Under the EYFS, all providers must have and implement an effective equality of opportunity policy. Good practice highlights how children, from a very young age, can learn to place a value on different races, cultures and disabilities.
Staff at the Little Tug Boat Day Nursery in Fulham, London, are very aware of this and work hard to encourage the children in their care to develop good attitudes towards differences of race, culture, language, religion, gender, disability, parental attitudes and changing family patterns.
'We help our children to learn that everyone has a right to be treated with equal respect,' says co-owner and manager Sadie De Domenico.
This is done by ensuring that when doing any activities and learning with the children, staff are given a 'balanced provision of images in order to promote positive examples of gender diversity, ethnic origin, culture, religion and people with disabilities'.
This includes resource books, materials and equipment that are multicultural and non-sexist and that provide positive examples of all groups, including those with disabilities, says Ms De Domenico.
For the past two years a profoundly deaf boy has been attending the nursery.
'We worked with his parents and had a lot of external support. He was having cochlear implants fitted, so his parents didn't want him to learn sign language - they wanted him to learn to talk,' says Ms De Domenico. 'So we did some external training to see how we could work with him on his language before and after the cochlear implants. We also had people come in to give us advice on how to get better acoustics in the room by putting down rugs.'
She adds, 'In developing our curriculum and weekly planning, we take into account children with learning disabilities, make provisions where necessary and ensure that no child is being treated less favourably than any other.'
The nursery has a lot of bilingual children, mainly from Italy, Sweden, Germany, France and Greece, and tries to get the parents involved as much as possible with festival days.
The nursery also 'takes account of national and religious holidays when holding meetings for parents, ensuring that members of all religious and cultural groups are not disadvantaged and are able to attend,' she says.
There is one more common but often unrecognised form of exclusion within the early years sector - that of men working in childcare roles.
Little Tug Boat Day Nursery has a full-time male chef who does cooking with the children.
Ms De Domenico says, 'He makes pizzas and smoothies with them and they do baking and we take regular trips to the park, where he is very much in demand, particularly by the children who love playing football with him.'
