Leading and Supporting Early Years Teams

A practical guide

Deborah Price, Cathy Ota

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415839198
• eBook ISBN: 9781317695738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

How a staff team works together and how effective and cohesive they are impacts significantly on the children that they care for as well as having implications for the general early years practice and the success of the business of the setting. Drawing together theory and practice this book provides comprehensive guidance on recruiting, supervising and leading an early years team in line with the most recent national guidance.

Focusing on all aspects of leading and supporting a team, the book aims to inspire managers and increase their confidence. It looks at the day-to-day demands of running a setting and the reflective thinking that is needed to establish a vision for a team. The authors consider the skills needed to lead and support a team and offers practical guidance on:

• recruitment, induction, ongoing staff training and supervision
• disciplinary processes including handling difficult conversations, refocusing a team after a critical incident
• staff relationships with parents and other professionals
• involving the team in problem solving and implementing change
• engaging with the community
• how to get support for yourself as a manager

This book will be invaluable support for both new and experienced managers wanting to establish a cohesive and dynamic staff team and provide outstanding childcare provision.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

 

 

 

This book is a product of our combined experience in working with people who work with children – both in early years and through to primary and secondary years. Together we have worked with groups of early years workers, especially early years professionals who have attended a long-term project with us on helping children to work together. Individually, Cathy Ota is an Independent Education Specialist and Team Dynamic Consultant, and one of the co-founders of Working With Others, a programme that teaches children across early years, primary and secondary level how to collaborate, work and learn together as part of a group (see www­.wo­rki­ngw­ith­oth­ers­.or­g). Deborah Price, as part of her university role, teaches post-graduate students across the children and young peoples workforce who are interested in developing themselves as leaders and managers. It is out of our individual and combined work that the idea and material for this book came about.

As we have been doing this work individually and together, we have specialized in helping children and adults work with others and one strand of this has been working with early years practitioners in order to improve social skills between children. As we have been talking to students we have realized that in order to be positive role models to children there needs to be high level modelling and understanding of such skills within the staff team. The managers that we have worked with have often expressed their frustration at not being able to inspire their staff team to work together or to manage change in a positive way. Talking and spending time with managers and leaders of early years settings has made us realize that there is a lack of training and guidance in managing and leading staff teams – as though managers are somehow expected to be able to do this as an innate natural skill.

We believe such skills can be studied, learnt and practiced and that most of the difficulties that happen in early years settings are due to a breakdown in inter-adult relationships. We hope that this book gives managers both an insight into an analysis of their role and some reflective points to consider as part of their personal development. It is both a handbook to use to determine practice and a troubleshooting guide for when relations break down.

Managing and leading teams has come under the spotlight recently in light of high profile cases such as the child abuse at a nursery in Plymouth, and the subsequent serious case review that fed into the Tickell review and the reframing of the EYFS. We intend this book to address and provide support for this new guidance and the enhanced expectations of the supervisory role required of early years managers. This role now needs to include regular monitoring and supervision of staff as part of the regulatory requirements. We look at what is necessary to be considered an outstanding setting by OFSTED in regards to leading and managing staff and how managers can take steps on the road to reach and maintain this high level of practice.

For the purposes of this book this is what we mean when we say the manager – we are referring to the person who heads up a setting and combines the role of manager/leader/SENCO. When we refer to early years settings this encompasses pre-schools, crèches and nurseries that are run by committee, privately owned or part of a school. We are also including larger childminder practices where childminders work with each other and sometimes employ assistants.

Change in the workforce

The last twenty years has seen a move towards greater professionalism and improved training in a workforce that is mainly made up of women in part time, low-paid work. While this is to be welcomed, the now increased expectations of performance at work have not been matched by improved rates of pay and status.

Much of the vocational training focuses on the needs of the child and providing the best possible care and development opportunities for children. This is of course completely necessary and justified. As people involved in the training of the workforce, we have long felt that leaders and managers need the level of training and support when working with their team that is provided in other areas of industry.

In the childcare workforce there seems to be an expectation that these skills are somehow naturally acquired as part of the job or the training that has already been completed. We wonder if this is part of the image of the sector as mainly female and imbued with a caring ethos that permeates to the role of managing and leading and so needs no further enabling.

We are hoping that this book will help to enable childcare workers to be part of the changing workforce in a positive and active way by supporting managers to understand their role as leaders and find ways to support their staff team and also themselves. We also look at the wider community and how the manager needs to place the setting in that community and make positive links with those professionals, parents and carers who come into the setting and those who are part of the community in the vicinity. Siraj-Blatchford and Manni (2007: 22) comment that, ‘effective leaders play a key role in the process of establishing a community of learners and team culture among staff. The task is not an easy one’. They go on to quote DuFour in saying that the leader/manager of a setting should have an unrelenting commitment to promote a collaborative environment – even in the face of resistance. We hope that this book will help managers and leaders to do this.

Our book has a UK perspective but we think that lessons can be learnt from it that can support and affect practice in early years settings internationally. This is also noteworthy as the present Government has been looking to mainland Europe, especially France, when writing the recent report, ‘More Great Childcare’, which sets out some key changes in early years childcare in the UK and also indicates the underpinning thinking that seems likely to be guiding policy in the next years to come. These changes are likely to be around staff/child ratios, childminder registration and also the change from a ‘satisfactory’ rating after inspection to be changed to ‘needing improvement’.

The book begins by looking at this report and other contextual policy and legislation in Chapter 2. The chapter gathers in one place the range of guidance and inspection material that relates especially to leadership and management in the legislative structures. However, it also needs to be noted that in order to carry out any of the EYFS and provide a safe and stimulating environment for children there needs to be strong, effective and inspiring leadership in place to move a team towards the settings vision.

Chapter 3 starts this process by examining the stepping-stones of creating a strong and unified team. The chapter breaks down the process of recruitment and provides some reflective points and suggested structures for managers to take note of and incorporate into their own procedures.

Chapter 4 explores the importance of leadership and different leadership styles for early years settings. It considers the elements of what makes a good leader for an early years setting and identifies the ways a leader can develop their organization by reflecting on themselves, their vision and how this is communicated and shared with their team.

Chapter 5 sits alongside Chapter 4’s discussion around leadership by turning to examine the features of managing early years teams. The roles of leading and managing are invariably located within the one person in an early years setting. Both roles need to be carefully balanced and are essential when leading an early years setting and team. In acknowledging and appreciating the difference and importance of each we present leading and managing as distinct and separate strands, with their own chapters.

Chapter 6 is about troubleshooting, as the title suggests. It looks at the underpinning difficulties that are connected with early years settings and staff teams and how these contradictions can be managed. It also gives a practical three-point plan for assertion techniques and provides a case study as an example of how conflict can be managed using these steps. The chapter makes some suggestions regarding bringing a staff team together with a united purpose that drives the setting forward.

Chapter 7 looks out to the wider community and how this should be a part of an early years setting. It offers managers suggestions for how they can support their setting, team and children, as well as themselves, by better understanding and drawing on the wider community around them.

Chapter 8 encourages managers to reconsider their responsibility to themselves and how they support themselves professionally and personally so that they can be effective as leaders and managers of their setting.

The conclusion to this book summarises the guidance and material discussed throughout the book. It distills it to a ten-point plan for managers to consider when auditing the staff team, adding to the staff team and reflecting on their own skills and areas for improvement. This section of the book also looks forward in the area of leadership and management to think about the wider arena and how general trends of changing roles of leadership and management are affecting the early years workforce.

References

‘More Great Childcare’ (2013) www­.go­v.u­k, accessed 9 June 2013.

Siraj-Blatchford, I. and Manni, L. (2007) Effective Leadership in the Early Years Sector: the ELEYS Study. London: Institute of Education, University of London.

CHAPTER 2

The background to current professional practice and policy

In this chapter we will be considering the legislative background to leadership and management in the early years. We hope to outline some of the recent changes that have happened in this area of early years practice and move on to look at the implications of these changes. With this chapter in front of them the practitioner should be able to steer a path between what are the requirements in terms of the EYFS, what the OFSTED inspector seeks when carrying out an inspection and finally what is expected from a good and outstanding setting when thinking of leadership and management of staff provision. Using this chapter the manager will have a clear understanding of the key changes in this area and be able to carry out an audit of current provision, matching it with the highest levels of practice and devising an action plan to achieve those standards using the practical next steps section at the end of the chapter.

Professionalism in the early years workforce

This greater emphasis on the management of early years settings is part of a wider trend and slow move towards greater professionalism in the early years workforce. It is a move that started with the 1989 Children Act and has seen qualification to level three, in addition to suitable experience, as a requirement for managers of settings:

We want the people providing care and support to babies and young children to be well qualified and well respected – and for parents to be reassured that their children are receiving the high quality care. We need to move away from the idea that teaching young children is somehow less important or inferior to teaching school-age children.

(www­.ed­uca­tio­n.g­ov.­uk, accessed 18 April 2013)

In addition, at present (and currently under review) there must be a minimum of 50 per cent staff trained to level two or above and more recently there has been the introduction of a foundation degree in early years and the Early Years Teaching Status (EYTS). This is a post-graduate qualification comparable to qualified teacher status. This latter qualification has been recently changed from Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) in the latest Government initiative ‘More Great Childcare’ (January 2013) because

there is nothing more important in early education than the quality of the staff that are delivering it. As Professor Nutbrown pointed out in her review of qualifications for the early education and childcare workforce, the quality of the workforce and the qualifications on offer at the moment are not good enough. Staff are on low pay and in too many cases lack basic skills.

(More Great Childcare 2013: 6)

Practitioners completing these post-degree qu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The background to current professional practice and policy
• Chapter 3: Recruitment
• Chapter 4: Leading your team
• Chapter 5: Managing your team
• Chapter 6: When the going gets tough
• Chapter 7: The wider community
• Chapter 8: You as a manager and leader
• Chapter 9: Conclusion
• Index