A Right to be Children: The Importance of the Design Architecture

The importance of architecture to Early Years is often misunderstood. The building is part of the enabling environment and needs to be designed to support learning by creating the right environment and resources both indoors and outside. They are also integral to meeting the sustainability pillars; economic, social and environments in their design for example where they are situated, and how they support local communities and the local biodiversity. Nowadays, people are thinking even more about the towns and cities, the city of play and how to make them child friendly and position schools and nurseries as community catalysts.

If you are interested in design and want to understand why it matters and how we need a strong relationship with architects, then listen here.

Sarah Ronan is the director of the Early Education and Childcare Coalition (EECC) – an organisation made up of 35 members which represent children, parents, providers, the Early Years workforce and the wider business community.

Like many others in the Early Years sector, Sarah's journey is deeply personal. Her own experiences with inaccessible childcare, combined with her passion for women’s issues, led her to work with organisations like the Women’s Budget Group and Pregnant Then Screwed. She firmly believes that access to childcare is a core feminist issue – not only for women as parents but also for the predominantly female workforce in the sector. It also shines a light on the broader politics of care and its critical importance in society.

Building a coalition in the Early Years sector is no small feat. It requires both time and resources, especially in a field as diverse and market driven as this. The first year of the coalition's work focused on laying the groundwork behind the scenes –aligning priorities and getting everything in place before officially launching its efforts.

Key to this is producing robust research evidence and effective policy solutions, both of which require significant energy to drive the movement forward and, according to Sarah, this has been lacking in Early Years for some time.

Her long-term ambition is for a movement that is not just a formal group of people but one that weaves together all the informal structures, dynamics and mechanisms that exist into a powerful catalyst that can become a force for change and therefore a force for good.

Sarah raises the challenges of a coalition which are not just keeping the energy powered but also securing funds to create the communication content and lead the advocacy to get in front of the right people. It is these individuals who can help drive the change needed to create a fair and accessible service for all children and their families.

So, have a listen to a master class on developing networks and coalitions in an Early Years that must do much more to share our powerful message with politicians, policy makes and the public.

There is a lot of concern about recently qualified staff who appear to find adjusting to the workplace a challenge and seem to have emerged with degrees which are low quality. As an employer of nearly 1000 staff, that is an issue, because my job isn’t simply to recruit staff but to succession plan ( and I don’t mean that in a Brian Cox sort of way!).
Therefore, these concerns which I am hearing about from many quarters are of concern. But are these facts or rumours and setting out self -fulfilling prophesies? Is it just university ranking snobbery?

So, I asked Professor Eunice Lumsden, from the University of Northampton who heads up the Childhood Youth and Families Department and is responsible for a whole suite of degrees from undergraduate to postgraduate, that cover a raft of subjects including early childhood studies, education, social work to working with children.

Listen to find out what this means for us as employers and university and college teachers!

It seems strange that in 2024 parents feel the need to lead a campaign about healthy food, but with the help of the Children’s Food Campaign at Sustain, that’s exactly what they are doing. Indeed, they managed to get to meet members of parliament to share their manifesto with them.

In this podcast I speak to Barbara Crowther, Children’s Food Campaign Manager at Sustain and parent ambassador Jaynaide Powis about their comprehensive polling of over 2,000 parents conducted by Savanta and the Children’s Food Campaign which has helped determine the biggest challenges faced by parents in the current food system and their top priorities for change.

Listen as we explore topical questions such as:

1. Is it time to stop our snacking culture?
2. Do we need to go back to the days when we all learned to cook in the home economics class at school
3. Should nurseries have free nursery food and should all chefs be trained with credible Chef qualification such as our degree from the Early Years Chef Academy ?
4. Do we need statutory food guidance for nurseries and childminders?
5. Should Ofsted be inspecting food in nurseries and childminders?
6. What further policies are needed to support them.

Getting into your Ofsted Groove!

In this podcast I talk to Wendy Ratcliff and Sam Sleeman-Boss from Ofsted about the Big Listen, refreshed handbooks, new complaints procedure and the research review series and how they are feeling about the Ofsted Academy and the future of Ofsted. While there are some things they cannot answer yet, like how will Ofsted reshape, I am holding them to the promise of a research report on babies especially with the expansion of childcare to include little babies of 9-months-old.

The conclusion of the conversation confirms that we need to continue with our OBC to keep engaged with our regulator so we have a voice in what is often a national debate that only focuses on Ofsted in schools.

The next London OBC is 31st of October, get your ticket here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/london-obc-october-2024-tickets-1007508564237

Listen to this to help you get into the Ofsted groove.

Slow Pedagogy

During Covid, the LEYF staff running our 15 nurseries for key workers had a call with me at 3pm every day. I looked forward to our chats and it wasn’t long until they we talking about how the reduction in numbers of children, time to play, less curricular demands and fewer wider issues was positively impacting on the children and they in turn were slowing down the pedagogy to allow the children time to just enjoy being children.

Let’s think about slowing down early childhood in the world of fast living and undesirable excess is the message. Let’s ignore the government or business ethos of targets and consumerism. It isn’t working! No one is satisfied!

Have a listen and tell us what you think.

Baby, It’s Time

Do you think babies are a focus of care and education policy enough? Do we have a baby policy blind spot? We think so!

This is the subject of my conversation with Sally Hogg, Senior Policy Fellow at the Centre for Research on Playing Education, Development and Learning better known as PEDAL.

Why has this issue become so important now? Well, because of the speed of the childcare expansion. From September, babies from nine months will be able to access a nursery place. Getting it right from conception to two years is more crucial than at any other stage of learning. The brain development in babies is startling. Just imagine the baby brain as a firework of synaptic connections, fizzing across brains and forming strong cerebral pathways.

If you are interested in the Under 2's and what makes great practice, listen to my conversation with Sally Hogg and share it widely. You know the drill!

It’s fitting that this podcast is being aired on International Children’s Day because Sir Al is a huge advocate for children over his very busy and noteworthy 50 years. His message is powerful, and he pulls no punches about his frustration over the failure of our country to take seriously the importance of children, and particularly those in the Early Years.

“Every child should be given the resources to achieve her or his full potential. Now, why don't we have that being articulated, let alone actioned? It is utterly dire in my view.”

He despairs at the serious erosion of the basic humanity of the caring services and his new purpose is putting compassion back into compassionate care that we provide for people, especially children.

“There is a mismatch between our wonderful science and all of our services and the dismal failure of politicians to recognise the importance of children “.

“…chiselled in letters of stone over every Department of State should be this. We need healthy, educated, creative, resilient and happy children, with the life skills to become the productive adults of the future and the competent parents of the future.”

Reflecting on Every Child Matters which he describes as the world's best policy programme for children (one for which he proudly shared across the world) – it was the brainchild of the Labour Party, then destroyed by a triple whammy. The Coalition government dismantling it without any serious debate, then austerity followed (and its dreadful impact on families), followed by COVID. Effectively, it was the destruction of the world's best policy programme for children which he despairs does not appear to be top of the Labour manifesto.

We discuss the low birth rate, the old age dependency ratio between working adults and the elderly, fertility rates, immigration, the science of attachment, brain development, synaptic connection, his book The British Betrayal of Childhood and much more…

Listen to his call to action and get involved. Start by listening and sharing this podcast…