Childcare director Reesha Stefek is leaving a legacy shaped by instinct, grief, and an unshakeable belief that early childhood care can and should be better. She talks to DHWANI PATHAK.

She calls them “little people”. It slips out naturally, mid-conversation, the way it must have for years. Then she stops.

A family stands at the glass window overlooking her office, waiting. Woden Early Childhood Centre’s director Reesha Stefek excuses herself and walks out.

There is nothing performative about it. Just a quiet exchange, a few words, and then the child steps forward and wraps their arms around her, holding on longer than expected. It is not a goodbye that needs explaining.

Back in her chair, she lets the moment settle.

“Thirty-five years is a long time,” she says.

It began, as she tells it, not with ambition but with dissatisfaction.

“My son was 10 months old, and I put him into family daycare. And the care was really substandard.” 

The frustration lingered until it became a decision.

“I complained to my auntie. I can do better than that. And she said, ‘why don’t you?’” So she did. She left her public service job, stepping into uncertainty. 

“For the next year… I was cleaning and all those sorts of things.”

The turning point came quietly. “They rang me, and I came here… they said to me, can you read a story to toddlers?… and they loved me.”

By 1992 she was studying, and not long after, she found herself in a role she had not planned for. 

“I just fell into the director’s position,” she says. It was never part of a long-term plan, but once there, it stayed. The role grew around her, and she with it.

That connection, over time, became something harder to define and impossible to separate. “If you cut these walls,” she says, “it would bleed my blood.” It is not said lightly. 

Over three decades, Stefek helped shape a model of care that often ran ahead of the sector, embedding a nature-based philosophy, maintaining higher educator ratios, and introducing year-round outdoor sleeping that would later draw national attention. 

“Research… I love research… I love finding out exciting things,” she says, describing mornings spent reading, testing, refining. But alongside that curiosity came the accumulation of responsibility. Paperwork, regulation, the quiet pressure of accountability. 

Still, she kept pushing. In 2011, a study tour to Scotland shifted something fundamental. “We came away going, why don’t our children sleep outside?” 

The idea was simple. The response was not. “Those first few years were a bit tricky… we would have parents who would say their child has got a bit of a cold. I don’t want them to sleep outside.” It required patience more than persuasion. “Educating the parents was the key.” Slowly, resistance softened. What began as an idea became a defining practice nationally.

But beyond the work, there were harder years.

‘The pain was always there…’

“I lost my son… several years ago when he was 24.”

“It was a really horrible time.” For a while, the question of leaving sat close. “I realised that I had to give one of them up… I love teaching… and I love the children more.” So she stayed. Not unchanged, but continuing. 

“The pain was always there… but the thing was that at least I got joy from the children. They fill your cup.”

She said the centre becomes “a bit of an extended family” for many children and parents. “These children don’t know that we get paid to look after them. They just come here because mum and dad work,” she said. 

In a city where many families lack nearby support, she says the service helps fill that gap, offering reassurance to parents and a sense of belonging for children. 

“But now I am tired… I’m worn out,” she says. What she will miss is immediate and specific. 

“The children coming in… it’s lovely… they come in to see if I’m here… where’s Reesha… and I’ll run in and I’ll get a cuddle.” And the parents. “Just chatting to a parent about their children and reassuring them that they’re doing a good job.”

What she will not miss sits just beneath it. The strain of being “everything to everyone”.

Out in the yard, though, there is something that stays.

The “sandpit room” she helped build is still there – open to the elements, just as she designed it. Her name has been engraved into it, a quiet reminder of the place she helped create. 

What comes next is quieter, but not idle.

“There’s lots to do,” she says. 

Reesha has a home in Royalla, spread across seven acres where she plans to expand a 10-bed garden and train her seven-month-old German shepherd. “Restoring my batteries will be great.” There is also family. A six-year-old grandson. 

And the sector she is not quite ready to leave behind. “I still think I can contribute,” she says, considering staying connected in a different way. 

If there is one last message, it is a simple one.

“For parents, you are enough. Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

For educators, she says: “Go slow. There’s such a push for doing more, but slow pedagogy matters.”

And for those shaping the system, the question lingers. “Why is ‘meeting’ good enough? Who decided that? If one service can aim higher, why can’t more?”

“Look at what you do well. Build on that. Make it rich for your families. Make it something you value.”