Nursery World - Michael Pettavel: Working in early years contributes to a higher cause

Early years practitioners can’t solve the sector’s issues right now, but they can make a difference by continuing to do their vital work, says our columnist Michael Pettavel

Michael Pettavel: 'We won't receive the likes on social media, the offers of advertising contracts, but we will be part of the solution, not the problem'

With academics and researchers tripping up over themselves to highlight the problems facing children under five, there seems to be a paucity of centralised thinking about how to co-ordinate a response to what has already become a crisis. Teachers and early years educators know only too well what the impact of the pandemic and chronic levels of underfunding have led to, and it begs the simple question of ‘What to do?’.

We know from our own experience what one and a half decades of austerity, sidelining and ignorance results in and I am sure that there is much more than we are currently aware of. Crises don’t always just appear – sometimes they are made.

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