Love is no longer all you need

When one thinks of the Beatles song, ‘All you need is love’, or Sue Gerhardt’s book on childcare, ‘Why Love Matters’, you might wonder if ‘love’ is all that counts in early years work and feel qualifications matter less. We all know practitioners with impressive lists of qualifications who just do not seem to cut it with children and families. 

However, ‘love’, if it ever was, is no longer enough and the right qualification does matter. The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education study highlighted the difference graduate qualifications made to quality of provision. The more recent Sound Foundations Report on under-threes made a similar point. 

How far do we need to go down this road of more and more qualifications? How difficult can working with young children be? Last March, this appeared in the London Evening Standard newspaper: 'My son was barely detached from his placenta when a fellow father enquired whether we had enrolled him for nursery yet…This was before I discovered that most London nurseries charge Eton-like prices….Nothing fancy: just a friendly childminder helping out a few hours a week while she keeps up her career.'

This was a new father speaking so why should he understand the complexities of early years work? Yet he reinforces the view that working with young children is merely ‘helping out’.  One of the achievements of the early years profession during the past 40 years has been to show the complexity of young children’s early learning and to highlight how developing their thinking and exploration is skilled work.

Enabling young children’s emotional development is even more complex. Practitioners are expected to build emotional bonds with children whilst never forgetting they need to maintain some professional distance. They are further called upon to do all this whilst being sensitive to safeguarding and parents’ feelings. Getting these relationships right in ordinary parenting is difficult enough. It is immensely complex with other people’s children.

On top of this, successive Governments expect more and more from early years services. The emphasis on measurement of children’s progress in primary schools is reflected in similar pressures on early years services. . Health promotion, integrated assessments, better safeguarding and closer partnership with families are all on the list of demands.

At my own university in Roehampton, we’ve recognised the need among early years staff for greater understanding in this area. We’ve specifically re-structured our post-graduate MA in early years studies, practice and leadership to meet this need. Our aim, underpinned by Froebelian principles, is to support the continued development of a post-graduate level qualified early years profession.

If early years was mainly a matter of following technical instructions in a manual, it would be easier. However, there is not one ‘best’ way to get all this right. Research evidence can help. But there will always be judgements to be made and uncertainties to be managed. It is why so many professions are looking to grow and develop not only deep level theoretical knowledge, but the capacities and self-confidence of leaders who can cope with complexity and uncertainty. In many professions and particularly early years, the most effective practitioners seems to be the ones who manage uncertainty by listening to many different perspectives, who can encouraging thinking and reflection, who can be creative, and who can resist the pressure to come up with simplistic solutions. 

This is why there is a need for much more than ‘love’. Formal, practical training and academic study can give the confidence to understand where the boundaries are, how to deal with the increasing demands from all quarters and how best to structure often complex relationships.

Continuous Professional Development is not always easy in nursery and early years settings, but as much as the need for children to learn whilst at nursery has grown during the past decade or two, so has the need for those who support them to be educated in latest thinking and practices in their field.

• Dr Peter Elfer is Principal Lecturer in Early Years at the University of Roehampton. p.elfer@roehampton.ac.uk