Good management - Digital Marketing Specialist Journey Early Learning Employee Review

The children are the best part and some educators genuinely care

Chronic understaffing and unrealistic expectations lead to burnout. Leadership is inconsistent, reactive, and often absent when support is needed. Culture feels blame-focused, with heavy micromanagement and constant scrutiny. Communication changes week to week with little clarity or follow-through. High turnover creates instability, extra workload, and poor continuity of care. Professional wellbeing is talked about, but not genuinely protected in practice. Gaslighting culture: concerns were minimised, reframed, or denied until staff questioned their own judgement. Issues were often spun as “your perception” rather than addressed as real operational problems. When mistakes happened, leadership shifted the narrative instead of owning decisions and fixing systems. Staff were told expectations were “clear,” even when instructions changed constantly. Raising problems felt risky because the response was defensiveness, not support.

Some genuinely lovely, skilled and caring educators; positive experiences with many of my colleagues. My centre had an actual tree children could climb. The kinder curriculum includes Italian classes. Management demonstrate care for staff wellbeing. Management took meaningful steps to improve the quality of child supervision during the sixth months that I worked there. Management take some practical steps to support staff with disabilities. Management appear to be genuinely open to feedback.

(This is specific to my experiences in the Essendon centre and may not be applicable to all Journey centres.) There is not an indoor-outdoor program in the toddler rooms. The allocation of planning time is miserable. I was supposed to have the equivalent of an hour per week in theory; in practice it averaged at 1 - 1.5 hours per month. Instructions on the walls of the chemical storage room are out of date/ refer to products no longer in use. Staff are expected to have weekly Critical Reflections Meetings, but management doesn't do much to make this feasible in practice. Internet connectivity is terrible. Communication between the different levels of leadership is not ideal - feedback/instructions from management are often good in theory, but not achievable in practice with the time and resources available, and/or not followed up on or supported by management. As a permanent but more junior member of staff, I was constantly being pulled out of my room to cover breaks in other rooms. Some educators interact with children in a way that shows too little empathy and respect for children, or use language that conveys blame or judgement, fails to support children's emotional development, or indicates a lack of understanding of the children's developmental capacities. Not all rooms use all the checklists they're supposed to, or do enough to promote respect for the environment. Excursions in the toddler rooms are a fairly rare occurrence. I suspect many of these issues are to some extent unavoidable in large centres in the for-profit sector, and not specifically the fault of local management. I probably would not recommend this organisation as a workplace to educators who are very new to the field, unless you completed your student placements at Journey, as the orientation process is fairly brief.