Opinion

Sarah Mackenzie: 'Trust has fallen off the radar'

In all aspects of early years work, settings and parents rely on trust, but this valuable commodity seems to be scarce in some areas
Sarah Mackenzie: 'Somehow, somewhere, I think trust has fallen off the radar'
Sarah Mackenzie: 'Somehow, somewhere, I think trust has fallen off the radar'

Whatever happened to trust? I’m not sure that we get very far without trust. If children don’t trust us, they can’t learn. If families don’t trust us, they don’t choose us or stay. If our team don’t trust our leaders, there is no commitment, no belief. If leaders don’t trust their team, no-one learns, no culture builds.

Yet somehow, somewhere, I think trust has fallen off the radar. I’m not sure that we place enough emphasis on it. Maybe as we have grown more sophisticated in our approaches to quality assurance and audit, we have lost sight of trust?

We value checking and verifying that our policies and procedures are being followed. It’s important, but it doesn’t replace trust. Trust must be there, and when it isn’t, we need to question why and solve it. If there is no trust, what person, process or priority is driving that?

Trust is a resource. Parents are more informed now than they ever have been; SEND parents, in particular, have an array of information at their fingertips – all at a time when access to local authority SEND support is so limited. Is there a way of us tapping into that resource within families more? Trusting in the parents’ knowledge to benefit the children?

What of those that support us? We recently had an LA visit at one of our settings. The advisor highlighted many positives, but also two issues. One was an in-the-moment lack of judgement by an educator over the appropriateness of a particular resource; right to be flagged, easy to rectify. The other was an issue the advisor had with our deployment policy, stating that the EYFS doesn’t allow for ratios to be adjusted when children are sleeping. When we shared resources such as the DfE blog that showed they can, the advisor didn’t engage to leverage and build trust, instead opting to head straight to Ofsted. Trust broken, and without it, what impact can that relationship have? Luckily, we find that one area where Ofsted builds trust well is its regulatory work and the way it responds to concerns; seeking to understand, rather than jumping to conclusions.

Yet Ofsted does suffer from a trust issue, driven largely by inadequacies in the complaints process. Most Ofsted inspectors, like most LA advisors, get it right. But there must be trust that the processes are there for dealing with the ones that don’t.

When you surround yourself with people you trust, great things happen. So, let’s consciously consider trust a little more. After all, it’s underrated, magic and free.