Early Years Professional Status: Past and Future

At the beginning of the twenty first century, a number of reports (for example Laming 2003 and Ofsted reports of some day-care settings, e.g., Ward 2005) indicated that the UK was were seriously failing the very young in English society, resulting in the production of The Every Child Matters (2003) agenda. 

In October 2005, the Early Education Advisory Group in England proposed that there should be a new early years leading practitioner role that, while encompassing many of the features of the existing nursery teacher role, also embraced social and most importantly, emotional development at a more informed level, developing the complex blend of skills and knowledge to lead a multi-agency child care and education team in the new Sure Start Children’s Centres, which had begun to provide a complex range services for children aged birth to five years and their families. Many high profile early years research projects, in particular, the British-based Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) project (2003 Online) produced findings indicating that outcomes for children, particularly those from a background of disadvantage, were improved when practice in the setting was lead by a graduate. It was therefore additionally agreed that these new Early Years leaders should be trained at university level, most particularly becoming experts in child development theory and practice relating to working with parents and families, particularly those with children under three.
 
The role of Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) developed from this basis, under the administration of the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC), a QUANGO created in 2005 by the New Labour government. The EYPS project was an attempt to support the most effective concepts and structures of Early Years practice in England, and to move these forward under a new band of leaders who would further develop these for the twenty-first century. The concept of the ‘pedagogue’, which has a long record of success in Scandinavian nations, had a strong influence upon the model drawn up for the Early Years Professional (EYP). The initial requirements for the EYP were stated as follows:

• An in depth understanding of child development from birth to twelve;
• A focus on how children develop and learn; the role of the adult in supporting learning -  about natural science, the arts (dance, music, visual, drama and literature), mathematics, music; 
• Observing, assessing, evaluating and planning learning opportunities, for individual children and groups of children; 
• Working effectively with the most vulnerable children, including children with special educational needs and disabilities;
• Working with parents; working within a multi-agency team, with an understanding of the contribution of other professional disciplines; 
• The ability to listen, to reflect, to critically analyse and to apply in practice, with an emphasis on practitioners as evidence based practitioner researchers; 
• An understanding of the broader social and economic issues that impact on children and families 

(Early Education Advisory Group 2005, Online)

The focus on the wider age range, which had been based upon the notion of children’s centres providing out-of school care for children up to twelve was dropped during the later planning stage of the project in favour of a more concentrated focus on the pre-school birth to five stage. EYPS was eventually shaped into a graduate leadership role for the full range of Early Years settings in England. The resulting training programme was piloted by the CWDC in 2006, and its first full year of national operation commenced in January 2007. 

The stated New Labour government (1997-2010) target was that there was to be at least one Early Years Professional (EYP) leading practice in all Children’s Centres offering daycare by 2010 (two in areas of disadvantage), and at least one EYP in every full day care setting by 2015. EYPS was introduced as a qualification that was to be equivalent to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), but different in nature. However, in practice, when teachers and EYPs began to operate within the same environments some role confusion arose. In particular, the focus for QTS (Early Years) is children between the ages of three and seven years, while EYPS had been designed to focus on children aged between birth and five years; this made for a difficult overlap. Teacher training also emphasises the delivery of specified learning outcomes to children, while EYPS training focused upon a child-led agenda, which required far more theoretical child development content. One of the early solutions to this impasse, introduced by Children’s Centre managers, was to employ teachers under the proviso that they would take an in-service programme to gain EYPS. As time went by those of us who trained EYPs found that they began to be employed under the proviso that they would also take an in-service programme to additionally gain QTS (Early Years). Unfortunately, such grassroots solutions, which worked out reasonably well on a setting-to-setting basis only added to the confusion at the policy-making level, which viewed the developing situation as increasing training costs.

While the EYP role was modeled upon the Scandinavian pedagogue, the British Sure Start project (1998) was modelled upon the US Head Start initiative, which began in 1965 (Head Start 2010). Sure Start was introduced in the 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review, with the New Labour Government’s announcement that it would set up 250 Sure Start Local Programmes in disadvantaged areas around the country. In 2000, the number of Sure Start projects expanded to 524. In what was designated ‘Phase One’ of the Children's Centres programme (2004-06), 800 existing settings were given the status of ‘Children's Centres’. In ‘Phase Two’ (2006- 08), funding was made available to open many more Children’s Centres, taking the overall numbers to 2,500. Most of these additional settings were newly created. By 2010, at the end of ‘Phase Three’, it was intended that there should be 3,500 Centres nationwide (Children, Schools and Families Committee 2010, Online). 

The New Labour government did not however mention the EYP role in this 2010 report, stating instead that ‘The involvement of early years qualified teachers is essential to the ambitions of Children's Centres to provide the highest quality early years experiences… the requirement for early years qualified teacher posts should be increased to achieve this if necessary’. Two months later, they were voted out of office and a new Conservative-Liberal Coalition took over, proposing in their manifesto:

We will take Sure Start back to its original purpose of early intervention, increase its focus on the neediest families, and better involve organisations with a track record of supporting families. We will investigate ways of ensuring that providers are paid in part by the results they achieve. We will refocus funding from Sure Start peripatetic outreach services, and from the Department of Health budget, to pay for 4,200 extra Sure Start health visitors 

(Cabinet Office 2010, p.19).

As such, those 4600 individuals (CWDC figures, March 2010) who qualified as EYPs across the nation over 2006-2010 were only been ignored by the outgoing government that created and funded the status, but were also subsequently side-lined by the incoming Coalition government, who stated an intention to revert to a purely health-oriented model of services for young children and their families. The Coalition government intended to take an entirely new route, funding the training of a nearly identical number of new health visitors to the number of EYPs currently available whose expensive training had already been funded by the state. By 2017, following two subsequent elections, 350 Sure Start Centres, that is 10% of those opened at great expense over the early 2000s, had closed down (Walker 2017).

In 2013, Michael Gove’s Department for Education discontinued Early Years Professional Status, revising it into Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS), altering the skills outcomes to become less about understanding child development and more about managing teaching and learning, with a heavy focus on early literacy (including phonics) and numeracy. This created an even greater overlap with QTS (Early Years) and caused great consternation amongst the early years community (Gaunt 2010). Applicants for EYTS were also required to have the same qualifications and undertake the same skills tests as applicants for QTS (Early Years); however EYTS did not bestow Qualified Teacher Status, with EYTs subsequently having a less obvious career development trajectory and being employed on a lower pay scale than Nursery Teachers. By the end of the 2016 academic year, EYTS training programmes were closing down all over the country due to lack of applicants. Many universities reported that their EYTS graduates were going directly onto early years QTS programmes.

I began employment with a team training Early Years Professionals in January 2007, and left in September 2013. By this time it was clear to me that the creation of a graduate early years expert to lead holistic practice with young children and their families, particularly those living within situations of disadvantage, had been a brief illusion. I had always felt that, within the English care and education system, the role had been poorly framed from the start, and that the EYP should have been conceptualised as a graduate professional to slot into the existing gap: to work with children from birth to three and their families. However, I was hopeful of a future where there would be growing recognition, as we find in other nations, that the early years developmental period stretches from birth to seven, and that we would eventually train EYPs across this age range, possibly with an option to specialise in birth to three or three to seven. In reality, this never came to pass and in the England of 2018, this prospect seems as far from realisation as it did at the end of the 20th century. 

But it is still possible that a change of government may change the early years landscape. There is still also the potential for the brief English EYPS project to share its experience with other English-speaking nations. Scotland in particular may be an ideal location for such a project, with its booming Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) aware nation project and its growing synergy with the Nordic awareness of human developmental issues; the culture from which the role of the pedagogue originates.

References

Cabinet Office (2010) The Coalition: Our Programme for Government. Available online at: <http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/files/2010/05/coalition-programme.pdf> Accessed 1st July 2010.

Children, Schools and Families Committee (2010) Fifth Parliamentary Report- Sure Start Children's Centres. Available at: <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmchilsch/130/13002.htm>  Accessed 24th July 2010.

Crown, H. (2016) Providers cut EYT courses due to low demand. Nursery World. Available at: https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/news/1157040/providers-cut-eyt-courses-due-to-low-demand Accessed 8th October 2017

DCSF (2010) The History of Sure Start. Available at: <http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/earlyyears/surestart/surestartchildrenscentres/history/history/> Accessed 31^st July 2010. 

DfES (2003) Every Child Matters, Green Paper. The Stationary Office. London.

Early Education Advisory Group (EEAG ) (2005) Annex 3, Paper 05/5/9, Item M available at: <http://www.tda.gov.uk/upload/resources/doc/b/boardoct05_early_years_teachers_c.doc> Accessed 2^nd April 2008

Gaunt, C. (2013) Anger at proposals to replace EYPs with EYTs. Nursery World. Available at: https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/news/1097569/anger-proposals-replace-eyps-eyts Accessed 8th October 2017.

Laming, W. (2003) The Victoria Climbe Report. Available at: <http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Society/documents/2003/01/28/climbiereport.pdf> Accessed 26^th July 2010.

Android Nation?

As the summer approaches, it is time for me to turn away from blogging and towards more extended academic writing. So I thought I would put together an overall reflection on some of the issues that I have been exploring in this ‘sandbox’ blog and other blogging sites over the past academic year. Those that stand out most prominently are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and a lack of understanding of child development in public policy making, which in the past year, has given rise to the OFSTED document Bold Beginnings and the DFE plans to ‘baseline’ test 48 month old human beings.

The more I contemplate these points, the more I see them as related symptoms of something that is becoming increasingly being lost in western society; a conception of ourselves as ‘real’ human beings rather than as manufactured androids; as organic creatures who have evolved to undertake a long developmental process which involves complex physical, social and emotional processes alongside and interacting with the development of intellectual skills.

I have written some extensively referenced blogs on various facets of this topic, but here I am simply going to ask the overall question: why does our current government insist upon wasting increasingly scare public funds on developing academic tests for children who have only been alive for a very short period of time, while so many families live in impoverished conditions which impact upon their physical and mental health, and create conditions in which recent research indicates that children’s stress coping mechanisms are likely to be poorly calibrated, predisposing them to poor mental and physical health in later life?

It seems to me I have asked this question over and over again in various texts over the last few years, and never received a satisfactory answer. The most prominent response; a proposal that such tests are necessary to make adults ‘accountable’ is dysfunctional on several different levels, most importantly because the children are simply too neuronally young for any accurate projections to be made relating to their future competencies, but possibly of even greater concern, because if a government distrusts the adults involved in children’s care and education to such a great extent, there must be something very wrong with the social cohesion of such a society.

When I first received my PhD, I envisioned a very different professional environment to the one I have experienced over the past decade. Reception, the school year in which most of my research observations had taken place, had recently been taken out of the National Curriculum, and placed under a new, more developmentally informed set of guidelines created for the care and education of children aged 3-5 called the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (2000). The care and education for children aged birth to three was governed by a set of guidelines entitled Birth to Three Matters, which had been drawn from an extensive state funded literature review of early childhood development. By the end of the decade, the two sets of guidelines were combined in The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) (2007), a child-led, play-based statutory framework for practice with children birth to five. The government had also put funding aside for up-skilling the early years workforce, and for a new graduate role in early years practice, the Early Years Professional who was to be trained in the facilitation of play-based learning.

The Children’s Plan, published in December 2007, set out the aspirations of the Brown New Labour Government for the further development of children’s services in England from 2008-2020, which included the provision of play areas and a comprehensive review of the primary curriculum, including the consideration of a more gradual transition from play-based learning to a more formal curriculum for 6-7 year olds. There was also a pledge to eradicate child poverty by 2020; but in reality in 2018, child poverty levels are higher than they were in the 2000s, with children as the members of contemporary British society most likely to be poor.

A decade later, the most obvious question is- so what happened?  A worldwide recession and a change of government, yes, that much is obvious. The decision to leave the European Union has also had a destabilising effect on British society in general. But when did we start to construct our youngest, most vulnerable children, and the adults who care for and educate them in such a very different way, and over such a very short period of time? When did we begin, as a society, to actually believe that it was more important to use public money to formally test tiny children than to enhance their daily lives and optimise their physical and emotional development? Why did this happen? These are troubling questions for troubling times, and I am going to give them a lot of consideration over this coming summer.