we have 765 students actively studying towards becoming a Bachelor-certified teacher with the help of our THRIVE program.

This year, the number of teachers employed in our centres rose from 1380 to 1586, supported by a range of upskilling pathways.

We’re for being a great place to work

It’s important to us that our people feel safe and secure in their jobs. We believe the happiness of our Goodstarters is directly linked to learning outcomes for our children.

We’ve worked hard to secure the jobs of all fulltime employees through the 2020 pandemic, while also converting more than 700 casuals to permanent employees even during these really uncertain times.

We’ve always had a focus on safety, hygiene and well-being at Goodstart but 2020 has seen us take our approach to a whole new level.

We’ve gone to great lengths to set the benchmark for safety across the sector, with a deep and ongoing commitment to keeping our employees, families and children safe through continued improvements and enhancements to our daily safety protocols.

We’re for recognising the truly incredible people who call themselves ‘Goodstarters’

Our people have always made us proud, but this year as frontline essential workers our ‘Goodstarters’ rose to the challenge, stepping up to support our 59,200 families and 70,700 children through some incredibly challenging times.

Throughout the pandemic, our people have continued to impress. They adapted to change, learned new skills and stepped up to provide high quality early learning for our children – even through the lockdown.

To honour and celebrate their incredible dedication to Australia’s children we thanked them with a free day off and sent a gift to each and every Goodstarter who went above and beyond during these challenging times.

We also continue to recognise our amazing Goodstarters and centres with our annual Goodies awards, with 2020 having additional categories such as centre innovation and leadership in adversity.