Why It’s Worth the Effort of Bringing Your Practice to a Research Conference
Four LEYF staff recently attended the annual EECERA conference. This year it was held in the friendly hot and very humid city of Thessaloniki, a city suffering from the…
LEYF News and CEO Blog
Read the latest news and updates from our CEO and the wider LEYF team.
Should there be more Social Enterprises in Childcare?
I operate in two worlds; Early Years and Social Enterprise. Every now and then they converge, and I find myself invited to a most unusual or unexpected event. That happened…
Ready, Steady: The New Education Inspection Framework has Arrived
It was the longest and largest consultation Ofsted has ever undertaken (four months with 100 focus groups and 250 pilots across the sector) and consequently 15,000 people replied. Lesson to…
Whatever happened to lifelong learning?
The debate about what is education continues unabated. The DfE annoyed and baffled many last month when they announced that they did not advocate using the word learning because…
What is Cultural Capital?
To be honest, cultural capital is not the usual conversation piece. But it is both a conscious and unconscious part of our everyday lives. Now that Ofsted has introduced the…
Going to Bath for a Bath
I arrived on Friday evening (15 March) in a wet Bath for the Firm Foundations Conference. A wet bath was also just perfect metaphor for my life at the…
Enjoy Books on World Book Day, Don’t Worry too Much about Dressing Up!
I grew up in a world where reading was a normal pastime. I didn’t have access to many books at home but I was an avid library fan. I went…
Messy Play not Messi Plays
Last week I gave a seminar at the Nursery World Show about pedagogy, and I particularly referenced the importance of Early Years teachers being able to name and describe the…
The importance of partnership
“The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.” – Theodore Roosevelt Many organisations talk about working in partnership. It…
Quality childcare: it starts with meaningful investment
The Report by the Education Policy Institute (EPI), raises the self-same issues which have been of concern to the Early Years sector for the past five years. The Government’s…
Playing with Lego to Spark a Story
“The sound a box of Lego makes is the noise of a child’s mind working, looking for the right piece. Shake it, and it’s almost creativity in aural…
Getting Back to Basics: Learning from My UK Road Trip
I am always pleased to be invited to speak about things that matter to me such as social enterprise and the business of childcare, child poverty, pedagogy and wider early…