Raising the status of the early years workforce is something that Nursery World has campaigned for over many decades, and increasing the employment of graduates is obviously a positive move.
Making sure that the worth of those graduates is understood and valued is vital too. So replacing the Early Years Professional Status with Early Years Teacher Status looks on the face of it to be a good idea in terms of a name that is higher ‘status’ and better understood by parents and everybody else.
The change followed the Nutbrown Review of qualifications, which recommended a new early years teaching specialist qualifcation. At the time, there were concerns about the fate of the 12,000 or so EYPs who had worked so hard to gain their status, with fears that this would be worth nothing or that they would have to retrain.
Government reassurances followed that the new qualification would build on EYPSand be viewed as equivalent to EYTS.
But Professor Nutbrown had envisaged a new route that would offer QTS, and the decision not to do this has contributed greatly to the situation now where a good number of EYITT providers have pulled out of offering the course (see our investigation, pages 6-7).
EYPS as a clearly separate course seemed not to have the recruitment problems of EYTS, or the same exodus on to the QTS courses that lead to a better career path and pay. Could it be that instead of calling graduates ‘teachers’ but not making them QTS, you would actually be better calling them something different?
Of course, the Education White Paper proposes doing away with QTS all together, and the Workforce Strategy is due, so let’s hope we can emerge with a helpful solution.