Corter - seamless day

The ‘seamless day’ is something we’ve heard, sort of from people who are concerned with practice and making programs work for children,–and I think there’s always been a great concern in supporting young children–that we try to provide continuity for children, and we try to make the transition from the family out in the community seamless and smooth so that as children move from family to school there isn’t an abrupt transition that sets children back. Or when children move from the family into child care, there’s communication and ways of making sure that the environment works in a continuous way.  

And I think integration is trying to build that continuity more strongly than in our current situation where we have lots of different service pieces for children and for families but they’re disconnected so there may be hassles in getting the child from child care to kindergarten. We know there are hassles when that’s not on the school, in the school location. And trying to eliminate that kind of transition—time problem for children of families I think is going to be a huge benefit. So there’s transitions and continuity within a child’s day, within parents’ days that can be improved if services are working together, and, even in the same location. 

But there are also continuities we can build across developmental levels. Like it used to be that preschool and school was a big gulf and children would show up in school and there would be a huge issue of transition, and maybe there would be a visit by the kindergarten teacher to the family home or maybe there would be a one-day program to sort of bring the two together, but that’s not terribly effective.  **And the more connections we have between what happens in the preschool period and the school, the easier that transition will be for everyone. And that’s partly what integration in the Toronto First Duty project has helped to accomplish. So there’s seamlessness within the day, there’s curriculum that builds across child care and kindergarten; there’s an attention to transitions and eliminating those that are not helpful. So there’s seamlessness built into this program.  

So it’s almost like you’re trying to remove barriers so that parents and children have access to more as well. They’re not just going from child care to kindergarten but with those extra parent support pieces. That must make a huge difference for families.  

Yes, there’s a seamlessness in the way that this operates for the families, and bringing them into a community hub where people are concerned with supporting the child, and with supporting the parents. So that’s done in a way in Toronto First Duty where parents can bring along younger siblings, babies, when their older preschooler is coming to a program.  So there’s a welcoming and seamlessness to the way it operates to involve and engage parents.