Practitioners who work with babies feel undervalued and isolated

The Baby Room Project, run by Dr Kathy Goouch and Dr Sacha Powell of Canterbury Christ Church University, sought to respond to an urgent need for information about what is happening in baby rooms in early years settings and the nature of the environments, interactions and resources in place to support babies' development and learning.

The project, undertaken in light of the revised EYFS, the Nutbrown Review and Childcare Commission, involved working with baby room practitioners and their managers in 43 daycare settings in Kent and Medway, caring for 370 babies. Key findings of the first research summary of the project reveal that baby room practice is a 'hidden' aspect of daycare provision with practitioners commonly reporting that they feel isolated and neglected.

Visitors to the baby room were rare and deemed to lack any specific knowledge or understanding of babies' care, development and learning in many cases.

Despite the fact that the majority of practitioners working in the baby room are often inexperienced and least qualified, many claimed that any training or support is given to those caring for older children, while the opinion of local authority training is that it is not designed to meet the needs of baby room practice.

Often the youngest members of a nursery team, baby room staff said they felt least valued within the setting. A common theme which arose from the findings was that practitioners make few, if any, decisions about rooms and provisions. Most decisions are made by managers who often fail to consult with them.

Practitioners working with babies were also found to be powerless to access first hand policy dissemination. Instead policy knowledge is most commonly filtered through to them by nursery management, room leaders or local authority. This often means they receive confused and sometimes inaccurate information.

In light of the findings, the report makes a number of recommendations, including:

• Offering training, support or guidance to those working with babies which is specific to their work and carefully designed to include opportunities for professional dialogue and accurate policy and research information.
• Providing professional development which is funded, widely available and accessible to low-paid employees.
• Creating provision for dialogue exchange for individuals working in baby rooms and the establishment of networks of practice as a core local requirement.
• Encouraging and supporting baby room practitioners to gain EYP or qualified teacher status, with continued professional development encompassing specialised knowledge of the care and education of babies under two.

Dr Goouch (above left) and Dr Powell (above right) said, 'We are at a difficult point in the history of daycare in this country, particularly for babies, with commercial and political interests seeming to take centre stage.

'The Baby Room project has been carefully focusing on person-centred explorations of the processes and practices of everyday experiences in daycare against the backcloth of the tussles in the sector around the thorny issues of qualifications, regulation and monitoring, concepts of quality, accessibility and affordability.

'In our project we have analysed carers' and babies' experiences and reported these to place them squarely at the forefront of considerations of the impact of change in policies, systems and practices.'