Finding the balance between providing quality childcare facilities and meeting stringent development constraints
We’ve worked with a range of childcare operators and developers, often on projects that have had an original design that they're not satisfied with. Through this process, we’ve had a lot of exposure to how other childcare centres are designed and built today and the room for improvement that a new approach can provide.
With these projects, comes a lease agreement that requires a certain number of children to be viable. This deal can have adverse effects on the quality of a design as the cost of construction is consequently limited. When developers or operators solely focus on the ratios of how many children can be squeezed onto a site, a project suffers and the outcome is a building that can have limited public interest. Regulations and guidelines clearly need to be met, but they should be seen as a starting point, a bare minimum. When the number of children is maximised, with minimal staff and the smallest possible building area, centres become formulaic.
The other element that is often affected by focusing solely on ratios and regulations is the quality of the architecture that can be provided. Passive solar design and sustainability measures shouldn’t be optional extras but the fundamental tools that make a healthy, long lasting facility. Most of the centres that we see as successful are simply orientated to the north sun, provide shade within the design of the building rather than an afterthought shade cloth and have implemented sustainable measures that are suitable to the site and can often double up as an educational facilities (as well as a selling point to potential parents).
A shaded play area with a deciduous vine growing over it. A part of a play space improvement project we were engaged for at Merri Creek Primary School.
Advancing childcare centre design to allow for flexibility and efficiency
We believe that childcare is really about the children. That's a radical idea! It's about the child's experience, along with the staff, ensuring it's a positive experience for everyone. To talk numbers, if you have a required ratio for instance of 1 staff member to 4 children, you invariably end up with a group of 8 or 12 children. Some operators will base their room numbers off these regulations, seeing smaller groups as having more carer connection and the overall experience being more ‘homely.’ We see this arrangement as quite isolating for the children and staff as there’s less flexibility and limited experiences.
Some of the centres we've worked on have purposely just taken ‘numbers under the roof,’ rather than room by room. We find that this is much better for the experience of the children because you can easily and efficiently change staff and group sizes. You still have staff ratios working, but at one point of the day a group of twenty toddlers could be involved in the same activity connecting with children that they aren't with everyday. At another time, you could have 4 or 5 children doing a different activity suited to a smaller group size. Flexibility is the priority and it’s a lost opportunity when developers aren’t open to improving the design, only looking at the figures and the return. With flexibility also comes longevity. In our designs, we prioritise having a more forward thinking approach identifying how a space can be used in multiple ways.
Two open play spaces are easily connected to each other via a large glazed door
If a centre for a hundred children implements this larger group size approach, there could be as little as four activities rooms where a more conservative operator will require 6 or even 8 activity rooms. This means more bathrooms; more bottle prep and craft sink facilities and intrinsically, more walls. It nearly always results in long, narrow and dark rooms so each indoor space fits the requirement of being directly connected to the outdoors. It’s not only more efficient but cheaper to have larger rooms. The idea of the larger room is a also a misnomer, as they can be easily and effectively split by moveable joinery or partition walls so the space can operate as smaller rooms as needed.
Fostering development in the first years of a child’s life
A child's development between the ages one to five is undoubtedly important. It's not necessarily about learning to read and write but about learning how to socialise, fostering imagination as well as cognitive development. We see that the architecture that houses this early childhood development needs to be continually pushed to provide the best possible backdrop to allow for children to grow and develop into healthy adults. Additionally, we have utmost respect for the childcare workers that support and foster children’s wellbeing and take pride in offering them facilities that allow their challenging jobs to be as smooth as possible. If there’s a possibility that our work can assist form the future and how the next generation think, see things and use their imagination to respond to difference challenges that are bound to come up in their lives, then there's a lot to factor into the design of a childcare centre. This is a big priority of ours and a responsibility we take seriously.
You can read about our take on the shifts occurring in childcare here.
