Back in 2012, Professor Cathy Nutbrown’s interim review of early years qualifications heard ‘a general message of discontent’ from employers over a ‘lack of appropriate skills and knowledge among applicants’.
Almost 13 years on, a tiny minority of Professor Nutbrown’s recommendations have been actioned in full, and this message from employers persists.
June O’Sullivan, chief executive of the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF), says she has noticed newly qualified staff often know ‘very little’ about child development.
‘They think they know all about inclusion, but child development, the theory of attachment and how babies develop are missing,’ she explains. ‘It’s scary to have a situation where we are expanding to younger children but staff are not trained well enough. We are setting up a disaster for little children.’
Getting the numbers up
With 40,000 extra staff needed by 2025 in England alone, there is the suggestion that quantity is being emphasised over quality.
Independent researcher Sara Bonetti explains, ‘With the expanding entitlement, the focus has been on getting more people into the sector. Whether they have good qualifications is just a second thought. Speed is the focus; let’s get training faster, let’s get into ratios – but the training is not there.’
Michael Freeston, director of quality improvement at the Early Years Alliance, adds, ‘Anecdotally, I speak to chain providers who say they are taking people who they would not have considered five years ago.’
Meanwhile, Louise Hannan, course leader in health, social and professional studies at Bridgwater and Taunton College, says financial limitations put pressure on training courses to admit all-comers.
‘We have a neo-liberal university system that takes bums on seats over quality, alongside a general neglect of the early years sector, professionalising anything past Level 3 and still not recognising anything beyond that until teacher status,’ she explains. ‘We do soft background checks but don’t really say no to anyone unless they are deemed a safeguarding risk.’
Assessments
Meanwhile, for apprentices, experts warn that a shortage of end-point assessors will become even more acute.
‘One of the big concerns is where we get these assessors from,’ says Freeston. ‘Could we be training them up? But then you have to take managers out of settings to assess, so how do you cover their absence? It’s really critical.’
While the total size of the workforce has already started to increase, this is driven by a large rise in unqualified staff, data reveals.
The ‘experience-based route’, which allows early years managers to count some of their Level 2 staff as Level 3 without them having ‘full and relevant qualifications’, is viewed by many in the sector as a quick fix that does not help raise the quality of staff.
Hannan calls it ‘dangerous, especially with the quality of people the sector is taking on’.
Freeston also acknowledges difficulty with the approach. ‘It risks undermining all the progress that has been made to get highly respected qualifications,’ he says.
He suggests a compromise in which the experience-based route is undertaken for a limited time period, during which students could do an accelerated apprenticeship and count in ratios.
Content concerns
Since the loss of the ‘gold standard’ of the NNEB, there has been plenty of soul-searching in the sector about the quality and content of qualifications. It can take half the time to gain Level 3 Early Years Educator than it did the two-year NNEB.
‘You had to do many more observations for the old NNEB,’ says O’Sullivan. ‘They don’t seem to have anything like that any more.’
Bonetti agrees that important topics like brain development and specific training for baby room practitioners can be left out. ‘I personally don’t think the Level 3 is good enough on child development or good-quality observations,’ she says. ‘Students haven’t done enough practice. Observations are really important to understanding how a child is progressing, to spot the need for early intervention.
‘There’s a massive variance in the quality you get as a student. Just because it says “child development” on the syllabus, we don’t necessarily know what is taught.’
But Freeston, who has been involved in reviews of Level 2 and 3 qualifications, says there is a limit to what can be done. ‘We are not allowed to instruct training providers to ensure observations take place. All we can say is we believe certain sorts of evidence should go in a portfolio, and at the top of the list, we put observations.’
Practical suggestions
To ensure more of these skills are reaching everyone who enters the sector, early years consultant, trainer and author Stella Louis suggests targeting local authorities and training advisors who work with settings. ‘We need to put together child development courses that can be cascaded down via local authorities to everybody,’ she says. ‘Every local authority needs to be investing in good-quality, face-to-face child development training, and must support settings to up the ante.’
Bonetti advocates coaching to support new staff, but acknowledges the challenges of delivery.
Professor Eunice Lumsden, head of childhood, youth and families at the University of Northampton, believes some meaningful change can be made simply through culture and terminology.
‘The T-Level in Education and Childcare was recently changed to the Education and Early Years T-Level, and maybe that’s a way of changing the narrative in terms of the induction and development of our young joiners,’ she suggests.
With the updates to the Early Years Educator (EYE) Level 3 criteria and the standard review of the Level 2 apprenticeship about to complete, Freeston maintains that both qualifications are in a good place. ‘I don’t think people should confuse bad delivery of a qualification with a bad qualification.’
Improving delivery
So maybe the issue is not with course content but with the way courses are taught? With a wide range of choice for students, Bonetti acknowledges that it can be difficult to ensure quality.
‘We really don’t know much about training providers,’ she says. ‘Training is a market in itself.’
O’Sullivan questions the inspection process for trainers. ‘I would like to know if colleges are being inspected well enough,’ she says. ‘The old Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI) inspections took two to three days and lifted the lid on everything. How rigorous is inspection now? There’s a lot of focus on processes, but not much observation of teaching.’
Freeston agrees it can be difficult for inspections to give the full story.
Ofsted inspects Early Years Educator qualifications other than teacher training under the Further education and skills inspection handbookand the Education inspection framework. A spokesperson calls the process a ‘rigorous approach’ with inspections that last several days.
Gen Z
Meanwhile, for employers taking on new joiners, Freeston says the demographic of the workforce has changed a lot, with fewer people coming to early years from a previous career in a different sector.
‘When I started in my role 20 years ago, I was genuinely surprised at how many “second career” people joined the sector, with more life experience, and higher academic qualifications. Now, that cohort is marginal. We have more young people, with all the challenges they face.’
At LEYF, where they train their own apprentices, O’Sullivan fears that social and economic challenges have had a significant impact on a younger cohort’s ability to deal with the demands of working in the early years. ‘A lot of apprentices come out of school unprepared,’ O’Sullivan says.
Lumsden agrees that today’s younger staff can find it particularly tough.
‘They had a particularly complicated adolescence period, facing Covid and the rise of online learning, so their confidence levels and socialisation are not that high, and their previous educational experience is usually one of revision guides to get through exams.’
However, she believes that greater responsibility should lie with employers to support this group.
Wider worries
There is also a sense that some of the concerns about workforce training are indicative of wider issues facing the sector. The old stereotype of young people being directed towards ‘hair or care’ in the absence of other options persists.
Freeston acknowledges that not all trainers are as up to date with best practice as the sector would like. ‘The people who teach and assess may not always be the best people to be doing so. And at the root of that is the idea that anybody can do it.
‘As a nation, we need to give due status and respect for this important work.’
