Successful Placements in Early Years Settings

Jo Basford, Elaine Hodson

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781844457427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Students on Early Years placements face many challenges, from understanding the Early Years Foundation Stage, to coping with the immediate needs of individual children. This accessible guide begins by examining the diverse range of Early Years settings and how to prepare for placements. It goes on to look at the four areas of the EYFS and covers working with individual children, building positive relationships with children, colleagues and parents, creating and working in an enabling environment and supporting children?s learning needs. A complete guide to the placement experience, this book supports students on their journey from student to qualified practitioner.

1 The range and diversity of Early Years settings

Jo Basford

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

By the end of this chapter you should:

• have an understanding of the historical development of Early Years provision;
• know about the range and diversity of Early Years settings available to children and families;
• have an awareness of some of the unique features of each type of Early Years provision.

This chapter addresses the following Professional Standards for QTS and EYPS:

QTS: Q3; 5; 6; 15.

EYPS: S1; 4; 24; 29; 33.

Introduction

This chapter is intended to give you a detailed insight into the range of Early Years settings you may encounter during your placements. A child’s access to a particular type of provision is usually dependent on a family’s needs. For example, parents who both work may well require a setting which offers full day care. Alternatively, some children are cared for by their family members, and will access sessional care in order to develop their social skills, or to prepare them for full-time schooling.

Early Years settings tend to fall into two broad categories.

• Settings ‘maintained’ financially by the local authority (LA).
• Settings which receive funding from other sources. These settings are commonly referred to as the PVI sector (Private, Voluntary or Independently funded) or ‘non-maintained’. (See Table 1.1.)
  
  

Maintained settings (Public/LA funding)	Non-maintained settings (funded from revenue other than LA)
School – Nursery class/Reception class/Foundation Unit (term time only).	Private/Independent – Day nursery (up to 50 weeks per year) or school (term time only) run by a company or individual owner.
Nursery school – staffing commensurate with a primary school, including a head teacher (term time only).	Voluntary – preschool or playgroup run by a voluntary or charitable group. For example the PLA, Barnardos, NSPCC or social enterprise. These are not-for-profit organisations (usually only term time).
Children’s Centre – a multidisciplinary team (including a centre manager and teacher) employed by the LA (sessional ‘groups’ and full-time day care).	Children’s Centre – the day care element may be delivered by a PVI provider (up to 50 weeks per year).
Family Centre – usually funded through Social Care budget (sessions only offered to children and families as identified ‘in need’).	Childminder (up to 50 weeks per year).

Table 1.1 The range of settings available to families

It is important that you understand how and why there is such a diverse range of settings available for parents/carers to choose from. The political landscape over the last 40 years has transformed and influenced society’s thinking about the needs of young children. This, in turn, has had a significant impact on the phenomenal growth within the Early Years sector. The first section of this chapter provides you with an overview of the way Early Years provision has evolved over time and considers the way government policy has influenced this growth. Understanding the sociological and political dimensions of policy and practice is an important area of your own professional development. The ability to critically reflect on, and to problematise some of the issues and tensions for practitioners within the Early Years field, will help you to understand the unique range of challenges practitioners face within their own provision. The remainder of this chapter outlines in more detail the unique features pertinent to the type of provision in which you may be placed.

The historical development of Early Years services

In pre-industrialised times, childcare was predominantly the woman’s role. Mothers were expected to combine work and home. There was a great reliance on older siblings or the extended family to look after the younger children while mothers went out to work on the land. It was not uncommon practice for babies to be taken out to the fields with their mothers or for young children to participate, in a small scale, in cottage industries such as spinning and weaving, developing skills for their adult life.

Industrialisation had a significant impact on families, many of whom moved to the towns and cities to work in factories. Families no longer had access to their extended family, and older siblings were sent to work themselves in the factories and mills. Mothers had to rely on far less suitable care for their youngest, through either wet nurses or minding schools (commonly termed ‘baby farms’). By the end of the nineteenth century, universal education had been introduced in order to purposefully occupy the youngest children who were unable to work. Large numbers of young children were forced into inappropriate formal learning conditions. Yet this was also the period of the enlightenment, and there was now a growing recognition of the need for young children to be nurtured and protected. Children under the age of five became excluded from the state system, and the care and education of these children was heavily reliant on such pioneers as Margaret McMillan and philanthropist mill owners such as Robert Owen who established nursery schools. Emphasis grew on the health and care of working-class children who were living in poor conditions. The expansion of nursery provision continued up to the Second World War, because of the demand for mothers in the labour force, and this practice continued. With the immense growth of provision, but very little money to provide suitable accommodation and an appropriately trained workforce, there was a need to regulate standards of childcare with the Nurseries and Childminders Regulation Act 1948.

Post-1945 provision

After the Second World War, the education and care of young children became traditionally separated. This separation rested not only on the type of provision available, but also reflected society’s views concerning the responsibility for the care and education of young children. Mothers were no longer required to work and returned home to make way for the returning soldiers, and day nursery provision was reduced by half. Alongside this, views regarding the damaging effect of day care on children (Bowlby, 1958) led to the belief that children needed the constant presence of their mother.

Government thinking was that childcare was predominantly the responsibility of parents. The nature and type of settings, therefore, available to children and their families reflected this notion. Provision available was limited in scope, accessibility and quality, and heavily dependent on local communities (predominantly parents) establishing their own voluntary resources to meet the needs of the families in that area. State-funded settings such as Family Centres and nursery classes/nursery schools, since they were costly, were generally only available to families in areas of significant social and economic deprivation. By the 1980s there became an increasing emphasis on equality of provision for all children. The 1989 Children Act (part x) provided specific regulatory requirements for provision in the non-maintained sector and, in 1991, the DfES commissioned the report Starting with Quality (Rumbold Report). This marked the inception of changes to Early Years provision, which gathered momentum as the political landscape changed.

New Labour policies for children

In 1997, the Labour Party won the general election. The new government demonstrated a huge commitment not only to ‘education, education, education’, but also to the care, learning and development needs of young children. This was evident in its National Childcare Strategy (NCS) (DfEE, 1998). Baldock (2001) cites this commitment as a crucial shift in social policy, comparable in significance to the creation of the Welfare State which provided a National Health Service in the post-war years.

With the establishment of the NCS in 1998, and its three key aims of accessibility, afford-ability, and quality of childcare, came a significant focus on both increasing the number of Early Years places for children, and improving the standards of care and of education. OFSTED was given overall responsibility for this regulation of standards. In addition, the introduction of the government-funded Nursery Education Grant, enabled for the first time, all parents/carers of pre-school age children to access up to 12 hours of free nursery education. Links to broader policy concerned with reducing poverty, greater social inclusion and increased opportunities for children to be cared for, meant that there were greater possibilities for parents to join the workforce.

The Labour government demonstrated a continued commitment to improved outcomes for all children, and equality of opportunity. This has been evident in contemporary and ever-changing policy: (Every Child Matters 2004; Children Act 2005; Childcare Act 2006; The Children’s Plan 2007; The Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (2000) and The Early Years Foundation Stage Framework (EYFS) (2008).

A key element of the NCS was its emphasis on linking care and education to encourage a more holistic view of the needs and development of young children. Prior to the implementation of the EYFS, pedagogical and regulatory approaches to Early Years’ practice varied, dependent on the nature of the setting, and there was a distinct view that the PVI sector was the ‘poor relation’ to the maintained sector. This perception was compounded by the significant difference in status, pay and terms and conditions of service, and the expectations of both curriculum provision, and regulatory standards (Hevey, 2009).

The introduction of the EYFS was intended to provide a framework to reassure parents that, regardless of the type of Early Years provision they chose to use, their child would be kept safe and helped to thrive. The term ‘Early Years provider’ is now commonly used to describe any Early Years setting which follows the EYFS. What is significant now is that all providers, regardless of their designation, will have a

legal responsibility to comply with the provisions set out in the landmark Childcare Act 2006 … to ensure that their provision meets the learning and development requirements, and complies with the welfare regulations, as required by Section 40 of the Act.

(DfES, 2007, page 8)

The themes and commitments that underpin the DCSF (2008) clearly reflect this and are designed to assist all children in achieving the five outcomes of the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda. At the same time, the notion of ‘joined-up’ working has also become a significant feature of government policy. All stakeholders are expected to share responsibility for the planning and delivery of services for children and their families. Further consideration of multi-agency working will be considered in the Children’s Centre section of this chapter, and in Chapters 5 and 6.

One final development, which is significant to your work as an Early Years practitioner, is the government’s aim to ‘professionalise’ the Early Years workforce. Findings from the influential Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) study (Sylva et al., 2004) found that, where settings employed a trained teacher who acted as manager, and a good proportion of the staff were graduate/teacher qualified, then effectiveness for influencing a child’s development and progress were improved (Siraj-Blatchford and Manni, 2006). These studies have led to a commitment to a structured career and qualification framework for the Early Years workforce, and the aspiration to have a Graduate Leader (EYP) leading practice in all settings delivering the EYFS by 2015 (CWDC, 2008). However, a highly contentious debate concerned with parity of pay, status and conditions of service between qualified teachers and EYPS practitioners continues to create a divide between the maintained and non-maintained sectors. The perpetuation of low pay within the PVI sector has traditionally undermined efforts to raise the quality of the Early Years workforce. This has been compounded by low minimum qualification requirements and the absence of a clear career ladder. Traditionally, hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors and contributors
• Introduction (Jo Basford and Elaine Hodson)
• 1 The range and diversity of Early Years settings
• 2 Preparing for your placement
• 3 The placement experience
• 4 A unique child
• 5 Positive relationships
• 6 Enabling environments
• 7 Learning and development
• 8 Next steps
• Index