Nowadays most early years settings accommodate babies in a separate room, away from older children, but this hasn't always been the norm. Is it time to think about mixing up the ages again?
Back in 1994, Elinor Goldschmied and Sonia Jackson told us (without much enthusiasm) that most day nurseries in Britain operated 'family grouping', with children of different ages together in the same room. They suggested that this practice had been influenced by the move away from care in large impersonal institutions (such as children's homes) to 'family group homes', where the mixture of ages mimicked the age range of siblings in an average family home.
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