Child development training offered free by the National Day Nurseries Association in collaboration with the London Borough of Bromley has been designed to help local settings enhance and develop their provision, particularly with the two-year-old entitlement in mind.
Feedback from participants has so far been very positive, highlighting that the training goes beyond early childhood development theory, encouraging participants to evaluate their leadership, parent partnerships and use of the outdoors.
At Blossom Years Day Nursery, room leader Kirsty Cunningham is currently gearing up to give a concluding presentation on brain development from birth to one year, to the 30 candidates in her cohort. She reports that the programme has increased her confidence as a leader and provided useful networking opportunities with local settings.
'I've also been able to feed back what I have learnt to my team, which means there is a knock-on effect that their knowledge of child development has been enhanced, and this will feed into areas such as our planning and how we work with parents,' she says.
'In March we introduced our Forest School, which has been a huge success. Now we want to ensure that our garden is continually developed to enhance outdoor learning opportunities for the children.'
The opportunity to refresh existing knowledge and gather new ideas to feed into an ongoing self-improvement plan made the course attractive to Teresa Robinson who owns PALS Pre-school in Bromley. While she is already taking two-and-a-half-year-olds, and will be slightly increasing her quota this year, the course is helping her to think of new ways in which her existing space can be broken down more effectively for this age group.
She says, 'While we have always had good relationships with our parents, the course has inspired us to think of ways to get families involved with children's learning. For example, we recently sent home birdwatching sheets and asked parents to look for the birds with their children.
'We also noticed that some of the little ones were hesitant to access the outdoor area and last month we had an eco planter week. Again the parents worked with children at home, creating planters for our outside area from recycled items.'
Ms Robinson likes the fact that this training is well-rounded and flexible for the participants' different needs, and that it has addressed a range of challenges.
She adds, 'The course has helped us to think about several areas of our provision and I think it will continue to challenge our thinking for some time yet.'
