Playcentre Says "Parents are best"

Volunteer Awareness Week 17 – 23 June 2007

MEDIA RELEASE
For immediate release
16 June 2007

Playcentre Says "Parents are best"

The New Zealand Playcentre Federation is proud to celebrate all their volunteers during Volunteer Awareness Week. Nationally, Playcentres are celebrating their Diamond Jubilee year: 60 years of parents volunteering to be part of their children's education.

Playcentre is an organisation that provides high quality early childhood education for over 15,000 children and their parents. It acknowledges and supports parents as the best and most important educators of their children, and recognises that children reach their full potential when parents and whanau understand their development and take part in the learning process

"Time gifted to their child is one of the most precious things a parent can give" says NZ Federation President, Marion Pilkington. "When coupled with parental empowerment to be their child's first teacher, we create an exciting recipe for growing together in the best possible way."

Playcentre as an organisation is run by volunteers and is supported by a few paid staff. Centres are run co-operatively by member families who manage and supervise the sessions all on a voluntary basis.

Parents are provided with appropriate training and support through Playcentres' NZQA accredited Adult Education Programme, which enables them to expand their skills and make a positive, professional contribution to the high quality early childhood education provided in the Playcentres.

There are 33 regional associations servicing 496 Playcentres, and once again most of the people involved at association level are volunteers.

"Nationally, we work in a voluntary system" said Marion Pilkington. "In a recent study, looking at Value Added by Voluntary Agencies (the 'VAVA report'), Playcentre volunteers' work hours equated to over 1170 full time equivalent paid staff. This is equal to the top 1% of profit making companies such as Telecom. Our members do an amazing job – they are to be congratulated!!"

Playcentre has always had a policy of keeping fees to a minimum so that cost would not be a barrier to any family attending. From the first this was achieved by parents volunteering to run centre programmes.

A philosophy of encouraging emergent leadership has seen many volunteers gain new skills and the confidence to try new things.

Along the way they also gained free education, empowerment, encouragement and support for life long learning and the satifaction of seeing and supporting children learning and growing.

"Parenting is the most important job any person will do in their life" said Marion Pilkington. "Playcentre provides a community network, plus free parent education, to help parents do this job as well as they can. We put our resources into building families, who then move out and strengthen their communities."

And this is seen in the number of Playcentre people who go on to be on boards of trustees in schools, who continue work in other community organisations and who go on to do further training and education.

ENDS

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