Students: quiz: Are you up to it?

Now that you're finally working in the early years, you can evaluate how successfully you are applying your professional training with this quiz set by Ilse MacLean

If you have just finished a nursery nurse or nursery teaching course and are waiting for your first real job, you will be familiar with the principles of self-evaluation of provision, using performance indicators. The Scottish Executive sets these out concisely in a nice colourful ring binder, titled The Child at the Centre. Its writers might welcome some parallel input, written from practical experience in the form of a quiz.

1. Ethos

You want to look nice for your first professional job, and have vowed to give up your stained, hole-ridden student gear for some real clothes. During week one in the world of work, however, you arrive home with two white flour handprints on your best trousers' posterior (baking scones, Monday), a red handprint on your spare trousers (painting post van, Tuesday), dried snot on your designer sweatshirt (incipient measles epidem- ic but you don't know it yet, Wednesday) and so on until, on Friday, you are forced to take stock of reality.