A Tyrannosaurus Rex looms over a large metal bowl filled with sand and small-world dinosaurs in one of our early years settings. Wooden cable reels and crates turned on their sides enticingly display more carefully chosen provocations, and a nearby reading corner is covered with a sparkly canopy and filled with a cosy rug and cushions beside a range of picturebooks. We want our settings to be magical and feel like a warm hug every day the children are here.
We purposefully strive to provide the most engaging and rich environment possible in order to fully support the unique needs of the children in our care who are growing up in military families and living a transient life around the world. Defence Children Services looks after Ministry of Defence schools and nurseries on military bases across the globe. We provide support and advice to ensure that all Service children have every opportunity to achieve their full potential. There are seven Defence Children Services in the organisation – four in military bases in Cyprus, where I am based, with the others in the ‘Rest of the World’: Brunei, Germany and Gibraltar, which my fellow early years advisor oversees.
Families can be stationed abroad for a range of periods, but two of our bases in Cyprus are mainly served by Regiment Infantry Battalions, which generally move en masse every two years, or even less, as they are posted to other places around the globe. This leads to some children frequently saying goodbye to friends and trusted adults and moving home. With this in mind, we have worked hard to design settings where there is a strong emphasis on positive transitions, a home from home feel and a curriculum that young children can easily access in order to thrive.
OUR JOURNEY
As a collective group of settings in Cyprus, we have been focusing on our development and journey for the past 18 months. Although we have been affected by Covid in Cyprus, our lockdowns were not as long as in the UK and we were still able to undertake our project.
The Cyprus early years settings opened in autumn 2017 in brand-new, purpose-built buildings. They range in size from 25 to 78 children on roll and offer full daycare and education alongside wraparound provision for school-aged children. The settings have developed rapidly in the past few years and are now growing in size as they offer care and education to birth to three-year-olds, and in the near future, our three- and four-year-old children will move into the settings in some locations from school-based nurseries to further develop a cohesive approach whereby teaching staff and early years practitioners come together to embed a high standard of teaching and learning.
We have also focused on getting qualified practitioners to lead the settings, and now employ permanent senior leaders in them all. The rest of the workforce is a heavily weighted mix of British nationals who already live in Cyprus and dependants of serving personnel. Employing people from military families can have its own challenges as many of them leave us after two to three years when their partners are deployed, which leads to a regular turnover of staff.
To date, our journey in Cyprus has consisted of:
- looking at our children and families and their own unique needs and set of circumstances
- deciding upon the collective pedagogy for our settings, which would underpin our curriculum offer
- examining how we can develop and care for our workforce so we can ensure they have the highest quality of continuing professional development and on-the-job training to maintain consistent high-quality practice.
A COLLECTIVE PEDAGOGY
We based our curriculum on the needs of our children; discussing what we wanted children to know and to do. So that our children have the highest quality of early years education, we believe we need to have the most engaging and enriching environment possible. Our children move regularly and often do not have the roots to call home. Despite this, when examining our children’s needs, we found them to be resilient, independent and adaptable. We wanted to build on their unique circumstances and ensure that our settings are where they can flourish, regardless of how long they are with us for. In order to achieve this, we decided to use a shared approach to our pedagogy:
Adventures with Alice: To develop our staff and secure our pedagogy across all four settings, we engaged early years expert and trainer Alice Sharp to provide training (see ‘Staff development’). We have also subscribed to her Adventures with Alice programme, which we feel is engaging and accessible for all levels of staff, including those who are embarking on a career in the early years. We use the magazines and films individually and in team training sessions to look at different aspects of our practice, think about theory and research and use this to reflect on what we are doing. They are good for challenging thinking and inspiring best practice.
Curiosity Approach: We have adopted a curiosity-style approach because we wanted our settings to feel welcoming and homely, due to the transient nature of our community. We want our children to have exciting opportunities every day. STEM plays an integral part of our offer because we aim for children to be inquisitive and wonder about the world around them.
Both these pedagogies have shaped our thinking and the resources and experiences that we provide for our children.
WHAT WE OFFER
We make sure we offer all the brilliant and exciting learning opportunities that living in a hot country with a rich cultural background provides – fun on the beach, Mediterranean cuisine, children learning about, growing and eating native fruits and vegetables. We also offer some opportunities that our children don’t always have by being posted abroad too – the joy of jumping in a muddy puddle, the excitement of climbing a tree in the forest and the cosiness of sharing a book together in a nook. We have access to free flow onto our covered veranda outdoors at all time and offer all the curriculum both indoors and out.
Our managers meet regularly and discuss the needs of our children and families in order to ensure that our curriculum has the highest expectations for our children. We ensure our staff focus on process over product and our planning is led by the needs of the children on what they can already do and what they need next. There is lots of opportunity for repetition and skill development in our continuous provision.
We noticed that our children who move frequently often need extra support with developing language and communication, so this is at the very heart of what we do, and we develop this every day. We want our children to be confident talkers and have a wide-ranging set of vocabulary.
Through our playful and engaging interactions, we encourage our children to talk, ask questions and actively investigate. We talk with our children all of the time. Every interaction is a learning opportunity and we use our interactions to the full potential by developing our children as thinkers and talkers.
In our environment, we offer lots of books in all our areas – fiction and non-fiction – as we want to encourage all our children to love reading and enjoy sharing a book with our key persons, our family and our friends.
We aim to be inclusive of everyone and really celebrate culture from all over the world and celebrate the wide range of cultures not only on the island but within the military community. Our curriculum is enhanced by drawing on the expertise of our community and other wonderful experiences, such as Fijian dancers, celebrating Black culture, cooking and baking using recipes from around the world and sampling different foods during meals and at snack time.
Children have to get to know their new community every time they move so our community is at the very heart of our provision. We take children out to explore – taking walks around the garrison, visiting the church, the fire station and the shops. We take children to buy our ingredients for our cooking locally and go to the bakery on base to buy our snacks. We are invited to observe parades and marches – seeing the military bands and vehicles, including armoured tanks, is impressive. We also invite people from the community into the setting to see the children and share with the children their jobs. We love having people from a range of diverse roles within the military visit us including the military dentist, doctors, vets, the Padre, commanding officers and pilots, to name a few! The military chefs even served Christmas dinner to children and staff.
As our children live far from their extended families, we encourage families to send in photos of relatives and videos to get them involved too. We use these in different ways; for example, during our careers aspirations week, grandparents, aunts and uncles sent us films and photos of their jobs back at home. It keeps us in contact with our families and friends back in the UK and supports the children to see life outside of the military.
Transitions for all
A lot of our practice is developed around the fact that our cohort of children move frequently. While some come from other early years settings in the UK or other countries, many of our children have never been to a setting before.
In order for the transition to be a happy one, we ensure that it is as long as the child and parent needs it for. Importantly, the transition process starts with a home visit.
Each child is allocated a key person, and that relationship starts to be built on the home visit where they meet and play with the children, share the setting’s prospectus with the parents and talk about our ethos and vision. We want to make sure we find out as much as possible about the child and their family before they arrive at the setting – their background, needs, interests, likes and dislikes – so that we can ensure that our environment is set up to support them.
The key person is responsible for welcoming the child and family when they come in for settling-in sessions, which are unique to that individual child. They monitor how the child is settling and liaise with the parents to decide how long to leave the child for and how many sessions to have before attending nursery fully, on which day they will be present for support too. Children who may have additional needs also have a team around the family.
Parent workshops help parents to also feel welcome and form part of the journey of understanding why we do what we do in our nurseries and how they can further support their child at home. Our families love our parent workshops and they provide the opportunity for them to meet other families living on the base.
Our community and family hub and outreach work have been an integral part of showcasing the setting and introducing the early years to families that would not normally have come into a nursery. We have spent a lot of time busting myths as parents often think that the nurseries are only available to those who work. We wanted to ensure all our families and children access high-quality provision and that it is universal for all, not just for our families with working parents.
We offer weekly Stay and Plays, joint partnership work with Home Start, our midwives and health visitors work from the setting, and we offer groups such as breastfeeding groups and parenting support.
Staff development
The vast majority of our staff are partners of serving personnel so only stay with us for two to three years. While our staff are here in Cyprus, we want to ensure that they receive the highest quality of support, development and training both with formal early years qualifications and with a training programme offered by each setting.
We focus on ensuring our induction into the setting is smooth and clear so each staff member feels supported and understands how we work with and develop our youngest children. We spend a lot of time in ensuring our staff know our pedagogy and know why we do what we do and we coach and model how to plan, interact and play with our children.
We spend time working with our staff on how to set up the environment and learning opportunities for children and ensure we discuss our provocations and why we are doing what we are doing. Our settings focus on professional love and care for our children and each other. We look after our staff’s wellbeing by ensuring they have everything they need to look after and educate our children. We really do value our staff and have a spotlight of a staff member of the week. We also ensure that our staff are supported by initiatives within each setting to promote staff wellbeing and belonging. We support our staff with mindfulness, gifts, flowers and make sure they have a lovely inspirational quote to help if anyone is having a challenging day.
All staff can receive training and their own mentor and assessor to achieve Level 2 and 3 Early Years Educator, as well as a personalised plan. We ensure that at whatever level a staff member comes into the setting, they leave much more knowledgeable and skilful.
We ensure all of our staff receive support and training on child development and particularly the brain development through our ‘Adventures with Alice’ programme as well as training using our ‘Curiosity Crib’ package. Staff use training materials, articles and professional research to discuss in teams. In two of our settings we have training rooms where staff can use the resources in there to work with other colleagues, and we have a variety of professional reading material.
Annually, we also have a joint Cyprus and Rest of World Early Years Conference. This year, the Curiosity Approach founders Stephanie Bennett and Lyndsey Hellyn will be joining us.
FURTHER INFORMATION
- Adventures With Alice: https://alicesharp.co.uk
- Curiosity Approach: www.thecuriosityapproach.com