Brunswick Creche and Day Nursery

I cant recommend Brunswick Creche highly enough. This is the second year of sending our child there and short of moving out of the area we wouldnt go anywhere else. Every was so welcoming when we first joined and they were proactive about asking about our goals for our sons time there which we hadnt really encountered at other places as well as creating social events for parents to meet which has been great too. As for the space itself, it is segmented into age groups, very clean and well stocked with books and toys on rotation. There seem to be many different activities organised throughout the day which our child loves to tell us about like painting and sports dats. The staff are all wonderful, they have certainly left nothing but positive impressions on our child and us.

My daughter has now been at three day care centres and I can confidently say that this centre was our WORST EXPERIENCE by far. We are so over the moon with our new ELC and wish we'd never enrolled our child at Brunswick Creche and Day Nursery. Cons: 1. Educators are exceptionally low on warmth and kindness. Our daughter, who is generally a very open, confident, happy child, completely stopped talking (including saying even yes/no) when she transitioned to this centre for approx. one month. We never saw anything like it with either of her other two transitions. We never saw an educator once pick her up/hug her/show any form of affection. We believe this likely contributed to her really tough transition. 2. We felt the educators didn’t care about our child. We never saw any positive regard shown to our daughter (except from Nerida who is really lovely). In her six months there, we only got two personalised and very brief anecdotes about our daughter and her development (e.g. that she liked dancing). Aside from this, no one relayed anything about her to us. There was hardly ever a smile at drop off/collection directed toward her. There was a period where our daughter was ripping her hair out and was going bald due to ongoing sleep challenges. It wasn’t until we asked the centre to help us manage the issue that they told us they’d seen her on numerous occasions with pulled out hair in her hands. Why did they never communicate this to us or show they cared enough about her to want to help her with that?? 3. Exceptionally prohibitive sickness policy. This was by far the hardest aspect for us to manage on a day-to-day basis, being two working parents (FT and PT), as well as it being very disruptive to our daughter's rhythm and ability to adjust to the centre. In the six months our daughter was at this centre, she managed to stay in care for her full three days a week on two or three occasions. Not only did this make it truly impossible to earn an income, but we’d often receive the call for collection right before her nap time (rather than just letting her nap before collection), and they would expect collection sharply within the hour. The last time they sent her home for suspected gastro, after only ONE ‘loose’ nappy, they isolated her from the rest of the class until we collected her; she returned to us in completely good health with no further ‘loose nappies’ or any other symptoms of gastro. This was just one of SO MANY false positive "gastro" cases we experienced, and never did the centre take any responsibility for getting it wrong time after time or show a sign of understanding for how burdensome their constant false positives was. Strangely, the final time I received a call to collect our daughter Ange (admin staff) actually laughed; I will never understand that bizarre interaction. Please read their sickness policy VERY carefully, as it is THE MOST RESTRICTIVE policy I have ever encountered and I have many, many friends with children in many different ELCs across Melbourne. Just so that you're aware, even with a negative PCR, a child will get sent home due to a snotty nose. I have no doubt this is not new to COVID times, it's simply a policy that suits the centre/educators, as they benefit from a very low educator-child ratio (as per the daily classroom photos). 4. STILL not letting families into the children's rooms claiming COVID. Under the guise of COVID, parents are STILL not allowed in their child's room. This arrangement works very well for the centre, as parents are unable to fully see the educators taking a very hands-off style of 'educating', as we could still see through the front entrance's glass door that educators were often sitting down, talking amongst themselves. It also allows for exceptionally minimal handovers at the end of each day, where we almost exclusively got the generic "had a good day" comment. This is a nominal final comment, but we often saw small groups of educators smoke in a nearby lane. It made me wonder about second hand smoke and the health of the children.