There was a flurry of activity at our Central Office last week because we were interviewing for new staff. We need new staff because we have increased our capacity to accommodate more two-year-olds. The morning saw the arrival of the interview team of LEYF nursery managers and deputies expressing great hope and enthusiasm: new staff, new blood, more stability for teams and less dependence on agency staff. Hurrah!

As someone invited to sit on Professor Nutbrown’s Expert Panel, I supported the intention to have the best quality of staff in our settings. I am keen that the Level 3 is relevant and appropriate. By this I mean that anyone wanting to work with children are given a solid grounding in both child development and how children learn, so they know how to care for a child in a warm, empathetic and good-humoured way. We have long despaired about the qualification being watered down to the point where it has become too broad. As such, I welcome the opportunity to comment on the review of Level 3 qualifications.

Nonetheless, I am a pragmatic person and wondered how we would achieve this baseline quickly enough to meet the needs of the Two Year Old expansion. The outcome of our interviews last week was telling…

Three hundred hits on our advert results in 200 CVs being submitted. These are then followed up with instructions to download the information pack and complete an application form. At this point you see a big drop off: seemingly people just don’t want to write the letter (literacy, literacy, literacy). Those who do are invited to interview. Here at LEYF we call this an assessment centre, where potential staff complete a selection of activities and get to visit a nursery. The final interview pulls all this together to ensure we can both work together successfully.

The outcome is depressing and predictable. We had people who had managed to achieve their qualification within 10 weeks (and you could tell). We had recent college graduates who did not know what was meant by the EYFS. We had candidates who really struggled with spoken English. One manager said they had asked if candidates saw the position as a job or a career (don’t knows just don’t cut it). The enthusiasm began to wane throughout the day…

I chatted with our man from HR: is there not high unemployment he asked, scratching his head? There is, only the trouble with recessions is that staff sit tight, especially those in lower paid jobs (they cannot afford the risk of moving). According to the Office for National Statistics, 2012 saw a 42% drop in people leaving their jobs and the labour market at its least dynamic for 13 years.

So what shall we do? LEYF staff interviewing said they used courage (one of LEYF’s five core values) to help them in the selection process:

We will give one or two a chance for three months, during which time we will balance the risk, complete the induction and observe their impact on the children. (We think it’s a risk worth taking rather than continuing with agency staff.) We will then make a courageous choice to say ‘Goodbye’ if its not working.

Back in HR there is talk of reviewing the selection process. Maybe we will scrap the application form; does it tell us enough anyway? Yes, says Mr HR but we have to remember that any recruitment process must reassure Ofsted that it’s robust.

Does it feel like déjà vu? Remember 1997? The great ambition was to take on 100,000 new staff to expand childcare and enable people to work. Fantastic, if only it weren’t for the same problem we now face: getting enough of the right staff in place to turn the ambition into a reality. Without the power of the genie’s lamp, we can rub all we like, but we simply cannot ‘magic up’ enough good staff. As a result, twelve years later, and further stymied by a dogged recession, we appear to have made little progress.

So, here is a real task for our Minister: use the LEYF value of courage to get out there and talk the sector up!

• Make schools understand the importance of childcare as a career option
• Build childcare into the Career Guidance DNA
• Make child development a key subject on the school curriculum
• Get the Treasury to understand that Early Years training and learning needs continual funding just like that for school teachers
• Get the sector in the press for the right reasons

Children are all our responsibility from conception. Invest in this at every level of the education system, starting right here and right now.

Well the bankers are in trouble again. Is it a case of money corrupts? Poor Bob Diamond (former CEO of Barclays Bank). Last year he proudly announced that culture is the most important thing in an organisation because it is what people do when no one is looking.  He said that bankers must always operate in a way that brings the best service to customers. He looked like he was leading a ‘good bank’.  Aside from the political impact (now evident), it must have galled him to know that some of his staff lost sight of this culture and values when they behaved so dishonestly.

According to Patrick Lencioni in his book The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, culture is set by the leader; it has to come from the top. In another book, How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Ken Robinson describes culture as a means of creating contagious behaviour by embedding the attitudes and behaviour that are acceptable and unacceptable across the organisation.

Funnily enough, I spent last week reflecting on our own culture at LEYF with my fellow directors. We have always known that culture is critical, especially when growing an organisation: staff need to ‘get the vibe’ and, without even thinking about it, know what behaviour and attitudes are the LEYF way. We summarised our three cultural behaviours  as  Nurture, Excellence and Innovation.  This culture then has to align with the core values of the organisation.

These words sum up a whole set of behaviours that are designed to ensure that we are a high performing organisation.  And culture is the behaviour that underpins high performance. Many of us have previously worked in organisations with a culture of underperformance, accepting shoddy work, high absenteeism and lack of care and concern for the customers.  It’s a most de-motivating and depressing place to be for children, parents, staff, students and visitors.

So ‘Nurture, Excellence and Innovation’ sounds good to me, not least as a set of demanding cultural norms:

Nurture is about training, development and encouragement. It’s about supporting positive connections, bonding and bridging.  It is also about being able and willing to deal with poor behaviour. Children who are nurtured and encouraged learn about what is right and wrong, what they can and cannot do.  The same goes for adults.

Excellence is about how we operate our core business. We need to be smart and develop intelligent strategies, marketing plans and financial models which sustain our service and give us a competitive edge. But we also need to be healthy and have the right leadership, support services, communication and engagement that allows us to be top of the class. Children deserve the best so we must give it to them.

Innovation is how we use our action research to reflect on, consider and review what we do and how we do it.  It’s about examining new ways of making things better.  It’s about intelligence, about thinking creatively and courageously about what works and whether it is right.  Certainly a brave culture, but one that keeps us all on our toes.

The challenge for LEYF and indeed any organisation is how to make sure this culture permeates every nook and cranny. It’s feeling assured that everyone gets it and those who want to break the code are held back by the power of the cultural norms. For us, the best way to do this is to…

• Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
• Create organisation clarity
• Over-communicate organisational clarity
• Reinforce organisational clarity through people systems

If we get this right we are less likely to end up vilified like the banks, as Allister Heath journalist at City AM says:

Barclays inability to ensure that some of its staff behaved appropriately was a major failing of its corporate controls. People knowingly broke the rules.  Shame on them… Too many people turned a blind eye to the wrongdoings of others. The City’s reputation as a trustworthy marketplace will take years to recover.

No one can afford to get into this mess. So let’s ensure we have the right culture from the start, and at every level.

Happy New Year and welcome back to my blog. (Thank you in advance!)

As I recover from cooking, eating, talking, reading and watching TV (little different there then, except this time a lot of it was done with my extended family, including the delights of my youngest brother and my nieces and nephews who are placed on this earth to remind us about our duty to listen to the young), I have checked out the predictions of Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, the I Ching and various political pundits in order to sound informed. Ironically, the best advice came from RiRi, my favourite pop singer of the moment, who in Fading (Away) tells us that life is too short to worry. The only downside to the lovely RiRi is her acceptance of lyrics which lack any reference to women’s rights or suffrage! She is certainly no feminist.

Back to the gloomy predictions of 2012: deflation, interest rises to 8%, employment increasing to 4%, tougher economic year than 2011, crazy election results, Eurozone debacle, cyclones, volcanoes, storms… and frankly more of the same. Hey ho.

Of course, here at LEYF we work with children – preparing them for this very future – so let’s take RiRI’s more optimistic, pragmatic view and challenge this dire outlook with a positive attitude. (We know that optimism breeds positive attitudes and a better chance of successful outcomes; in my book that means balance risks but don’t ignore the opportunities.)

For us, irrespective of the bigger issues, this year I hope to do more around our core LEYF values: being child focused, collaborative, courageous, creative and constant.

First and most important of all, we will strive to be even more child focused than ever before, as we know children are the ones most hurt by poverty and stupid adults.

We will collaborate more, particularly with parents. I learned a lot from a meeting I had with parents at our Noah’s Ark community nursery recently, and it’s a lesson I won’t forget. Parental perspectives matter and need to be valued and understood.

Even greater courage is required as we discover how many more children are suffering economically and emotionally from some of our leaders’ dim-witted policies. We really must do things differently, and so I hope we get our LEYF research hubs motoring in 2012. I want to have Meet-ups with parents and all those who want to talk about new ideas or anything that will get our little grey cells operating. (Yes, you guessed it – I received a box set of Poirot for Christmas!)

Creativity is a fascinating value and one that is demonstrated in many ways. For example, I have just finished the biographies of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton and his wife Isabel Burton, both great Victorian travellers. He was an irascible character with a fascination of the East and wrote prolifically, including a translation of Arabian Nights and Kama Sutra. He showed creativity in how he overcame the challenges of exploring and brokering relationships across unknown places; his grasp of languages and understanding of cultural behaviour was a clear means of ensuring that he could broker a mutual understanding. However, his creativity was less well received by the stuffy and hierarchical hide-bound Victorian society. When he died he was snubbed by the establishment and refused a burial place in Westminster Abbey, so his stalwart and loyal wife Isabel persuaded the British public to fund a mausoleum in a cemetery in Mortlake in the shape of a Bedouin tent, one that she designed. She was both constant and creative in her efforts to support her husband in a way that celebrates what we struggle with today; a genuine and honest appreciation of east and west.

So, whatever Nostradamus and his pals say, here at LEYF 2012 will be shaped by the 5 Cs from a positive, creative and optimistic outlook.

And if you don’t believe me, I completed the I Ching and asked what we might need to tackle. The answer came in the form of the hexagram KU. The translation is:

• Work on what has been spoiled
• Has supreme success
• It furthers one to cross the great water
• Afterwards there is order

Good Advice; let’s go forward. Happy 2012.