Head for Business, Heart for Children
Forty of our partner centre principals recently completed the Grow ECD Business Accelerator Course — a three-part in-person programme that asks ECD practitioners to see themselves not only as educators, but as the leaders of small businesses with budgets, staff, compliance obligations, and children at the heart of it.
The programme’s organising idea is a heart for children + a head for business = a sustainable ECD centre. Unfortunately, a centre with all the love in the world will eventually have to close its doors if it can’t cover its fixed costs.
Across the modules, principals worked through the practical and the personal in equal measure. They calculated break-even fees, mapped fixed and variable costs, measured their own classrooms to work out legal capacity, and grappled with what minimum wage compliance actually looks like on the books. They tackled cashflow — why the bank balance in March doesn’t tell you anything reliable about July, and why the good months have to carry the lean ones.
But the course also asked harder questions of the principals themselves. Who’s in control of your centre: you, or your circumstances? What’s your End Result, your biggest dream for this place? What are the red flags on the road there, and what will you do to avoid them? On the quality side, they revisited the National Curriculum Framework and the Early Learning and Development Areas, what play-based learning actually looks like in a classroom, and how to assess children in ways that inform real planning.
“I used to think running a centre was just about the children going to sleep and eating at the centre. Now I understand it’s about leadership, communication, planning, and giving children the best quality early start in life.” — Getrude, Best Future Learning
“Every cent of money that I get, I record. It must go straight to the bank. I used to buy something to drink and chocolate every time I went to town. Now I carry water from home, and I eat before I go. That’s part of the saving I learned from the course.” — Sinethemba, Gugulethu Educare
The Accelerator isn’t a silver bullet, the work of running a financially sustainable centre while keeping the children at the heart of it doesn’t end when the workshops do. But the principals walked out with the tools, the language, and —importantly — the company of others doing the same hard, hopeful work.
“We all have a relationship with money — sometimes we need to take a look in the mirror and confront our emotions towards money and the way we work with it and realise there are other ways of doing things. If we don’t know what the picture is, we cannot change the picture.” — course facilitator Deborah de Villiers.