Minds Really Do Matter

I was very pleased to be invited as a guest to the 2018 Pre-school Learning Alliance conference. The subject was one that currently keeps me up at night; wellbeing of children and staff.

Neil Leitch gave a powerful and eloquent speech setting out the issues.  Neil, like me, never minces his words, and generally packs a punch. He asked: "how  do we look after ourselves so we can look after the children?" Neil was caustic in the complete lack of surveys about stress and wellbeing of early years staff. He said there were plenty highlighting the stress of teachers but absolutely none for the sector.

He then presented the  findings from the Alliance report Minds Matter.  The report recorded the results of a survey conducted online with 2,039 respondents from pre-schools (43%), nurseries (27%), childminders (15%) and the rest from primary schools, children's centres, maintained nursery schools and after school clubs.

The report findings were depressing but unsurprising given the harsh and unkind policy context in which we currently operate. Just think, we have had five ministers in six years and none of them have truly listened to the sector about the structural funding issues which underpins a great deal of the difficulties.

The CEEDA report says the financial shortfall equates to £500m across private, voluntary and independent sector. This means pay continues to be low for which we have been singled out by the Low Pay Commission. Consider the legislative changes we have had to respond to over past decade, some of which have been neither helpful nor successful. These include:  EYFS, EY Single Funding Formula, new Ofsted inspection framework, GCSE A to C Level 3 requirement, amendments to Paediatric First  Aid and more recently the new EY National Funding Formula. All of which required us to respond and deliver with no additional resources.   It was therefore unsurprising that the most common sources of stress were admin and paperwork, fnancial resources of the setting, workload (other than admin and paperwork), pay (all of which can be addressed by proper government funding).

And the most common symptoms of stress were: