Key Persons in the Early Years

Building relationships for quality provision in early years settings and primary schools

Peter Elfer, Elinor Goldschmied, Dorothy Selleck, Dorothy Y. Selleck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415610384
• eBook ISBN: 9781136642555
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Key Persons in the Early Years aims to explain what a Key Person is, the theory behind the approach and the practicalities of implementation. Practical in its approach and containing case studies as examples of reflective practice, this second edition details the role of the Key Person across all ages in the early years. This new edition has been fully updated in line with the EYFS and features a new chapter on the Key Person approach with 3-5 year olds.

The book offers guidance on:

• making the Key Person approach work in your setting with realistic strategies;
• the benefits of this approach for children's well being, for their learning and to ensure equal chances for all children;
• potential challenges and problems and how to overcome them drawing on accounts from practitioners of their journey in implementing this approach.

This book will be an essential text for practitioners and students who wish to fully understand the Key Person role and how it can benefit children, parents and their setting.

CHAPTER

1

Parenting and working, children and settings
Achieving life balances

Public Policy and Private Choices

Are work and family life compatible? All too often parents find it impossible to balance employment and care commitments. Reconciling work and family life is important to individuals and societies. Parents who wish to care for their children by giving up work should have their choice respected. Often, however, this ‘choice’ is constrained, because parents see no way of giving their children the care and education they need at the same time as working in today’s demanding labour market. Yet children whose parents are not in paid work are likely to be poor, while mothers who have interrupted their careers to care for their children are at higher risk of poverty when they are older. The ability to generate income in a fulfilling job and the desire to provide the best for one’s children, giving them the care and nurturing they need, do not have to be mutually exclusive.

(OECD, 2005)

The practicalities for parents of finding a job and an early years place for the children where the hours fit together, never mind the journeys, is not at all straightforward. If parents also have children of school age, the logistics are worse. Then there are holidays, late starts on days following holidays and INSET days. Covering for when children are unwell can barely be thought about.

But achieving a balance of family life and work, connecting the worlds of home and the early years setting is much more than the fitting of work round setting hours or setting round working hours, as difficult as that is. There are emotional transactions to be negotiated: balancing personal needs and children’s needs, time at home and earning an income for the family, being a ‘good’ employee but also being a ‘good’ parent. Although parents are very different from one another and have different approaches to bringing up their children, almost all parents want the very best for their child. Compromises are always necessary in life, but for most parents their children matter more than anything else. Striking these balances has to be done in a society that seems to be continually changing its policies and attitudes to earning and parenting. Public policy has certainly come a long way in the last 60 years.

While recent governments have wanted to encourage both women and men to work outside the home, this has certainly not always been the approach. At the close of World War II, the Ministry of Health could not have been more explicit:

in the interests of the health and development of the child … the right policy to pursue would be positively to discourage mothers of children under two from going out to work.

(Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education, 1945: 1)

Since 1945, the demand for greater fairness between women and men, equality of opportunity, changing family needs and the growth of the economy have combined to gradually enable a change of message from Government about how our youngest children are cared for.

In the years since 1945, the attitudes of government towards child care, evident in the circular quoted above with its message that women with children under the age of 2 should not work, have changed completely. Governments since 1994 have achieved a lot:

The authors of this paper are not alone in applauding the government’s achievements. Tremendous progress has been made in children’s services in England since the first OECD review took place in December 1999. Most noteworthy are the significant increase in investment, the expansion of (local) Sure Start schemes and new moves towards children’s centres and extended schools.

(private communication from John Bennett, author of the OECD report on early years, 2004, quoted in Pugh and Sylva 2005: 22)

An aspect of this ‘tremendous progress’ has been the increasing attention successive governments have given to the Key Person role and its importance. In the guidance issued with the Children Act 1989 (Department of Health, 1991), the importance to children’s well-being of consistent individual attention from a practitioner who knew that child well was emphasised. That value of each child having his own Key Person was a guiding principle of the Birth to Three Matters framework issued by the Government in 2002 (DfES, 2002). Another big step forward was made with the introduction of The Early Years Foundation Stage in September 2008, when the Key Persons role was made a duty (‘you must’) rather than just a recommendation (‘it would be a good idea if . . .’) (DfES, 2007).

Yet even back in 2005, Gillian Pugh and Kathy Sylva did not wear rose-tinted spectacles. They described a number of serious challenges still to be faced to develop a genuinely child-centred, integrated, accessible service working closely in partnership with parents. Further, as we write, the news is dominated by the imposition of spending cuts by the Coalition Government and the intention to move away from the aim of universal provision for all children and back to targeted provision for children and families considered to be most in need. The Early Years Foundation Stage is being reviewed by Dame Claire Tickell and it is likely that we will see some considerable changes to it.

So public policy and the legislation, duties and guidance that accompany it, impacts directly on the private choices parents make because it influences the very supply of early years places, their cost and their quality in general and very specific ways. We know from professional experience, research evidence and from having children and grandchildren of our own, just how much it matters what each early years setting is like. We know too how much difference it makes to know that there is someone in the early years setting who has special responsibility for each child and for helping that child build a special bond of belonging.

As well as public policy, public attitudes impact on private choices too. The roles women and men, mothers and fathers take at home and at work, as portrayed on the television and film, in newspapers and magazines, also shape the life balances that families strike. At one time it was seen as irresponsible if a father did not work outside the home but irresponsible if a mother did. An opposite but equally powerful theme suggested women were bored or boring if they did not work outside the home. Many mothers seemed to feel blamed and shamed whatever they did.

For many parents, particularly mothers, there still seems to be quite a deep anxiety about whether the care of children outside the family home, however good it is, can be good enough. Yet the main conclusion of researchers is that good quality services are not harmful and may bring many benefits (Melhuish, 2004; Belsky et al., 2007; NICHD, 1997).At home, they allow both parents to work and have a better standard of living. And children may end up with the best of both worlds, the love and uniqueness of private family life but also the advantage of being part of a public community of adults and other children in the early years setting.

Alongside changes in public policy, more flexibility and less blame in cultural attitudes about the roles men and women actually take has seemed to free up the private choices that can be made about how child rearing, earning a living and running a home can be shared.

How ‘free’ such choices feel to those who make them and how well they work out in practice depends on many factors and not least levels of wages parents receive and levels of charges for early years places they have to pay. The flexibility of working hours and the hours of the early years setting are key factors too. Alongside these essential practicalities, we believe there are two other critical factors that determine the impact of early years care and education on the daily lives of children, parents, and practitioners: first, the quality of the early years setting; and second, how the two worlds of home and setting are enabled to join up.We believe the key to both these factors converges in the idea of the Key Persons approach. The remainder of Chapter 1 is devoted to saying why.

What counts in quality?

‘Quality’ is a slippery idea. It is easy to slip it into writing and conversation (‘quality education’, ‘quality setting’, ‘quality standards’), as if everybody would understand exactly what quality means in practice (and agree that this is what they wanted or valued for children).The quality of a car will be judged differently by different drivers according to what they most want (size, style, reliability, economy, top speed). To describe something as a ‘quality car’ says very little about its strengths or weaknesses. Similarly with a ‘quality early years setting’, different parents will give different priorities to different aspects of the setting (location, training of staff, programme of activities, approach of the manager, facilities and equipment).

When asked what they think is most important, most parents and practitioners list practical things first – safety, hygiene, quality of the food and sufficient staff. However, they also say that whilst these are essential, they are not enough. What matters most once the practicalities are in place are the staff, what they do and how they interact with the children.

This strong consensus amongst the people in daily contact with the children is supported by research:

Why do infants, indeed all people, so strongly seek states of interpersonal connectedness, and why does failure to achieve connectedness wreak such damage on their mental and physical health?

(Tronick, 2005: 293)

Penelope Leach emphasises the same central point although she expressed it in terms of how much relationships, another word for ‘interpersonal connectedness’, matter:

Children’s relationships with the people who take care of them are an important – probably the most important – aspect of the overall quality of child care. Research studies have identified a range of caregiver qualities that make good relationships with young children more likely, including sensitivity, empathy, and attunement. Being cared for by adults whose work is informed by these qualities and attitudes can help babies and young children to feel confident in themselves and encourage them to communicate and talk, think and have ideas, discover and learn.

(Leach, 2009: 193)

To this extent, researchers and writers, practitioners and parents seem to broadly agree about what counts in judging quality. However, when Leach speaks of ‘adults’, how many adults can this be? How can a team of practitioners work as individuals as well as a team offering each child consistent attention as well as enabling the child to benefit from contact with all the people in a team? And what does Leach mean by ‘sensitivity’ and ‘attunement’?

Consistency partly means that the majority of staff working in a setting ‘this month’ are still there working together ‘next month’ and the month after and so on. It refers to staff turnover and the importance of this being low. However, it also refers to a more detailed consistency during each day with regard to how many different people hold and care for each child. If a baby has five nappy changes in a day, for example, and a different person carries out each one, is that sufficiently ‘consistent’? If six different people give a toddler her lunch, one washing face and hands, another sitting her in her chair, a third spooning in first course and a fourth pudding with a fifth also taking a turn with the spoon and a sixth wiping her face and hands and getting her down at the end, is that sufficiently consistent?

These questions of who does what with each child in each setting, the number of different people and the details of how they interact, are very practical questions that lie at the heart of big questions about quality. But they raise an even bigger question about what kinds of places early years settings should ideally be.

Most people, watching the interaction between a baby and parent figure, are moved by the intensity of their mutual love affair. Whilst the baby’s adoration, delight and playfulness can seem to quickly collapse into sadness or even despair, there is no escaping the intense passion and importance of these interactions. This is how babies are!

But why? Is this intense interaction, like any other love affair, purely for its own sake, unique and irreplaceable, a wonderful part of the human condition? Or does it also have a purpose? Is this interaction, in the form it takes, present for a reason? Does it matter for the child’s healthy development? Is there even a place for the word ‘love’ in discussions about professional practice?

It’s called love … actually!

‘Care’ is the word that is most often used in early childhood settings to describe the role of practitioners who are not ‘teachers’ in the traditional sense of the word … We are continually reminded that care and education are inseparable … For me, in policy terms, the role of ‘carer’ has always been cast as a ‘cinderella’ role to that of teacher/educator. Many practitioners choose a career in nursery nursing because of their desire to form close relationships. A well informed practitioner (with a Masters degree in ECE) recently told me, ‘Our babies are so happy and content, they have a lovely time, I love them all so much!’ …

Drawing on Noddings’ work on the intellectual aspect of caring in relation to ethics of care and education, I want to push the boundaries of ‘care’ and ‘love’ further, specifically in relation to babies and children under three. I want to suggest that the work of early childhood professionals involves not only ‘care’ and ‘education’ but ‘love, care and education’. If this is the case then could it be that for some mothers when they recognise reciprocity at first hand they are able to identify the intellectual experience as an attachment that is fundamentally in tune with their own wants and needs for their child rather than a feeling that is threatening to the mother–child relationship?

(Page, 2008: 181–7)

In relation to early years settings, we can ask these questions in another way. We know that monomarty (infants being cared for by one mother figure) is not a precondition for healthy human development. However, do settings need to be places where some features of the parental relationship are provided for each child? These features might include coming to know the child very well, showing the child spontaneity, immediacy and delight in interactions, the ability to be involved in an intense relationship without being overwhelmed by it.

In no way is this to suggest the relationships professional practitioners make with children can be the same as home relationships, but it is to ask whether some aspects of the parental rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Parenting and working, children and settings: achieving life balances
• 2. What is the Key Persons approach?
• 3. A strategy for implementation: an approach, not a system
• 4. The Key Persons approach for 3- to 5-year-olds
• 5. The Key Person journey: its benefits and challenges
• References
• Index