Skills for the new curriculum

In less than three months’ time, early years practitioners across England will need to deliver a revised curriculum for under-fives. The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework, first published in 2008, will be radically streamlined and reduced from 69 learning goals to 17, following an extensive review by Action for Children chief executive Dame Clare Tickell. It will now focus on three prime areas of learning - personal, social and emotional development; communication and language; and physical development – and introduces a progress check on these areas for two-year-olds to help determine if early intervention is necessary.

The government claims the reforms will reduce paperwork and strengthen partnerships between parents and professionals. But it will require practitioners to cement their expertise in the remaining areas of focus.

While the slimmed-down EYFS has been broadly welcomed, local authority-funded training on the revised framework is very much a postcode lottery. In particular, practitioners want more guidance on the two-year-old progress checks.

Many early years settings appear to be left by local authorities to fend for themselves.

Michael Freeston, director of quality improvement at the Pre-school Learning Alliance, says: “There is a sense that settings are being left to deal with this on their own, particularly as local authorities are losing early years consultants who would normally help them in this period of time. We are encouraging clusters of settings to come together to identify their own training needs and to help and support each other through it. This may not be ideal but is necessary when the money for more formal training is not available.”

Stella Ziolkowski is director of quality and workforce development at the National Day Nurseries Association (NDNA). “Local authority cuts have had a significant impact on funding available to train staff,” she says. “There are still a number who offer fully-funded training but according to feedback from our members, approximately 40 per cent of local authorities are only partly subsidising their training programmes and a further 35 per cent are not funding any training at all”.

For the larger, financially established nursery chains, the issue of funding is less of a concern.

Cathy Hart, who is training manager at Asquith Day Nurseries, says: “We run 81 nurseries across the country. Some have benefited from local authority funding, but not all. Regardless of this, we provide centralised training for staff – even if employees have already experienced local authority training.”

The much smaller Old Station Nursery chain says it has been offered no funding to train staff and is financing all its own training. Operations manager Rachel Attwood says: “We feel it is extremely important to support our staff’s full understanding of the revised framework before its implementation and are therefore prepared to fund all training requirements ourselves.”

Local authority briefing
In Lancashire, the Beyond the Walls Outdoor Nursery is a small setting registered for 15 children. Lead practitioner Diane Calvert says: “We have had a briefing from our local authority which was free of charge. It did not really give us much more of an insight than we already had as we have been keeping ourselves abreast of the upcoming changes.

The revised EYFS can be downloaded from the Department for Education website or purchased as a hard copy from the NDNA or the Pre-school Learning Alliance. But Calvert calls the decision by the DfE not to issue hard copies of the revised EYFS “extraordinary”.

“We feel that at least one per registered setting would be appropriate and wise. Then at least everyone will have received information even if their local authority has not had any briefing or training,” she says.

Where funded training is on offer, some question whether there is sufficient time for practitioners to familiarise themselves with the framework before it becomes mandatory.

NDNA chief executive Purnima Tanuku says the window is “very short, particularly given that it includes the summer holiday period where many staff will be taking leave.”

Early years organisations are themselves offering courses to assist with the change. The NDNA is delivering regional training events on how to implement the revised EYFS, plus in-house and online training. Similarly, the Pre-school Learning Alliance is offering a series of one-day training programmes on particular topics in the new EYFS. It is also offering an online training course focusing on the EYFS changes, available free to members as part of a partnership with learning provider Educare.

However, the introduction of progress checks for two-year-olds will be a particular test for many practitioners. Its success will be very much dependent on their knowledge of childhood development, points out Lisa Morgan, professional director at The Communication Trust. “The effectiveness of the two-year-old progress check, in providing a summary of a child’s language and communication and identifying children who are struggling, is dependent on practitioners having a strong understanding of how and when children develop language, alongside effective skills in observing how young children are actually communicating,” she says.

The trust has produced a series of booklets, called Universally Speaking, which demonstrate at what stage children should be with their communication skills at any given age.

The Asquith chain says it is already well on the way to devising its own system for the progress checks. “We are putting a tracking system in place to support latest EYFS revisions.Every child’s progress is constantly monitored and measured for evolving achievement over each 12-week period,” says training manager Cathy Hart.

However for many, the prospect of carrying out progress checks for two-year-olds is daunting. “I am most concerned about the progress checks as there has been no detail. I was speaking to a health visitor and she hadn’t even heard about it,” reveals Vikki Wynn, childcare manager at Wingate Children’s Centre in Durham. “We have been offered a free two-hour training session for all our staff. My concern is that two hours is a very short time to go into the changes in detail.”

Anxiety over progress checks
For childminders too, who work in isolation and without the support of a nursery team, the progress check is causing considerable anxiety.

Lesley Sharp, head of professional standards at the National Childminding Association (NCMA) says: “There is some confusion about the practical implementation of this, and whether what would have until now been an informal chat between childminder and parent or carer needs to be something more formal.”

Claire Davies, an accredited childminder in Wiltshire, says: “We haven’t had the local authority training yet but I hope that when we do, they give in-depth advice on the two-year-old progress check. I don’t know what is expected of us. They have said the revised EYFS will be a lot less work but these new checks sound as if they are going to be a lot more work.”

According to Sharp, local authority training for childminders is patchy: “Some local authorities aren’t running any training until September, others have not heard about their authority’s plans, while others are investing.”

The NCMA has produced a book, EYFS and You, which sets out the changes for childminders. It is also offering a series of webinars, highlighting the key differences from the current EYFS. New childminders must complete a local authority-approved training course that helps them understand and implement the revised EYFS before they can register with Ofsted.

Early years practitioners have a hugely important role to help children get a good start in life. Yet, in her interim report on early years qualifications, Professor Cathy Nutbrown found the early years profession is “widely seen as low status, low paid and low skilled”. She identified a “hair or care” stereotype where students with poor academic records are steered towards a career in childcare, with early years courses “often the easiest to enrol on”.

Given this apparent backdrop, a well-motivated workforce that is properly trained to deliver the revised EYFS will be vital. 

The new demands on early years settings

Welfare requirements