This project is funded by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services: Ageing, Disability & Home Care (ADHC).

The SDN Community of Learners aims to provide young children with disabilities and their families with a highly effective, holistic service that meets each child’s individual needs.

The project builds on existing effective early childhood practice in an innovative, multi-disciplinary way. Its key innovation is to bring together the key stakeholders in each child’s life in an unusually close, communicative and highly beneficial working partnership – a ‘community of learners’.

The stakeholders always include:

• the child with a disability
• the child’s family
• early childhood centre staff in partner centres (strongly supported by SDN)
• early intervention specialists
• any other practitioners who are supporting the child and wish to participate.

This approach has great benefits:

• It brings together a wide variety of perspectives and understandings about individual children with a disability and their needs.
• It enables highly rewarding exchanges and working relationships.
• It boosts everyone’s capacity and skills to provide each child with rich early childhood learning environments that have early intervention programs embedded within them.

The SDN Community of Learners supports a minimum of 30 children with disabilities and their families, in up to 10 partner early childhood education centres in the Cumberland Prospect area of Sydney.

The SDN Community of Learners has many innovative aspects,  including:

Dedicated liaison staff (‘Enablers’) who support the Community of Learners in:

• Establishing relationships that are outside the traditional parameters of early childhood education creating a shared understanding within the Community of Learners.
• Listening to each individual child about their needs. ‘Listening’ to the child can take a number of forms and is often based on observation and reflection of his/her needs and interests. The child’s ‘voice’ can be drawn from a range of sources (parents, teachers, their drawings, movement) to form a picture of his/her view.
• Making joint decisions about what early intervention is appropriate for that child.
• A focus on play-based early intervention in the early childhood centre and the home.
• Family-centred documentation and reflections. Sharing these within the Community of Learners supports continuity of care for the children involved.
• Involving families as central partners in decision-making, planning, playing, reflection and processes of early intervention support for their child.
• Creating an online information hub (with audio podcasts and coordinated discussion forums) to support the understanding and knowledge development of each member of the Community of Learners, and the community as a whole.

This project has two tiers of early childhood intervention activities:

1.  based on child to adult interactions
2. establishing the foundation that underpins these interactions.

Joining the SDN Community of Learners

 For more information about SDN Community of Learners, click here or telephone 02 9897 3635.