With the Labour Party returned to Government, the plans first outlined in the Ten Year Strategy for Childcare to create 3,500 children's centres by 2010 will now be rolled out in full. For everyone who works in the early childhood sector, the most important issue for the years ahead is ensuring that tens of thousands of babies, toddlers and young children experience high-quality nursery education and childcare in these new organisations.
The BBC's 'Nurseries Undercover' programme, televised almost a year ago, highlighted just how poor this quality can be, and just how bad relationships between nursery staff and children can become. After seeing the covertly recorded video by reporter Lizz Brown, who worked as a volunteer nursery worker, parents' anxieties boiled over.
It would be horrible to imagine your own child living under the regimes shown in the programme. At almost the same time, the nursery where I am head was changing from being a conventional nursery school for three- and four-year-olds, into a year-round centre for children from birth to five.
In August, with many families signed up for the new places, I wondered how we could expect parents to entrust their children into our care, without having seen the completed building or the new staff team in action. Yet parents did, thankfully, put their trust in us.
Taken together, I wonder if this says something complicated and sometimes contradictory. On the one hand, parents do, understandably, get very worried about the quality of care offered to their young children in nurseries.
The media play on these fears all the time. In London, a recent Evening Standard front-page headline raised the fear that 'nurseries are turning our children into thugs'. But working parents need childcare, so the other school of thought dismisses all the fears as nonsense, arguing that nurseries are good for children. The argument swings from one extreme to the other.
The same inability to focus on the quality of nursery education and childcare was seen during the election campaign, where childcare only emerged as a consumer issue. The debate focused on how many childcare places could be provided, and at what cost, and how they could be made as convenient as possible. 'Childcare' in this sense is simply another consumer item, like DVDs or fresh milk. All that matters is increasing supply, and keeping the price low.
The lack of care shown to the children in 'Nurseries Undercover' was shocking. But we ought to worry just as much about the failure of most politicians and media commentators to focus on the quality of children's experiences. If the public debate shows no regard to quality, then perhaps it is no surprise that the type of bad practice shown in 'Nurseries Undercover' can happen.
Time to reflect
This guide argues for some different ways of thinking about practitioners'
relationships with babies, toddlers and young children.
First, we need to acknowledge some of the impact that working closely with such young and dependent children has on us: the times we feel close and attached, the times we feel worried by this and draw back, and the times we feel tired, irritated, or fed up with children.
Second, we need to try hard to observe and take in the reality of children's experiences in our care. It is easy to hope that all is well for children in nurseries, but we need to account for the EPPE (Effective Provision of Pre-School Education) project's findings that 'high levels of "group care" before the age of three (and particularly before the age of two) are associated with higher levels of anti-social behaviour at age three.'
We need to wonder why research shows that many young children in nurseries are showing significant signs of stress throughout the day, evidenced by the presence of high levels of the hormone cortisol in their saliva. This is not true of young children with childminders and with carers at home, whose levels of cortisol drop as the day goes on.
Third, this guide argues that developing positive relationships with young children is not just about being kind and sensitive, though these are fundamental qualities. It is about taking an organised approach to managing the care of young children.
Historically, there has been a long divide between the education and the care traditions in early years work. Some groups of staff see themselves mainly as educators, concerned with children's learning; others as carers, mainly concerned with the children's well-being and helping them to develop socially and emotionally. This is a false and, therefore, unhelpful divide.
Disposition to learn
The traditional strength of the best early years provision has always been its understanding that children's learning is holistic. Everything connects. When children are playful and happy, it is not just that their well-being is high. They are experiencing pleasure from being deeply involved in what they are doing. They are imagining, communicating, exploring the properties of sand, or paint, or water.
Recent large-scale research has established the soundness of this traditional view of care and learning in the early years. The Competent Children research programme in New Zealand and the EPPE project in the UK have both demonstrated that children's later success at school derives from their disposition to learn, rather than their acquisition of any specific skills or knowledge.
Disposition to learn includes confidence, enjoyment, persistence - all areas of emotional development. But no child is likely to show much persistence in an early years setting unless it is full of well-organised resources to promote play, and is buzzing with stimulating experiences and a love for knowledge and learning.
Perhaps the final word in this debate is the EPPE finding that the children who attend nurseries that integrate education with care will go on most successfully through their school years. Yet there is a problem which is hidden away in this apparently straightforward conclusion.
Culture war
In many of the integrated centres, a kind of 'culture war' is raging under the surface between different groups of staff. Those who work with the children under three may feel their work is not valued highly. The 'baby room' can be talked about as if it's a dull place, concerned with changing nappies and warming bottles.
The staff in this 'baby room' may find themselves coming under pressure to plan and deliver a curriculum which they feel is quite inappropriate. The Birth to Three Matters Framework concerns itself principally, and quite properly, with the quality of the care and relationships young children experience in nurseries. Yet the main impact of the framework in nurseries often appears to be a preoccupation with planning topics and setting targets for babies and toddlers.
Not long ago, I spent some time in a room for children under two, where staff clearly had good intentions and worked well with the children. On the wall was a comprehensive plan for the week, including a daily plan for the book area. One day the books would be about animals, the next day they would be about the colour red, and so on, finally rounding off on Friday with 'free choice' for the babies in the book area.
I wondered, when I left, whether this is really what integrated education and care means: caring practitioners following silly plans supposedly for the education of babies. When a baby shares a book, after all, it is just as much about the sense of belonging, cuddling up to the adult, finding a favourite book together, sharing a picture that may have special meaning to the baby. It seems rather sad to me that this special picture might be unavailable until Friday, the 'free choice' day - and all in the name of weekly planning.
We are at the threshold of a brave new world, where many more children in the UK are experiencing nursery childcare. If we are going to avoid the nightmares of 'Nurseries Undercover', then we have to bring together the strengths of traditional early years practice, with an openness to thinking about the particular issues which affect children who spend long hours in institutional care. If there is a single light which will guide us through this complex, dark maze, it is the quality of practitioners' relationships with individual children.
References
* The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project: Findings from the Pre-school Period is available at www.ioe.ac.uk/projects/eppe/
* The finding that children in nurseries have high levels of cortisol in their saliva is reported in Why love matters: how affection shapes a baby's brain by Sue Gerhardt (Brunner-Routledge).
* The findings of the New Zealand Government's Competent Children research programme can be found at www.nzcer.org.nz
