Just as every child is unique, so is every early years setting. Some challenges are faced by all early years leaders, but each provider will also be tackling concerns that are very specific to their nursery. The local community, the children and parents, the size and type of setting, the nursery's underlying pedagogy and values, staff demographics – all can combine to create a specific set of challenges.
Rather than studying for formal leadership qualifications with content which might not be relevant to their particular setting, some providers prefer to buy in bespoke leadership training which can be personalised and tailored to their exact requirements.
Community interest company Early Years Leadership, for example, offers bespoke training sessions for leaders and their staff teams across the early years sector, working with leaders to explore which skills they need, and which topics need to be delivered.
The organisation supports leaders to carry out a skills gap analysis to understand what their team already knows so training will be targeted and specific.
‘We set up Early Years Leadership because we felt that there was a real gap for leaders in terms of support, particularly if you were part of an individual setting or a very small chain,’ says Kelly Hill, co-founder and chief executive officer. ‘Often the owners of these settings are business people rather than early years people, and there is no-one to go to for support when you are a manager. Every setting we go into is so unique that we do something different with every one of them.’
The bespoke element of training can apply to delivery as well as content, whether that is adapting to the different learning styles and demographics of individuals and groups, providing a schedule and delivery platform that fits with the needs of the setting, or offering a number of different price points.
‘We talk about the unique child, but we forget that adults also have unique needs and learning styles,’ says Hill. ‘Some people have a very direct style: they need to learn something, and they want us to give them that learning. For others it's about exploring topics with them – ‘What do you think you could do differently?’. Some like to have a workbook or set exercise to complete, others prefer to just talk it through, and some would like us to come in and role model for them.’
Early Years Leadership offers face-to-face coaching in the setting, or remote coaching by Teams or Zoom. ‘The return on investment from face-to-face is huge, but not everyone can invest that much, no matter how much they want to,’ says Hill. Settings can move between remote and face-to-face, if their budget fluctuates. In January 2023, Early Years Leadership is launching the Coaching Club, a Facebook group which offers support and coaching for £10 a month.
Challenging conversations
While every setting has different needs, there are some common threads. ‘Particularly for new managers, it's often around having those challenging conversations with parents and with staff,’ Hill says.
It is common for a manager to ask for help with one small aspect of their practice, when in reality there is a bigger issue that needs support. ‘In the first visit, they’ll tell you they are just a bit stuck with one thing,’ she says. ‘And then when you dig deeper, you unravel some of the other challenges.’
One recent example saw Early Years Leadership working with a nursery with two managers. ‘Their quality was outstanding,’ says Hill. ‘But their leadership was very different sometimes, and that could be confusing for staff.’
Another issue is the wide gap between the role of manager and other leadership roles, which can leave recently promoted practitioners floundering. ‘There is often a massive gap in skills and knowledge between even the role of deputy manager and manager,’ says Hill. ‘Three weeks ago, they were managing children and planning learning, and they are expected to be planning rotas and parents evenings, managing parent complaints.’
Bespoke focus
Early Years Leadership is designing an accreditation process for settings involved in coaching and training, which will be based on annual visits. ‘It was important to keep the bespoke element in the assessment rather than having a tick list of evidence that settings have to provide,’ says Hill. ‘It is not about building a portfolio of evidence, it is about your practice improving.’
UCL Institute of Education also has a range of bespoke training offers, which grew out of an Action Research Professional Development Programme developed with the Early Foundations Teaching School Alliance in Kent. ‘In early years, people tend not to see themselves as leaders, but what they’re actually doing in practice is leading, whether that is the learning of children, parents and colleagues and perhaps the wider community in some way as well,’ says Dr Amanda Ince, programme lead for MA Primary Education 4-12 at UCL. Dr Ince worked with colleague Dr Lizbeth Bullough to design and deliver the bespoke CPD package.
The evidence-based programme is tailored to individual needs, but aims to support early years leaders and senior practitioners to engage with educational research, and adopt an investigative attitude that will help improve and evaluate practice. The sessions take participants through the entire action research cycle process in identifying a problem to investigate, collating information, implementing change and evaluating impact.
Dr Ince says, ‘We work with them to make sure that [the training] is bespoke and tailored to their needs. It works well because it empowers practitioners and there's a huge amount of agency within it.’ The North East London Teaching School Alliance is running a version of this training for early years practitioners and Islington Borough Council has also developed a programme.
The training includes an impact evaluation framework, based on work from the Centre for Educational Leadership at UCL. ‘Everybody is under an enormous amount of pressure and time constraints, so you need to know that whatever you’re doing is going to have a positive impact,’ says Dr Ince.
Along with Dr Eleanor Kitto, programme lead for the Early Years Initial Teacher Training (EYITT) PGCE Programme at UCL Institute of Education, Dr Ince has also written a book to enable settings with smaller budgets to use action research themselves. A Practical Guide to Action Research and Teacher Enquiry explains the underpinning research and how to translate it into practice.
The key benefit of the action research project is its ability to incorporate a range of issues. Georgina Trevor, director at Little Angels Day Nurseries, says, ‘A lot of training targets one specific issue, but in reality most problems are interconnected – like whack-a-mole, you deal with one issue and another pops up,’ she says. ‘With action research you can take all the strands and tie them together.’
Little Angels Day Nurseries, North London
Little Angels Day Nurseries took part in Facilitated Action Research with a focus on leadership through UCL's Institute of Education in 2019. Trevor had completed an MA in early years education at UCL and was keen to incorporate some of the leadership issues she had covered in her own settings.
UCL's Dr Ince came into the settings to establish the areas that the group wanted to focus on. ‘We had surveyed parents, and Amanda wove that feedback into the training, as well as research and academic papers that had a big impact on the team,’ says Trevor.
The practitioners decided to focus on enabling environments. Each room was given £1,000 to act on the research they were carrying out as part of the project. One team decided to redesign a garden area, testing out different configurations to find out the most effective solutions. ‘They identified that children were not engaging with the environment in the way they wanted them to,’ says Trevor.
The action research encouraged the development of leadership skills across the board. ‘Having to work collaboratively and look at different leadership styles was eye-opening – people fell into roles they hadn't had the chance to do before, leading projects and developing relationships with senior staff,’ says Trevor.
Around six months after the settings had completed the project, the pandemic hit. ‘I think the training made us more able to think on our feet,’ says Trevor. ‘We came up with ideas off the back of the action research – for example, because we had seen the impact the garden had on the children, we opened it up to whole families in 30-minute slots.’
FURTHER INFORMATION
- A Practical Guide to Action Research and Teacher Enquiry: Making a Difference in the Early Years by Amanda Ince and Eleanor Kitto, https://bit.ly/3SYPgAp
