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 years issues such as child obesity or supporting inclusive workplaces. It's always good to come away and see what other places are doing to improve the lives of children and those who teach them.

I treat every invitation as an honour that someone values what I have to say and how I say it! It's true, that I like telling stories and people seem to enjoy them. (But the pressure was on in Ireland to deliver some good stories as the expectation from a nation of story tellers was high).

According to a book I read recently called The Storytellers Secret, great stories release a surge of dopamine, cortisol or Oxycontin and with it a feel good factor. People remember how the story made them feel. We therefore need to get much better at telling the story of why and what we do in early years.

I started my trip in Belfast, had the weekend in Sligo to see my lovely nieces (and an update on unicorns and the defrosting world of Princess Elsa) and then headed to Dublin and Scotland.

My stories focused on how a social enterprise is a sensible option for sustaining nursery services but only if pedagogy is right at the core. My message was provocative. We have to have created educational systems and programmes and political promises across the UK that have less and less to do with children. The Early Years sector has attempted to make all these connect, align and operate smoothly with mixed levels of success. But while forcing these uncomfortable contortions we may have taken our eye off the real issue, the children. We worry so much about funding, flexibility, recruitment, accessibility, retention that we have no energy left for the more fundamental conversation about the core pedagogy that is really at the heart of any service to children.