Our Primary Caregiving Approach

What is the Primary Caregiving Approach at Poets Grove?

Primary caregiving involves genuine attentiveness toward children to help them build resilience, self-control and tolerance. Each child in our infant room is given a primary caregiver.

Our primary caregivers provide true care to children through sincere listening and engaging. It’s about noticing a child’s behaviour and actions, being adept at reading reading cues, and engaging in ways that support their early childhood development.

Benefits of Primary Caregiving

Primary caregiving can help children:

  • develop a sense of security,

  • build trust and reassurance, and

  • feel supported during transitions and interactions.

Caregivers recognise learning opportunities within routines and the flow of everyday experiences, providing children with a development of shared meanings.

These skills are required for building a sense of attunement—how reactive we are to another person—and what we label ‘attuned interactions’.

Better developmental outcomes and experiences through attuned interactions

Attuned interactions means engaging with infants (children, and adults!) in ways to ensure they feel connected and understood.

At Poets Grove, attuned interactions assist our primary caregivers to:

  • Regulate and influence a child’s attention.

  • Build a child’s interest, awareness and understanding.

  • Provide rich contexts for language development and conversation.

  • Assist in quicker and more efficient communication between the educator and parents.

  • Enable prompt and appropriate responses to a child’s needs.

Additional educational support for our educators

In addition to our primary caregiving approach, we also have an additional infant educator whose role is to support the entire team.

This provides an above average adult-to-child ratio of 6 educators for up to 16 children.

Availability

Our primary caregiving approach is provided to every child, every day in our Banjo Patterson infant space, at no additional cost.

Learn how to enrol your child at Poets Grove.

The quality of care from the staff is second to none. My son James felt at ease from the moment he arrived at the age of 20 months.

I was expecting a very clingy boy but the Banjo Patterson team made him feel very welcome and he integrated easily.

—Renee, Mother