Under-threes: Close encounters

The task of remaining 'professional' under the emotional pressures of nursery work with the youngest children is examined by Peter Elfer

Nearly two years ago, partly in celebration of the 90th birthday of Elinor Goldschmied, I wrote an article for Nursery World about children aged under three in nursery. Many readers will be familiar with Elinor's work in nurseries, particularly heuristic play and treasure baskets. Her great achievement has been as an advocate for babies and toddlers.

She has shown to a wide audience that babies are far removed from their conventional image of just crying, filling nappies, feeding and sleeping. Her work shows the intensity of babies' capacity to engage, delight and worry adults, to scrutinise faces and to examine objects using eyes, mouth and hands with the inquiry and concentration of an apprentice scientist or artist.

Since that article, babies and toddlers have continued to move up the public agenda. Just before Christmas the Sure Start unit launched Birth to three matters, a national framework for effective practice in working with children under three. This is the first official framework dedicated to just this age range.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Professor Lesley Abbott, who led the development of the framework. It reflects the holistic development of children, places relationships and the role of the key worker at the heart of healthy development, and is practical and easy to use on a daily basis. Most important, it is not a curriculum for the under-threes.

But the critical question is: will it make a difference to the quality of what babies and toddlers experience in nursery? How will it be used to support the complex work done by nursery staff, and what else needs to happen to raise standards of practice?

Many professionals are anxious that quality for babies and toddlers should not be measured by narrow learning goals, perhaps watered down from the Foundation Stage curriculum. These professionals would focus much more on babies' ability to cope away from key adults at home and on the intricacies of first friendships and being part of a social community at nursery. Why do some nurseries seem to do this so well, so that even a visitor senses quickly that this is a nursery where they would feel happy to leave their baby, while in other nurseries, advisers and inspectors report feelings of concern?

The difference between these nurseries lies in two related factors:

• how well staff members know the children for whom they are responsible and how close they can allow children to be
  
  
• how much managers value staff and understand staff members' feelings about their day-to-day interactions with children and other staff.

Closer to children

The 'in-built' challenge of nursery work is that it is impossible to spend time with individual children without the child forming a close relationship with particular adults. Yet many staff are concerned when babies and young children express their pleasure and reliance on these close relationships, or their distress when key people are not available to them.

The reality of nursery provision is that we ask nursery staff, as a matter of routine daily practice, to make close, sensitive, responsive relationships with the babies and toddlers in their care, but to do so with a measure of professional detachment.

I thought I understood well the complexity of this balancing act. But it was brought home to me even more forcibly recently while observing in a small private nursery in the Midlands.

My observations had focused on three specific children, but a fourth child, Thomas, aged 18 months, had become friendly towards me. In my experience of observing in nursery, it is not unusual for children to make overtures, wanting to offer me toys or write on my notebook.

Previously successful techniques of responding to these overtures with a brief, low-key response fail completely with Thomas. Other children would soon turn away, disappointed or bored by my minimalist response. Not Thomas. He is persistent in placing toys on my lap, vocalising to me with intense eye contact and head gestures, and standing close to me in a kind of hugging embrace. If I move, Thomas finds me, approaching me once more with exuberance, more toys, vocalisations, and occasionally physical contact.

The staff's response to this has been partly to stand back, as if they are concerned not to interfere or change this interaction, and partly to be amused. They seem to say 'now you know what we have to manage!'

During the most recent visit, I enter the room discreetly. Some children look up and some continue their activities. Thomas looks up and breaks into a big smile. I am uncertain how the staff feel about my presence, but there is no uncertainty with Thomas. He places three tractors in my lap and runs to fetch more. I place them on the floor beside me. Thomas puts them back in my lap and adds some more. I stroke his back as he stands next to me smiling. However, I feel conscious of the staff watching.

What are they thinking?

• That I am being unprofessional by being more responsive to Thomas than other children?
• That my competence to relate equally to all children is in question?
• That they resent me because of the strength of Thomas's response?

I find myself looking round for some guidance or reassurance, and then I realise that I am beginning to experience much of what staff have so often described about the challenges and dilemmas of working with children away from their homes and families.

Overlooked staff

Nursery staff have to manage these feelings day in, day out, and in the absence of opportunities to talk over their relationships with children with a more senior member of staff, they understandably take self-protective measures. The inherent painfulness of children's dependence and loss when they move rooms is sometimes minimised or laughed off. They may emphasise sharing the care of children with colleagues and avoiding individual relationships. Or they may admit special feelings about individual children, only in a slightly guilty way. One of the most common themes that staff express in interviews is that their work is not understood well by senior nursery managers. In addition, because of the emphasis on 'educational goals' in many nurseries, staff feel that managers overlook or take for granted social goals such as helping babies and toddlers form their friendships. As a result, staff in babies' rooms and one- and two-year-olds' rooms can feel that they are overlooked or that their work is less important than that done with the three- and four-year-olds. Even when managers try to be available to their staff, popping into baby rooms regularly and having an open door policy on their office, it seems something more is needed.

Some nurseries are providing more by establishing a system of regular staff supervision. Once a month, a staff member has perhaps a 30-minute meeting with a more senior member of staff away from the demands of the children to discuss their work with individual children. Taking the trouble to organise such a system is a powerful managerial statement that the staff and their work are recognised and valued.

Nursery heads may wonder how they can possibly afford such a system, as it involves staff taking time away from the children and special training for supervisors to ensure that the meetings are used constructively. Otherwise, the meetings may become simple chats away from the children or a semi-counselling service for staff.

However, the cost of failing to address the emotional stress of close work with children should not be discounted. Staff turnover and sickness in nurseries is typically high and the cost of this, both economically and to children and families, is significant.

The Birth to three matters framework offers nurseries an exciting and innovative resource. It is an officially sanctioned statement of how we can most effectively respond to the needs of babies and toddlers as they grow up at home and with childcarers. We now need to turn our attention at a national level to the demands on and the needs of childcarers working with babies and toddlers. The intense emotional demands of their work remains one of the most neglected areas in early years practice.