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.

Reggio Emilia: A Triumph for Maternalism

Maternalism in the Present 

I reached one of those sad watersheds in my life in February: my mother died. She didn’t have covid; she had Alzheimers for nearly a decade, she was ninety-two, and her passing was not unexpected. But as always, such events give rise to reflection. In 2010 as she first began to decline into her final illness, I dedicated my book ‘The Early Years Professional’s Complete Companion’ to her, commenting

‘My mother was born two days after British women finally achieved the franchise on the same basis as men: what a long way both you, and we have travelled in your lifetime.’

Optimistic words. But how far have we really travelled, as women, particularly in our role as mothers?

This is something I explored in one of my chapters in ‘Everyday Social Justice’ in 2019, from the perspective that while women engaging in paid work outside the home gradually became more normalised by socio-political changes in the last quarter of the twentieth century, they still faced a formidable level of social control, particularly in their role as mothers, feeling squeezed between the demands of paid work and family labour, whilst being relentlessly evaluated in both roles; an issue that has grown with the advent of mass online media and social media.

In 2019, Yinka Olusoga and I questioned:

‘A culture of performativity and compliance... make[ing] teachers, children and parents alike feel that they are compelled to comply with its demands...broadcast[ing], in the manner of Star Trek’s Borg collective, ‘Resistance is futile’ – a message designed to ensure mass capitulation.’

McRobbie writes of a “mediated” maternalism which has resulted in ‘previous historical affiliations between social democracy and feminism which aimed to support women as mothers [being] dismantled and discredited’ (McRobbie 2013, p.128).

“Maternalism” (Koven 1993) is a communal alliance between those who work together (including men) to support the well-being of young children, particularly those from socio-economically deprived backgrounds. Its origins track back into history; but at one point in the past, it briefly burned brightly on the national stage, before sinking back into near oblivion in the wake of the Great Depression.

Maternalism in the Past 

During the early 1920s, as the rights of women were being hotly debated in Parliament, Inverness-born Margaret McMillan, the founder-manager of an internationally celebrated nursery school, brought together an alliance of apparently powerful women- Queen Mary (1867-1963) and the first two women to serve as MPs in the House of Commons, wealthy socialite Conservative Nancy (Lady) Astor (1879-1964) and committed feminist Liberal Margaret Winteringham (1879-1955) to put the case for state-funded nursery schools on the national agenda (Jarvis and Liebovich 2016).

But despite the apparently high status of this alliance, the venture proved to be perilous, and forms the basis for the insecure status that many early years settings endure in the present. McMillan’s efforts to re-create her practice in a national network of nursery schools did not meet with success due to lack of funding forthcoming from the government, and her sense of failure blighted the final years of her life (Jarvis and Liebovich 2016)

In 1932, the year after McMillan’s death, her ex-student, Miriam Lord, Superintendent (head teacher) of Lilycroft Nursery in Bradford led a protest against Bradford Education Authority’s decision to impose a limit of one-third of a pint of milk a day upon children in their nursery schools. It is a situation that continues today, nearly a century later, in the £20 per week benefit cuts recently imposed by another Conservative government, in an era where 31% of the nation’s children are officially designated as ‘poor.’

Lord’s nursery was located in an area of great socio-economic deprivation where poverty-related childhood illnesses such as rickets were rife, and for several years she had been allocating one pint per day to each child, to use with cereals and to drink throughout the day.

She appealed to Nancy Astor, to put her case to Parliament. Astor obliged, but was over-ruled by the government when the Conservative chairman of the Bradford Elementary Schools sub-committee appealed to the wholly male leadership team of the Conservative government. Lord’s biographer, Ruth Murray (1993, p.12) commented ‘on reading through Hansard one can practically hear the groans of dismay ... whenever [Astor] raised the topic of nursery education’.

Miriam Lord was subsequently left to the mercy of Bradford politicians, who demoted her from superintendent of a nursery school to assistant mistress of a nursery class located within an infant school, a post in which she remained until her retirement in 1944 (Jarvis 2016; Murray 1993).

So, has maternalism ever won any resounding victories? For this we have to look to a different historical era, to an education system that arose from the ashes of World War II, conceived and actioned by female activists in Northern Italy, seeking a better future for their young children.

In the aftermath of war: a triumph for maternalism
Five days after the Nazi surrender in 1945, the women of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy determined to build a school for their young children between the ages of three and seven. They were members of two organised associations of women, the Union of Italian Women (UDI), an anti-fascist association founded in 1944, and the Catholic Italian Women’s Centre, created in 1945 (de Haan et al 2013).

Together with young teacher Loris Malaguzzi, the mothers of Reggio Emilia formulated a plan to create their own early years education system in which their children were not required to passively and obediently memorise and regurgitate ‘lessons;’ but to develop self-awareness, intolerance of injustice, a sense of equality and the confidence to stand up to an overbearing state or religious institution (Wortham 2013). In this way, they proposed, Italians would never be subjugated and led into disaster as they had been by Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Over several years, the mothers and teachers of Reggio Emilia worked together to produce a model of a child as strong, powerful and competent, confident to develop and explore original ideas and theories in collaboration with others, under the guidance of adults. Children aged between three and seven brought their own original questions into the classroom, from which teachers launched a programme of research around a topic agreed by the group. For example, a question like ‘how does the water get into the tap?’ would result in a range of discovery activities around plumbing, rainfall, water treatment centres and a study of the history of sanitation, amongst other potential lines of investigation.

The Reggio Emilia early years framework, which endures and has spread around the world, has no standardised testing system or fixed curriculum; teachers work by researching topics and learning about them alongside the children. The children are fully aware that adults don’t know everything, but that their greater experience enables them to act as lead researchers in project work.

Teachers’ professional evaluation is conducted on the basis of portfolios produced on the topics that they have researched with the children, which includes examples of children’s work. Adults work collegiately within the Reggio Emilia system, with additional input from parents and local communities, who are welcomed into the classroom to share existing expertise.

What now for Maternalism?

As a contributor to Scotland Upstart’s ‘Play is the Way’ manifesto (currently a candidate for a Nursery World award) and an emerging fiction writer currently in the process of publishing a novel rooted in my Scottish ancestry, I am now increasingly hopeful that a similar early years revolution may be emerging in Scotland, rising from the ashes of Brexit and Covid and fuelled by the movement towards Scottish independence.

Scotland has made plans to adopt the UNCRC into their policy for children and families, which has sadly but predictably been challenged by the UK Government, which has now all but lost the leading role it played in children’s rights in the post World War II period. A United Nations challenge to the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities report stands to have a heavy, negative impact on equality and diversity policies for children. There are also plans afoot for September 2021 to introduce a new Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum in England which emphasises rote memorisation, and an entry SAT for all England’s four-year-olds. ‘Baseline’ is a highly flawed data-gathering exercise, which will negatively impact on the youngest pupils in a year when families will still be recovering from the ravages of the pandemic. Sadly, the Westminster government has lost its way.

Scotland, by contrast has already explored the Reggio Emilia framework, and how it might be applied to a new nursery education phase for three to seven year olds. Is it possible that Scotland will provide a beacon in the British Isles, rekindling the flames that were previously extinguished by “malestream” politics? I would like to think, the journey that began for women, and for their young children, at the time of my mother’s birth is still alive in the land of our ancestors and will continue to shine the light that shows the way for those still stumbling in the dark.

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.

Charter for Childhood

As the Early Years debate ramps up ahead of the announcement of the Revised Early Years Foundation Stage, and SATs season approaches, I have drawn on my knowledge of child development psychology, biology and neurobiology to suggest a draft ‘Charter for Childhood’ to improve both physical and mental health. This is just a first attempt; I am hoping that others will input to these ideas so that they can be shaped into a set of ambitions that will be generally acceptable to the UK children’s workforce.

Attachment and Emotional Development:

*Practical and financial support for families with children under 3 to provide high adult:child ratio care on domestic premises. This would not have to be solely within the child’s family home, but those of extended family and paid childminders.

*Practical and financial support for families with children under 5 to ensure that they never live in a situation of desperate poverty (for example, dependent on food banks to eat)

*Practical and social support for families with children under 3 to enable the child to create secure attachments with a small circle of adults who provide regular care for him/her.

Early Education and Care:

*A guaranteed half-days/half weeks nursery place for every child from the beginning of the term after his/her third birthday.

*A guaranteed full time nursery place for every child from the beginning of the term after his/her fourth birthday.

*Early years education managed, led and staffed by early years specialists, trained in human physical, psychological and biological development and early years pedagogy from the term after the child’s third birthday until the term before his/her seventh birthday.

Play, Socialisation and Mental Health:

*The provision of safe places for children aged 7-14 to use for free, collaborative play both indoors and outdoors, overseen but not directed by adults, managed, led and staffed by trained playworkers; free attendance during the school term.

*Local Schools and Local Play Centres to co-ordinate on children’s attendance between 8am and 6pm on weekdays, with at least four hours spent in non-school activity every day between these hours.

*Play Centres to be open 8am to 6pm weekdays in school holidays; a fee proportionate to family income to be charged for attendance.

*Legislation to prevent children under 14 owning networked cell phones and tablets (ownership of cell phones with call and text facility permitted).

*Lead an international initiative to ban children under 14 from adult social media and gaming, and set up adult moderated alternatives for online child social media and gaming that are not financed by commercial advertising.

*No statutory testing up to the beginning of Key Stage 3. School inspections to focus on work sampling and quality of teacher continuing professional development.

*A statutory 20 minute mid-morning break and a 30 minute lunch break for both teachers and children in all schools.