For Centre Director Simone Miles, inclusion isn’t a policy – it’s a daily practice.
Leading a vibrant Queensland service of 138 children and 32 educators, she’s seen how quickly the community needs and cultural mix of her Centre can change year to year. This prompted Simone to rethink how her team connects beyond surface-level cultural celebrations.
Through Essential Resources’ Cultural and Social Inclusion course as part of the Kindy Uplift initiative, Simone and her colleagues discovered practical, meaningful ways to honour each child’s lived experience.
The result is a more confident, culturally aware team – and a Centre where every family feels welcomed, understood and valued.
Participant overview
Simone Miles is the Centre Director at Edge Early Learning Marsden in Queensland, Australia. Having spent nearly 40 years in early childhood education, Simone brings extensive leadership experience and a deep personal commitment to inclusive teaching.
She has been with her current service for almost five years, working with a team of 32 educators. The service supports up to 138 children per day and has an ever-changing, culturally diverse community, which currently includes many families with Torres Strait Islander, Māori and Pacific backgrounds.
Background and context
Simone and her team chose to complete the Cultural and Social Inclusion course as part of their strategic focus on inclusion under the Kindy Uplift initiative.
“We sat down and asked ourselves, ‘What do we really need to focus on and what do we want to have as a long-term professional development package?’” Simone explains. “It kind of resonated with me, it fitted into what we were doing in regard to improving our inclusion, improving our cultural bonds with our community.”
The nature of that community had changed significantly over two years. As Simone describes it, while the previous year the service had supported a mix of families from Sudanese, Indian, Pakistani and Māori backgrounds, “today 80% of our actual demographic is probably from New Zealand”.
Simone’s team wanted to better connect with each family’s lived experiences beyond surface-level cultural observances.
“It’s not just about culture and special needs,” she says. “It’s about being inclusive in every part of your teaching.”
The online course
Simone and three other team members completed the web-based Cultural and Social Inclusion course, run by Essential Resources. Designed specifically for early childhood educators, the course helps educators to build meaningful, inclusive practices for working with children and families from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Separate versions of the course are available for both the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) and the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF). Each version aligns closely with Learning Outcomes 1 and 2 of the related framework.
The flexible delivery options of the course proved crucial for Simone’s team. “At first, we had the idea that we would spend maybe half an hour, once a week to come together,” Simone says, “but I think we all found it actually easier just to do it in our own time and at our own pace.”
The course contains four self-paced online modules. Each module features two 30-minute webinars presented by early childhood expert and author, Anne Houghton.
Topics include:
- cultural diversity
- inclusion
- family structures
- transitions
- anti-bias curriculum
- support for English as an additional language/dialect (EAL/D) learners.
“It was done in a way that wasn’t hard work,” Simone says. “My ED leader and my ECTs [early childhood teachers] really enjoyed the course.”
Each module is supported by reflective questions and real-world case studies. Participants also receive a set of four professional books as part of the package. Simone has seen how these resources enable ongoing staff development as educators can continue to reference and use them. “To me, that’s success.”
Goals and expectations
Through the course, Simone aimed to:
- expand inclusive teaching to address all kinds of family structures and community contexts
- strengthen cultural competence across her leadership team
- foster collaboration between educators with differing levels of community connection
- see the training reflected in day-to-day practices.
That final goal was crucial for Simone. “I want to be able to actually use the tools I’ve been given.”
Key learnings and outcomes
Simone credits the course with broadening her perspective on inclusion and diversity. “It really encouraged us to look more deeply into what inclusion actually means in practice.”
“I think I had more of a closed-mind approach before – it was all about the family and the child and what background they came from. But now it’s their family demographics, their reason for being here in our community, how they’ve integrated their culture into society and how they share knowledge of culture and community.”
“There’s lots of techniques that I used to use, but I think the course gave me a few new skills … taking an observatory kind of approach to what the children were doing and then looking for the solutions.”
Application to practice
Simone and her colleagues applied their learning in meaningful ways across the service. The following were some of the key shifts they observed.
- Expanding cultural representation: “Rather than just having a cultural corner … it’s more spread throughout the classroom,” Simone says. “Now you can see the cultures that are in the classroom, and how they impact the classroom.”
- Language as inclusion: Simone learned to use simple greetings and expressions in home languages to welcome families. “It just made them feel a little bit more relaxed when they came in, especially if they were trying to tell me something and they didn’t know how to.”
- Strength-based behaviour support: In one case where a child was having a difficult day, Simone redirected him into a helper capacity and involving him in her daily tasks at the centre. “He actually became quite a big help and I was able to talk with him and unpack his emotions and recognise them for what they were to him. The tools that I got from the training helped me deal with him in a manner where I could be calm and considerate and open it his emotions and what the child was feeling at the time.”
- Cultural safety for families: The course also encouraged Simone to slow down and support families through enrolment and orientation. “It’s trying to take that approach of, ‘We can help you through this.’”
Impact on children and colleagues
In the time since members of the team completed the online course, the service has seen a positive impact on both educators and children. Fewer labels are used and challenges are seen as forms of communication, we see the child as a whole.
She has also seen more personalised teaching and deeper emotional regulation among children: “Where a child may have behaved in a way that was challenging we now have tools to help with redirecting them to the right way to support behaviour, to support emotions, and to support regulation.”
In addition, she has seen more collaboration between families and her ECTs and educational leader: “They wanted more storybooks – not just indigenous and not just Torres Strait Islander. We’ve now got a really wide range of books.” In particular, Simone continues, “We had a lot of Indian families that were coming into the service. They actually helped us find some stories. It’s helped us feel a bit more inclusive that way.”
Reflections and next steps
While collaboration was a highlight of the course experience, Simone sees further opportunity for service-wide impact.
“I would like to implement it with all my staff – at least the room leaders – so that they gain those skills,” she says. Time and staffing constraints have made that challenging, but it’s on her radar.
Simone’s team is also piloting a Māori-focused teaching programme developed in New Zealand. “We have a gentleman called Uncle Keith who is coming in each fortnight to introduce more Māori curriculum into our programme. I don’t think we would have delved into that if we hadn’t done this course.”
Final thoughts
The experience with the Cultural and Social Inclusion course was more than beneficial for Simone and her team – it was also enjoyable: “I enjoyed doing the whole thing.” She has already recommended the course to other centres.
Ultimately for Simone, professional learning is part of setting the tone as a leader.
“For me, being an educator is all about professionalism – not just in the way you look or talk, but the way you present yourself to the children and the other educators around you.”