Nursery World - Professional qualifications: Hit the road

There's a wealth of new training schemes to support your entry into an early years career, but how do you decide which path to follow? Meg Jones maps out the options

Being good at mazes is great preparation for starting on the early years qualification trail. Enormous changes have taken place in the childcare field over recent years and training is at long last being rationalised. Future generations of early years staff will be able to follow a clearer training and qualification path but, inevitably, reorganisation takes time.

At present, the Early Years National Training Organisation, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the DfEE and the awarding bodies are working together to make a much more coherent choice than was available in the past.

There have been so many different courses offered across the country it has been difficult to know quite where they fitted into the job market. It has not always been easy to assess which qualifications were suitable for what level of responsibility and what was needed for people to move from one area of work to another.

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