The evaluation of the Early Years Experts and Mentors, and the Childminder Mentor programmes – part of the £180 million, three-year Early Years Education Covid Recovery programme – by Ecorys and Professor Kathy Sylva from the University of Oxford was published last month.
Targeted support and coaching
Both interventions offered targeted support and coaching to early years staff – setting leaders, practitioners and childminders – by experienced early years professionals termed “experts”, working with peer mentors, and co-ordinating area leads. Coram Hempsall's acted as the training partner for both, and as the delivery partner for the childminding programme.
James Hempsall, Coram Hempsall's managing director, said hundreds of training sessions were delivered through the programmes with the benefits seen in improving everyday practice and in changing a setting's long-term culture.
“We saw the positive impact on the confidence of those practitioners who stepped up to these roles so they could share their knowledge and guidance,” he explains.
“We expected their growing confidence to be transferred in those settings and with those practitioners receiving their support. We saw this peer support happening in practice, and the two-way benefits for the settings, practitioners, and the experts and mentors themselves. The programme benefitted participants’ wellbeing, motivation, and determination to do what they could to effect Covid recovery.”
Hempsall's role and involvement was to create the conditions for the programme inputs to be focused on the principle that early education practice should understand, respond and adapt for children affected by the pandemic.
Hempsall says: “We were countering the view of some that expected children to be the same as they were before. An adjunct to those principles was the prioritisation of families experiencing disadvantage, who we can all comprehend were at the greatest risk of the negative impacts of lockdown and least likely to have the resilience to recover in the time after that.
“We delivered a blend of face-to-face and online training. Face-to-face training was something people had grown nervous about since the pandemic, and then there were the practical barriers and costs associated with leaving their setting.”
When focusing on children, the evaluation identified there to be a statistically significant impact in supporting children's personal, social and emotional development, with stronger impacts and difference made for children in the most disadvantaged areas.
The positive impact on practitioners’ confidence in supporting children's communication and language development was evident, as was settings’ appetite to be involved, even considering the pressures relating to the responsibility and constraints of day-to-day delivery, the evaluation found.
Long-term impacts
Even though the evaluation did not have strong findings in terms of workforce retention, Hempsall believes the career development and progression for all involved was important for building senior leadership skills, and workforce retention, and there is potential for this to have long-term impacts.
“All involved should feel proud of the work and impacts delivered to date,” he says. “There remains a need for continued and sustained application of this model, that seeks to address not only the long tail of Covid on children, families, and our workforce, but also targeted to address the effects of disadvantage and inequality.
“There is huge potential to use these lessons and approaches to support the workforce to be the solution to multiple needs – with support, capacity, and confidence building. That way we can develop and equip the workforce to deliver on the new targets for 75% of children achieving “good” levels of development, apply the newly increased Early Years Pupil Premium in effective ways, support school-readiness as early years children affected by the pandemic move through school, and close educational attainment gaps.”
