Talking Early Years: In conversation with Sarah Ronan
Can the new Early Education and Care Coalition Influence the next Government? Sarah Ronan, Director of the recently formed Early Education and Care Coalition (EECC) joined me to…
May 12th 2023
Things continue to be difficult for the sector, and we seem to have few choices as to how we resolve the issues which all revolve around the recruitment situation. I refuse to call it a crisis because a crisis has a peak; we have no peak but an unending Table Mountain of staff shortages.
We have already approached the Department for Education about some flex on how we delegate staff throughout the day so we don’t always have to have qualified staff on duty. Instead, we have the freedom to delegate the staff members we think are most suited, but that has big risks – for example settings never having enough qualified staff and running their service with a team of unqualified staff. We know from all the research that qualified staff and, better still, graduate staff are associated with stronger pedagogical practice which is best for children. To make changes they will need to change the law so watch out for a consultation.
There is talk about Core Hours during which qualified staff lead the nursery curriculum, but that challenges our understanding of how children learn and the whole premise of Early Years pedagogy where every moment is a teaching moment and education and care are totally integrated. It also puts children accessing funded-only hours at risk because they may not access the core hours. It happens now where funded children are slotted into gaps or in a separate part of the settings described as the “Funded Hours” section.
We are all fed up with paying agency staff because they have a qualification, and we need them on site for compliance. Yet some are very disengaged and inexperienced, therefore:
Can the new Early Education and Care Coalition Influence the next Government? Sarah Ronan, Director of the recently formed Early Education and Care Coalition (EECC) joined me to…
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