A desire to continually improve the wellbeing of children, staff and parents has led the Old School House Nursery in Cambridgeshire to link with early years settings in Norway and develop a project around Non Violent Communication (NVC).
NVC - or 'compassionate communication' - is a model of communication developed by Marshall Rosenberg, founder of the Center for NVC in the United States, which has been taken up worldwide in nurseries, schools and hospitals and many other settings to support relationship-based work. Benefits it can deliver include fewer conflicts, increased skill in mediating conflicts, greater happiness among children in their setting, more listening to each other and more engaged learning.
Old School House director Linda Baston-Pitt says, 'We recognise how important it is that adults are provided with the tools they need to help children develop social abilities, which will in turn enable them to solve problems without resorting to aggression or violence.
'This has motivated me to develop this project. Following a visit to Norway in December, relations have now been forged between our nursery and colleagues in Norway and Sweden, who have been successfully using the NVC method for a number of years.'
Staff from the Old School House will visit their partners and work on joint projects over the next two years through the Comenius programme, which is funded by the European Commission and managed in the UK by the British Council. The programme provides funding and professional development to enable staff across Europe to work together and learn about each other's communication methods.
Linda Baston-Pitt says she has a number of key objectives, which include establishing an international network of early years leaders and practitioners, communicating using the NVC model and promoting training initiatives to develop the knowledge, skill and understanding of it in professional life.
'The more I discover about NVC the more inspired I become,' she says. 'It was a wonderful experience to be able to visit Norway and a privilege to have the company of colleagues in a Norwegian kindergarten.
'We are aiming to create a joint learning experience and sustainable collaboration between partners through this commitment to enhancing non- violent communication. In its broadest sense, we hope the project will contribute to developing a sense of unity and a common understanding of what we want for the children of Europe.'