Meet our Centre Manager

Jess Hallihan

Jess is the Centre Manager at Bask Early Learning Springwood, bringing a wealth of experience and dedication to early childhood education. With her extensive background in early learning and comprehensive qualifications, Jess leads our centre with warmth, expertise, and unwavering commitment to excellence.

As a passionate advocate for early childhood development, Jess embodies our BASK values in everything she does. She believes in creating an environment where bravery flourishes, accountability is celebrated, curiosity sparks naturally, and kindness flows through every interaction. Her approach to leadership focuses on building strong connections with families and educators alike, ensuring our Springwood centre truly feels like a sun-warmed second home for everyone who walks through our doors.

Jess’s dedication to nurturing each child’s unique journey while supporting her team’s professional growth makes her an invaluable leader in our Bask community. She looks forward to welcoming new families and working together to create an environment where every child can truly bask in the joy of learning and discovery.

Inspired by Jerome Bruner’s Spiral Curriculum, Bloom with Bask is our unique inquiry-based learning approach where children explore challenging topics in age-appropriate ways, revisiting and expanding their understanding as they grow.

Through shared thinking and nurturing relationships, our curriculum encourages children to become confident learners while exceeding national quality standards, weaving literacy, numeracy, and creative thinking naturally into their daily discoveries.

BASK BUDDIES
Our Enrichment Program
Let us ignite your child’s imagination through six unique learning pathways, where curiosity sparks wild imagination. From creative and performing arts to STEM exploration, music, cultural discovery, and physical wellness, each pathway is thoughtfully designed to nurture your child’s natural talents and interests.

BASK COLLECTIVE
Our Community Connection Circle
We bring together a network of health services, educational partners, and cultural connections to help your child grow stronger, together. From child health nurses and therapists to environmental partners and wellness practitioners, we’ve created a nurturing circle of support that enriches your family’s journey at Bask.

Our Commitment: The Core Values of Bask Early Learning
Our values underpin all that we do at Bask Early Learning. Designed to guide our practices with intent, we encourage bravery, accountability, sparks of curiosity and kindness in all that we do.

Together, these values shape our approach to nurturing growth through care and knowledge, creating an early learning experience that develops confident, capable, and compassionate individuals who will shine brightly in their future endeavours.

Bravery
We believe bravery is about facing challenges with courage and resilience. We nurture children’s confidence to try new things, knowing that just as the sun rises each day, every attempt makes us stronger. By creating safe spaces for taking positive risks, we help children develop the courage to embrace life’s adventures, even when the path seems challenging.

Accountability
We stand firmly by our commitments and choices. We believe in owning our actions and their outcomes, using them as golden opportunities for growth and learning. By demonstrating responsibility in our daily practices, we teach children that accountability isn’t just about accepting consequences – it’s about growing stronger through our experiences and sharing these lessons with others.

Sparking Curiosity
We are passionate co-explorers, encouraging children to question, discover, and marvel at the world around them. Through our inquiry-based approach, we celebrate the joy of asking “why” and “how,” creating an environment where curiosity shines as brightly as the midday sun, leading to endless possibilities for learning and discovery.

Kindness
We create warm, welcoming spaces where care and respect flow naturally, touching everyone who enters our centres. By modelling genuine compassion and empathy, we show children that kindness isn’t just an action – it’s a way of being that makes our whole world brighter, creating lasting connections that warm hearts and foster belonging.

At Bask Early Learning Springwood we believe that Early Childhood Education is the first step in embedding a lifelong love of learning.

We believe that children must be supported to explore the significance of creating and maintaining nurturing relationships, as this encourages the building of social connections and allows children to develop a sense of belonging to their environment.
We understand that every child learns at their own pace, and we are flexible in accommodating their changing needs.

As a service, we highly value play based learning and offer children numerous possibilities to engage in a variety of opportunities such as open-ended play, group play, individual play, pretend play, and play that allows children to become fully immersed. We encourage a sense of agency and leadership as children explore risky play, such as climbing, sliding, balancing, jumping from heights, and hanging upside down.

Bask Early Learning Springwood recognizes parents and caregivers as their child’s first and most influential teachers. We value and welcome the uniqueness of all individual children and families, inclusive of culture, beliefs, structure, and status.
Our relationships are built over time with mutual trust, sharing of information and working together to produce the best possible outcomes for each child. We do this by fostering our Families’ sense of belonging by including them in all important decision-making processes, this includes the creation and updating of our Philosophy, our Quality Improvement Plan and Reconciliation Action Plan.

Community connections are at the heart of our programs, where we invite families and community members to be involved in special days and activities through incursions and excursions within our service. Connection to our local and broader community is crucial to us here at Bask Early Learning Springwood, as we incorporate our local community back into our service’s physical environment and written program.

We acknowledge that our community is built on the traditional lands of the Yugambeh Nation. We pay respects to the Elders of the Yugambeh Nation, past and present, the custodians of the country since the beginning.

You are welcome to join us in our home away from home.