- Entry type: Organisation
- Entry ID: AWE1119
SDN Children’s Services Inc.
- Former name Sydney Day Nursery Association
Former name Sydney Day Nursery and Nursery Schools Association Inc.
- Occupation Welfare organisation
Summary
SDN Children’s Services Inc. was the first organisation in Australia to provide all day care for children. The Sydney Day Nursery was established in 1905 in Woolloomooloo on the initiative of a group of young women with an interest in young children’s care and education as a result of their involvement in the Sydney Kindergarten Union. The organization aimed to ‘preserve family life, to educate mothers in child health and to save babies from death and from becoming State wards’. The Day Nursery catered for infants and toddlers ranging in age from a few weeks to three years. By 1927 the Association had established five centres. It changed its name in 1931 to become the Sydney Day Nursery and Nursery Schools Association Inc. and in 1934 it established the Nursery School Teachers Training College. It changed its name again in 1999 to become SDN Children’s Services Inc. This new name reflected an expansion of services for children other than centre based long day care.
Details
The women who established the Sydney Day Nursery Association did not want their new organisation to be a ‘cold, remote charity, but an institution started by fellow women, who fully realise the difficulties that beset the paths of working mothers’.
Women supported the Nursery financially through the formation of Circles, each of which was required to raise ten pounds a year to maintain a cot in the House.
In addition to increasing the number of centres, the Association established the Nursery School Teachers Training College in 1934 to train teachers to work with children from birth to eight years of age. It ultimately merged with the Sydney Kindergarten Teachers College to become a faculty within the Sydney College of Advanced Education. In 1994 the Institute of Early Childhood Studies became the Institute of Early Childhood located at the Macquarie University Campus.
Sydney women have continued to work in an honorary capacity as Executive and Board members to maintain and extend the services available to pre-school children with twenty-two centres currently operating.
Archival resources
Published resources
- Book
- Report
- Resource