Jayneen Sanders

Jayneen Sanders (aka Jay Dale) is an experienced author, publisher, elementary school teacher, mother of three and an active advocate for Body Safety, Gender Equality and Respectful Relationship Education being taught both in homes and in schools. She is also lead author of Engage Literacy published by Capstone Classroom, and has had published over 130 stories for children. Jayneen feels passionately that we can do so much more to keep our children safe by teaching them age-appropriate and empowering prevention education.

Jayneen is a strong public advocate for children’s safety, education and empowerment. You can follow her on Social Media channels to access important news, development and resources. 

Jayneen started her teaching career in the 1980s as a primary school teacher in rural Queensland. In her second year she was asked to lecturer to beginning teachers on creativity in teaching practice.

In 1984, Jay moved to Victoria and taught at a number of inner-city schools.

In 1985, Jay had a change of career and became an educational editor for Longman Cheshire; and in 1989, she was employed by Macmillan as commissioning editor in the Primary division.

Jay and her partner, Mark Sanders, moved to Japan in the early 90s and worked as English teachers for over three and a half years.

On returning to Australia in 1994, Jay and Mark established their own business, UpLoad Publishing (with the imprint Educate2Empower Publishing). Since that time, Jay has authored/packaged numerous titles for the educational publishing industry. She was one of three authors who wrote the overall structure for Nelson Maths for Victoria, (shortlisted for Australian Publishing Association Primary Textbook Series 2004) Nelson Maths and Nelson Maths for Victoria VELS edition (winner of Australian Publishing Association Primary Textbook series 2008). Jay was one of three authors who created the Nelson Numeracy Assessment Kit (winner of Australian Publishing Association Primary Teaching and Learning Package 2005 and the joint overall winner of Australian Publishing Association Educational Title of the Year 2005).

Jay is an accomplished children’s book author, writing a number of titles for Nelson’s literacy series PM Plus and Flying Colours. She has also written a number of children’s books including titles in Oxford’s humorous fiction series ZigZags, Funtastic’s series Totally Kidz, Macmillan’s non-fiction series Deadly and Incredible, and a children’s picture book series for Penguin.

During 2008 and 2009, and also during 2014 and 2015 Jay returned to teaching. That experience refreshed her understanding of issues facing children, teachers and parents.

She is currently Lead Author (writing under the name of Jay Dale) for Engage Literacy published by Capstone Classroom and has written over 100 titles for that series.

Jay is most importantly a mother of three teenage girls and has been a school councillor at her local primary school for over seven years. This time spent in primary schools both as a teacher and a parent inspired her to ask the question of her community: ‘What are we doing in schools to empower children and protect them from inappropriate touch?’ When she realised very little was actually being done, she decided to use her authoring and publishing skills to write resources to help parents, carergivers and teachers to broach the subject of self-protection and to encourage children to speak up.