Deb Callahan

Operations Support

Diploma and Cert III in Early Childhood Development, Certificate III in Management. Currently studying Diploma of Management and Certificate IV in Training and Assessment.

Deb has had extensive experience outside of the childcare field. She has worked for large organisations through to small family owned businesses, largely in Human Resource Management and Retail Management roles. Deb has worked across Australia, the UK and the United States. She brings, therefore, a pragmatic and experienced eye to her role at Giggletree.

Deb made a conscious career change decision to join the Early Childhood Education field around 10 years ago. Since making this shift, she has worked ‘from the ground up’, rising through the ranks quickly and gaining experience as an Educator, Lead Educator, Educational Leader, Assistant Director and Centre Director. She’s managed Centres up to 150 places and supported curriculum approaches including mixed aged/family grouping, Reggio inspired and the more traditional ‘room based’ models. She’s guided her team to achieve an ‘Exceeding’ Rating through the Assessment and Rating process – so has a demonstrated ability to implement the National Quality Framework and all that it entails.

With Giggletree, Deb has managed a number of services and built strong relationships across these communities. Deb also offers Human Resources support to the Giggletree team and adds her talents to the delivery of a number of the documents produced on
behalf of Giggletree. She has also had a number of articles published in industry periodicals.

Deb considers Early Childhood Development to be a profession and is passionate about providing the infrastructure and guidance across the Giggletree services and beyond, to ‘set us up to gain the status that we deserve within the broader community’. She believes that unless we treat ourselves as lifelong learners, it will be impossible to engender that philosophy in the lives of the small people who we are responsible for – she attends conferences and Professional Development as frequently as possible.

Deb passionately believes that ‘children are magic and incredible, precious little people. We should consider it a privilege to be given the opportunity to have an influence on the bigger people that they will become’. Anyone who has seen Deb with children, knows that she certainly lives this in her interactions. Deb is the proud mum to one daughter and the effusive Gran to her grandsons and grandaughter.