Lorraine Sands

Early childhood team leader

“A huge amount of training, experience and intuition is required to be a good early childhood teacher. It’s an innovative, relationship-based job where people need to be thinking on their feet all the time. It’s totally satisfying!"

For Lorraine it was having her children at Playcentre that opened her eyes to the enormous opportunities available for working with young children.  “The excitement and passion of learning in a co-operative setting led to my ‘catching the bug’ and retraining as an early childhood teacher.”

Lorraine is a team leader at Greerton Early Childhood Centre and has owned the centre, now on two sites, for 12 years.  She describes herself as a teacher first and foremost, passionate about the idea of “shared leadership” within a team of committed teachers.

Originally trained as a primary school teacher, Lorraine gained equivalency for the Diploma of Teaching (ECE) while studying towards a Bachelor of Education. Continual learning is part of her expectations and so she is currently halfway through a Masters in Education. 

Lorraine’s thirst for learning provides other benefits in her work – it has enabled her teaching team to be involved in research opportunities.  Greerton Early Childhood Centre has been part of the Early Childhood Exemplar Project ‘Kei Tua O Te Pae’, released nationally a few years ago.  These learning/assessment exemplars provide an insight into the myriad of learning opportunities possible, as teachers engage in children’s interests and enable children to persist with difficulty.  For Lorraine, watching how children take responsibility for their learning in a social setting and communicate their ideas is one of the very satisfying aspects of working with children in this way.

Her centre has been involved in a range of other national projects including the Ministry of Education’s Information Technology Video and Professor Margaret Carr’s Marsden Project researching ‘transition to school’.  These kinds of research opportunities motivate teachers to reflect on their practice and work hard to build a ‘community of learners’.

For Lorraine the urge to own her own centre came from wanting to be able to drive the philosophy, make the teaching environment a good place for everybody to be and where the principles of Te Whāriki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum were promoted.  “I’m a strong believer in empowering teachers so that they feel comfortable implementing new ideas, whether in their first or twenty first year of teaching.  No one has a monopoly on good ideas!”

Also key to her philosophy of running a successful centre is to have high staff ratios and qualified staff.  “A huge amount of training, experience and intuition is required to be a good early childhood teacher.  It’s an innovative, relationship-based job where people need to be thinking on their feet all the time.  It’s totally satisfying!