Last week, I attended the final meeting of the Baby Room project expert working group. It has been a privilege to have been part of this wonderful initiative led by Kathy Goouch and Sacha Powell of Canterbury Christ Church University.
Their work with baby room practitioners in a range of nurseries has shown that those staff who tend to have the least support and status can make huge gains in confidence, knowledge and practice, particularly benefiting from discussions with their peers in other settings. This can only be good for staff, parents and, most importantly, the babies themselves.
Although this project has now come to a close, there is interest in other areas in doing something similar, and it would be great if this sort of work could be replicated on a larger scale.
The lack of training and career development for baby room practitioners is certainly something for the Nutbrown Review to take into account. And responses to the EYFS review have also indicated that early years professionals would like more guidance on working with the under-threes.
We know already that Birth to Three Matters will be available on the Foundation Years website. And the new Development Matters will also be invaluable, especially if it can give due prominence to the key characteristics of learning.
Our series by Jan Dubiel, 'How children learn', reaches part 2 in this issue of Nursery World (see pages 19-22), with an in-depth look at the elements of 'Active Learning', one of the three key characteristics of effective teaching and learning identified in the Tickell Review of the EYFS. The importance of process over content needs to be kept in mind.