Staff Spotlight With Sabrina

My name is Sabrina. Where I’m from? Thats a bit of a complicated question. I’m a Swiss national but I actually grew up in South Africa and I’ve just arrived from China. I was there for the past four years and I’ve only been here since May.

What motivated me to get into childcare was my mom. She was always a teacher from a very young age and my step Dad was also a university lecturer, and I watched them in their lives throughout their education careers. I noticed also in my own schooling, there was a big gap in the education industry and there was such a miscommunication and so many problems with teachers not really understanding childcare psychology properly. So I wanted to be the change and be the teacher that I needed when I was a child and I went into childcare. I started studying my Bachelors and now I’m doing my Masters in the Psychology of Education so I want to work as an educator, find my feet, figure out what the problem is, where does it lie, and then try and implement a change within the education system as a whole.

A typical day at Little Harvard? I would go to say there is no typical day, especially in childcare you know, everything can just kick off and things can just go crazy but in a good way. Usually you get in in the morning. I get in around 8 depending on what time my shift starts and we usually go out to the garden and have some garden time. The kids enjoy playing outside, they really love the slide so they’ll play some games just kind of free play amongst themselves, we’ll go back inside we’ll have lunchtime and do like a structured activity after that. So usually its something to do with art or recently we’ve been going to trying and do a science week so we’ve been doing a lot of experiments and we’ll do like voting on what they think the different outcomes of the experiments are going to be so that’s like our structure time, then its dinner time, they have their dinner. They always love it, they talk more than they eat, ha ha, so you gotta watch out for that, and then its free play for the afternoon.

I quite enjoy working at the Captain’s Hill branch because especially in Leixlip it is very family orientated. It’s just a small little village and everyone’s close-knit and it shows in the staff here as well. When I walked in here on my first day I had the supervisor and the manager and all the other teachers coming up to me because they knew I came from really far away and just saying to me, “Listen, if you ever need anything, inside of work, outside of work, we’re always there, just text us, let us know what’s going on and we’re there to support you.”

I enjoy working for Little Harvard because I kind feel like there’s a very strong leadership coming way up from the top which is really nice and it trickles its way down. Everyone seems to know what’s going on. Everyone is kind of motivated to move forward and I also really like the fact that they have so many new branches opening, so there’s a lot of opportunity for growth. You come in as a teacher and there’s opportunity to move up, you don’t get stuck in one classroom forever which is nice.