Degrees of success - a graduate workforce

If more early years workers had degrees, it would improve pay, status and quality throughout the profession, says Pamela Calder

Without properly resourcing an early childcare and education profession, I believe our children are never going to receive the care and education service they deserve.

Education secretary David Blunkett has said he expects 50 per cent of the population to have graduate qualifications in the future. Given that we tend to value and pay people with respect to the standard and length of their education, those who look after our children should also be well and appropriately educated. There is every reason, as well as research evidence (Whitebook 1989), to indicate that the value that society places on the work that professional childcarers are doing is likely to affect both their keenness and self-esteem and thus the way in which they relate to the children they are looking after.

But we are not in the happy position of having a valued early years workforce in Britain, since the majority of those who look after our children, such as childminders, nannies, and au pairs, have no required education and training. Even those who look after our children in day nurseries are only required to have a two-year post-16 diploma acquired in further education, or an NVQ3, a qualification gained through a fallible system of checklisting competences. Only nursery teachers are currently required to be graduates, with a six-year education and training post-16, four years of them in higher education. However this only qualifies them for work with children aged over three, but not younger. There is also a problem with the content of their training with respect to children over three, because the necessity for all teachers to be conversant with the national curriculum, even though it does not apply to children under five, inappropriately narrows their knowledge and experience.

Several European countries have more coherent policies, and a better-educated and better-paid workforce. For example, Sweden ensures that staff have higher education early years training in all group settings, and other countries such as Spain have more recently moved towards this position. In addition, many of these countries have more extensive public provision for the early years than we do, spending three or four times more.

And yet as a country our prosperity is not so different from Sweden or France or Finland that we could not afford to pay for professionally qualified educators. In both Sweden and France the early years system is an almost universal public service and in Finland every child has the right to a childcare place from birth, with highly qualified educators.

We are a long way away from this in Britain. Apart from a few graduate nursery teachers - who are not qualified to look after the youngest children - the majority of staff are low- paid, on the minimum wage at best. It is not surprising that most of those who look after children do not see it as a long-term career and that turnover is high. A conservative estimate is that one in every five of registered childminders or volunteers in playgroups leave their jobs every year.

Nursery managers are often unhappy with the current training and qualifications of the staff available to them.
The Independent Day Nursery Workforce survey in 1998 revealed that many managers are dissatisfied with the quality of the staff they can recruit. This dissatisfaction can include doubts about ability to do the job, even in those supposedly qualified who hold an NVQ3 in early childhood care and education. In the local authority sector, many childcare advisors have been unhappy with the content and level of the childcare qualifications, including the Diploma in
Nursery Nursing, that their qualified staff have. They see deficiencies in understanding, experience and knowledge; in skills of organisation and planning; in communication skills such as report writing or working with parents or with other professionals.

Part of the general neglect of the sector has included a paucity of research into the impact of staff qualifications, particularly for children from birth to age three. Most of the potentially relevant research has been in relation to mothers - fathers have not been included - and investigators have related the sensitivity of mothers to the security of attachment that their children have with them.

British research on the importance of nursery staff has concentrated on research in nursery settings with three- to five-year-old children and has focussed on cognitive outcomes. The research has indicated that children who have been in nursery school
settings and thus with staff with graduate qualifications have better scores in reading or maths tests once they are at school compared with children who have been in other nursery settings without such graduate-qualified staff.

A current longitudinal study, The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project, funded by the DfEE, should soon be able to provide direct evidence relating staff qualifications to a number of outcomes. Preliminary findings already suggest that nursery schools, classes, and combined centres, are likely to score more highly than other settings on measures of nursery quality, such as better scores on both the cognitive and communicative sections of an early childhood environment rating scale (the ECERS). The staff relate more sensitively to the children and also provide better support for their cognitive development.

Recent American research, carried out in daycare settings with children both younger and older than three (Howes 1997), has looked at the impact of different staff qualifications. The findings show that staff holding a BA in early childhood education are likely, compared with others with lower qualifications, to be more sensitive and responsive to the children in their care.

So how can we achieve change in Britain? It was to try to rectify the split between care and education, and the split in training between those concerned with under-threes and those with over-threes, that a number of educators and early childhood professionals came together in the early 1990s, to argue for the establishment of early childhood studies (ECS) degrees.

By 1993 Bristol University and Suffolk University College had set up the first full-time ECS degrees and others had started part-time degrees. Since then at least 18 higher education institutions run full-time ECS degrees and another nine offer full-time childhood studies degrees, which include older children and sometimes youth studies. And there are at least an additional 13 part-time degrees. So far graduates have gone on to further studies including teacher and social work training. Several are nursery managers running early excellence centres, family centres or their own nurseries. Sue Clutterbuck from Suffolk University College says one of its students has become an adviser for the QCA and one an early years manager for the local social services area team.

The ECS degree now needs to be developed as a required qualification. The integrated training framework being developed by the QCA currently accepts the old division between care and education, since the framework both explicitly excludes nursery teaching but also implicitly sees the job as the pinnacle of achievement - as the main career aspiration of nursery workers. This is despite the flaws mentioned previously.

I believe that it should be the ECS degree, with additional supervised practice, that should be at the pinnacle of achievement and become the main required qualification for those working with children between birth and compulsory school age. In the meantime, there should be some intermediate steps to develop those with existing qualifications.

We need a core of publicly-funded institutions for children from birth to compulsory school age. This may or may not be supplemented by other private provision, for which some form of public subsidy would still be generally necessary. There are several ways in which a public subsidy can be delivered and different European countries have developed various models.

To make graduate training improve services in the long term, staff would have to be paid more. Can we afford it? Other countries manage to do so. It is a matter of the choices we want to make and the value we place on our children.        

Pamela Calder (BA, MSc, C.Psychol, AFBPsS) is senior lecturer in psychology at South Bank University, London and also convenor of the Early Childhood Studies Degrees Network