Early Learning and School Aged Care

Respond have been delivering Early Learning and School Age services for over 20 years with 15services nationally across 11 counties. We are one of the largest community based service providers and feel privileged to serve and support the communities we do.

We take your trust in us very serious and we offer a fully transparent, safe, secure and nurturing learning environment for your child. We work in partnership with a number of state agencies to ensure our services are rooted in best practice and continuous professional development.

We work closely with Tusla, the dedicated Child and Family Agency responsible for the regulation and inspection of all early years settings. All of our service are registered with Tusla and participate in unannounced inspections yearly.

Aistear is the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) curriculum framework for all children under the age of six. Aistear’s Early Childhood Curriculum Framework has been developed in partnership with practitioners, children, parents, people in education and training, researchers, and policymakers from the early childhood sector in order to provide the sector with guidelines and evidence based best practice . At Respond, our planning is underpinned by Aistear.

Siolta has been developed on behalf of the department of education by the Centre for EarlyChildhood Development and Education. Siolta defines, assesses and supports the improvement of quality practice in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) settings where children aged birth to six years are present. At Respond, we work within the quality framework and ensure that all our settings strive to meet these quality standards

All of our services fully comply with Children First, the national guidance for the protection and welfare of children act (2017). In addition, all our staff complete Tusla’s Child safeguarding Elearning programme and they also undergo children’s first training organised internally through Barnardos. Please see link to our child safeguarding summary leaflet.

Child Safeguarding

As a learning organisation, we recognise that professional development is a career long process and we are committed to continuously developing our understanding and knowledge of quality service provision.

To support our staff teams we are currently implementing two researched and validated assessment tools across our 15 services.

Highscope’s Program Quality Assessment tool. This tool assess program quality across seven areas of practice such as daily routines, learning environments and adult-child interactions. This tool supports us to stay focused on quality enhancement and best practice.

The second programme we are using is the Cor advantage assessment, developed by Highscope Educational Research Foundation.The assessment tool allows our practitioners to capture and record each child’s learning across nine developmental areas and use the data to create individualised lesson plans. The tool has really enhanced the quality of our practice as it gives our teams the ability to rely on accurate and meaningful data to elevate the learning and development program delivered across our services. The tool also has a family engagement function, which has created even greater opportunities for relationship building with parents as practitioners share real time learning moments from the setting and equally parents can share at home learning and updates.

At Respond, we believe that our staff are our greatest resource and we are very fortune to have a caring, passionate, nurturing, highly skilled and experienced workforce across our services. We recognise that child and adult interactions are central to a child’s social and emotional development, which is the foundation that all other learning is achieved. Therefore, we invest in our staff’s personal and professional development providing ongoing mandatory training, access to learning and development training fund and bite size training via dcmlearning portal.

All of our staff are fully qualified, are Garda Vetted and meet the validated reference requirements.  Our minimum qualification requirement is Fetac level five and we have many staffed trained to Fetac level six and an increasing number of our staff have achieved degree level seven and eight qualifications