It takes a special person to be a baby room practitioner,’ says Hannah Saunders, manager at Snapdragons in Keynsham, where up to 42 babies enjoy purpose-built spaces including a Baby Cottage and Baby Barn.
New staff are asked the age of children they prefer to work with, as the setting recognises the difference between working in a baby room and with a pre-school age group.
‘Working with babies isn't for everyone,’ Saunders explains. ‘Sometimes people think it will be easy and they’ll just get to sit and cuddle all day. It's not like that. There's a lot of love and nurture needed, but it can be fast-paced and constant go, go, go. You just sit down for a cuddle and then someone needs their milk. It takes an enthusiastic person who uses their initiative to really jump in on that.’
WIDE RANGE OF SKILLS
Co-originator of the Baby Room Project and chief executive of the Froebel Trust, Sacha Powell, says a baby room practitioner needs a whole wealth of skills to support the youngest children in the most effective way.
‘I don’t know the magic ingredients of a baby room practitioner, but it helps if they really want to work with babies and build trusting relationships with families.
‘They need emotional resilience and the wherewithal to be able to deal with the challenges of the role and respond to each baby's unique needs and interests.
‘It's a physically demanding role. It is also intellectually demanding, as practitioners need to be able to identify and respond to the cues babies give through body language and vocalisation to tell us what they want and need.
‘But I think above all the best baby room practitioners are fascinated by babies, and recognise how brilliant they are. If they don’t recognise that, the work can perhaps be tedious, because they may not be seeing or understanding all the wonderful things that are happening.’
Powell terms the approach required by baby room practitioners a ‘pedagogy of care’.
She explains, ‘It combines teaching and learning with caring, because inevitably there's a lot of functional, physical care involved, alongside emotional and psychological care too.’
It is this mix of duties that Saunders says attracted her to the role.
‘With babies, obviously, every day is different,’ she explains. ‘What works well one day might not work the next. It always involves lots of caregiving and meeting basic needs, like nappy changing and bottle feeding, but you’re also providing babies with new experiences pretty much every day because everything is a new experience for them. That makes it really special.’
MICRO-INTERACTIONS
The significance of these day-to-day interactions makes the baby room practitioner role particularly important, Powell argues.
‘Babies are learning from the womb, and from the minute that they’re born they’re trying to make sense of the world around them. They do that through relationships with other people. So they need very sensitive, nurturing and gentle guidance to enable them to become increasingly autonomous in their learning and development. That takes particular skills in observation and interpretation, which I think makes baby room practice very special and different.’
At Snapdragons, staff prioritise a close relationship with parents, recognising the need for this nurturing guidance. When babies start, staff go through development milestones with families to help them plan according to needs. Six weeks after they start, a baseline assessment is carried out, focusing on the three Prime areas.
In terms of monitoring development on a day-to-day basis, Saunders says the approach is relatively light-touch.
She explains, ‘You do get some children who might not develop how others do, but that's usually absolutely fine. Every baby is different. The more experience you have in the room, the better you are able to sense sometimes just a little sign of some kind of delay, and you just monitor it and look to your practice for what you could do to provide support. You’d be very unlikely to need to call in a professional for anything at this age.’
In her training on quality interaction in the baby room, early language and behaviour consultant Debbie Brace advocates a moment-by-moment approach over too much checking of milestones.
‘I don’t find developmental milestone checking helpful,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to be in the moment with a baby and go with where they’re at, not try to get them to do something they’re not developmentally capable of doing. It's about the connection between you and the baby in the moment, when you’re changing their nappy or getting them down off the highchair. Very responsive caregivers notice the potential for learning and development in these moments and can really give the baby opportunity to take part and express their feelings and ideas. It is all about micro-interactions in the baby room.’
Saunders adds that things can change rapidly at this youngest age.
‘It might be that in the baby room, a child is quite shy, but then when they go to the toddlers’ room and everyone's running around, they become more confident. They might suddenly pick up very quickly on what they had been falling slightly behind on.’
CHALLENGES
With baby rooms usually catering for children aged between birth and two years old, supporting the entire age range can pose a challenge for practitioners.
‘What a six-month-old requires compared to a nearly two-year-old is completely different,’ says Saunders. ‘When you are providing activities and looking at the environment, you need to check it is accessible and inclusive for all, because that age range sees a massive leap in development.’
With a wide variety of routines to follow, baby room practitioners often need to be particularly good at communicating with each other.
‘You have to work closely in a baby room, you need that security,’ Saunders acknowledges. ‘Teamwork is so important, and without it, things go wrong. We always try to follow parents’ routines, but because they are all so different, you need a team to have a strong bond.
‘You need a real connection and good communication skills to keep talking to each other and make sure you relay all the information and make everyone aware. Things change; a child might miss a sleep or go down later than planned, or from a staff perspective, holiday happens, illness happens. It's really important to make sure every staff member understands each baby in thatroom as an individual.’
STATUS AND TRAINING
Since the Baby Room Project dubbed baby room practice a ‘hidden’ aspect of provision, Powell says the status of working with the youngest children has improved, but there is still some progress to make.
She adds, ‘There is more work being done that recognises that baby practitioners are quite different, just as educators working with four-year-olds are different. They’re not all homogeneous. But I suspect that the availability of specialist CPD is patchy.’
The EYFS states that at least half of all baby room staff should receive training that specifically addresses the care of babies, but there is no further clarification as to what that training should cover or how it should be delivered.
Training options such as Mona Sakr's free online course are popular and focus on the role of the baby room leader in particular.
‘I think it is indicative of how things have moved on that we are now not just talking about CPD for working with babies, but also talking about developing baby room leaders,’ says Powell. ‘It's fantastic to have that greater level of complexity and growing recognition that not all practitioners’ roles are the same.’
CAREER PROGRESSION
Indeed, work in the baby room could lead to an upward career trajectory, if managers and leaders recognise the importance of the work.
Saunders started at the nurseryas an 18-year-old apprentice, and went on to become head of babies, then baby unit co-ordinator, then deputy manager before taking over as manager of the setting.
‘I think the willingness to get involved, learn and adapt that is needed in a baby room practitioner is a good sign of how that member of staff works,’ she says. ‘Because it is challenging. As a manager, if I’ve got a really strong head of babies, and I can see how hard she works and how successfully that baby room is running, I know that person is ready for the next step. If you can run a baby room, you can do anything.’
Powell agrees, but warns not everyone sees it like this.
‘A lot of managers say the baby room is the most important room in the setting. It's not the four-year-olds who are about to go to school, it's the baby room, because that's where everything begins. They will have their most skilful practitioners in the baby room. But there are others who don’t feel like that. We really need to think about the extent to which we value and have respect for babies’ learning and development, because that has a knock-on effect for people working with them. Until we have a fundamental shift in the way that we think about babies, when everyone recognises how important the first months of life are, and that babies are human beings with rights as well as needs, the role of the baby room practitioner may not be fully appreciated.’
MORE INFORMATION
Baby Rooms – Inspiring Leaders course: bit.ly/3gUEY7z
Baby talk and play by Debbie Brace: bit.ly/3itMhn3