There is something about the start of September, the beginning of a new academic year, that has always made me feel like I’m being given a nudge to press the reset button.
After months of pandemic and ‘pingdemic’, that reset button had an extra special appeal this year.
I don’t doubt that we have all had different starts to this new term, different challenges, different joy, but the one thing I am sure we have all experienced is the impact of change. Changes to the EYFS framework, changes to the children, families and teams we are working with, changes in isolation rules.
I could let myself feel like I hadn’t pressed the reset button, that I’m just reacting to change. I could say the rest of term will have less change in it, but I’m not sure that is true. In fact, the only thing we can guarantee about the term ahead is that there is bound to be some change within it. Whether that comes in the form of changes around us – Boris is busy making changes over at the Department for Education, after all – or changes within our own worlds.
A lot is said about change, about how we might best pre-empt it, or respond to it. We long for, campaign for and push for certain changes, and rail against others. While logic and philosophy tell us that change is the only constant in life, we seem to approach it as a variable. We ask ourselves how we are going to deal with change, as if it is a rarity that must be managed.
I was recently listening to an interview with an entrepreneur, who said he had grappled for ten years with the question of how he would maintain his company culture as it grew. He spent some time with a business guru, who advised him that if he had grappled with the question for so long, then maybe the question itself was wrong. She said she didn’t know of any cultures that can be maintained – that culture needs to advance, or it dies. She suggested the question that the entrepreneur was trying to answer shouldn’t be how can their culture be maintained while they grow, but rather how can they use their growth to advance their culture.
That struck me, and I wonder whether the same applies to our work in the early years. I feel inclined to stop asking myself ‘how can we manage change within our sector, within our settings?’ and ask a different question instead. Maybe we need to reframe the question and ask ourselves, ‘How we can use the immense amount of change that this sector goes through as an opportunity to advance?’
