Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine

Current Research Projects

Challenging traditional models of children ’s services support

Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Children’s Services at Bond University, Caroline Fewster has won a two-year service provider agreement from the Queensland Health and Community Services Workforce Council for giving specialist advice towards ‘guiding children’s behaviour’. Professor Fewster is supported in her work by Dr Margaret Anne Carter who specialises in behaviour management.

The professional development program specifically for children’s service providers has been a huge success, mainly due to Ms Fewster and Dr Carter’s unique approach to delivering needs-based workshops on guiding children’s behaviour.

The program has involved visiting children’s services to maximise the capacity of the professional support, learning about the context of each community and discussing things with the staff, families and children so that both their overall and individual needs can be met.

The success was also due to the opportunity offered by the Workforce Council to fund follow-up visits for additional training when requested and funding visits to many areas that are off the beaten track.

“We try to step out of the normal or the expected professional support to visit children’s services,” said Ms Fewster.

“We offer visits to big regional centres as well as to rural and remote areas who find it difficult to access professional support in their communities.”

The program looks at guiding behaviour through two initiatives: firstly, a non-blame approach, teaching children to behaviour in a socially appropriate way and teaching people how to respond to children’s challenging behaviours in a positive way.

The second initiative involves setting up the environment for social success, apropos of the fact that 80 per cent of children’s behaviours are the result of the environment they are in.

According to Ms Fewster, the challenge is giving everyone something practical and innovative to take away with them which they can implement in their own childcare environments.

“Given that most children spend 12,500 hours in childcare before they are five years old, the environment is an important factor in children’s learning and socialising,” said Ms Fewster.

“We want to show them practical, low cost options to assist children to communicate positively within the group, and to promote and encourage thoughtful communication which is not always confrontational.”

The initiative will hopefully impact on children’s learning styles in schools and reduce the rate of bullying both in the early childhood care environment as well as later on during their education.

“Behaviour which isn’t socially acceptable often leads to children not succeeding at school and not getting the best start that they can. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that later on they get into crime and don’t finish school, so the early years are the years most important to give children all of life’s opportunities.”

Key Project Team Members

Contact

Ms Caroline Fewster  

Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine
BOND UNIVERSITY QLD 4229
AUSTRALIA

Phone: +61 7 5595 4141
Email: cfewster@bond.edu.au