The Assertive Practitioner

How to improve early years practice through effective communication

Deborah Price, Cathy Ota

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317351795
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Educación infantil

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 assertive communication and offers a range of clear, practical strategies that are easy to implement in the early years setting.

The Assertive Practitioner aims to distinguish between assertive, passive, aggressive and passive aggressive communication so that early years practitioners can gain confidence, become more self-aware, reflect on their own practice and develop their effective communication skills. Divided into three parts: 'what is assertiveness', 'using it' and 'developing it', the authors consider the skills of good communication and assertiveness in the early years setting, offering practical guidance on:

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• Recruitment, induction, ongoing staff training and supervision;

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• Disciplinary processes including handling difficult conversations and refocusing a team after a critical incident;

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• Staff relationships with parents and other professionals;

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• Involving the team in problem solving and implementing change;

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• Engaging with the community;

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• How to get support for yourself as a manager.

Packed full of practical strategies and case studies, this timely new book will be invaluable support for all those wanting to enhance and improve professional practice and relationships in the early years setting.

Part 1

What is assertiveness?

Chapter 1

Why assertiveness is important for early years teams

This chapter is about the importance of using assertiveness skills in early years and examines why it is especially important to use these skills in the early years sector.

The main points in this chapter are that

• Women make up the majority of the early years workforce, often in part-time and low-paid positions.

• There are a small amount of men in the workforce.

• Because of the idea that working with children is naturally ‘women’s work’ men in childcare encounter a lot of suspicion and prejudice.

• Because of these reasons assertion skills are important for both women and men in childcare in order to bolster up their self-esteem and manage difficult conversations.

Men in childcare

Before we talk about the importance of using assertion skills in early years we need to state in advance that in this chapter we will mainly be talking about the importance of assertion skills for women in early years. We know that this may seem like an assumption and we also acknowledge the importance of assertion skills for men in childcare. Statistics (from 2012) show that only 2% of the early years’ workforce is male. Assertion skills are important for anyone to understand and take into their practice. We do feel that it is especially important for women who work in an area of the workforce that has historically been undervalued and is low paid, often part time work. We also wanted in this section to extend this to include men in childcare, as there are also pressures and expectations of them that mean that challenging attitudes and having difficult conversations using assertion techniques is essential practice.

The Pre-school Learning Alliance carried out a survey in 2011 that showed that, although most parents surveyed said that they were happy for men to care for their children, this number decreased the younger the children were.

The survey of 1,200 mothers and fathers who use childcare found that almost all (97.9 per cent) parents are happy for men to work with children aged three to five in day nurseries.

However, the percentage of parents fell to 89 per cent when it came to younger children aged from birth to two. Of the remaining 11 per cent, only 3.2 per cent of parents were unhappy for men to work with such young children.

(Baker, 2012)

The survey went onto interview male school leavers and ask them why they weren’t considering early years as a career option and the answers ranged from it being ‘women’s work’ to worrying what other people would think of them and lack of career progression.

We think that the small amount of men who do work in early years need and would benefit from assertion skills. They have to take engage with and challenge the attitudes of some of the women that they work with ‘why would you want to work with babies?’ and also the prejudices and suspicions of some of the parents. One of the men that we have interviewed for our previous book on leadership talked about starting work in an early years setting:

When I started work there it felt like a bit of a closed shop. For a while I was the only man working there and I was always conscious of the other women judging me and wondering why I was working there. I felt the pressure to be even better than my best and never make a mistake. There was also the attitude of the parents. One mother openly made some comments about paedophiles and I didn’t know what to do. I knew that my manager had taken a risk hiring me and had to speak to quite a few parents about my placement in the baby room and I didn’t want to add to her stress. Once another man was employed there things got a bit better even though he just works in the after school club. I still resent being the one who is expected to do all of the odd jobs in the nursery, like moving heavy furniture and changing light bulbs. They seem to look to me to take the initiative in outside play as well. I have heard quite a few staff members refer to us as ‘the boys’ and I feel uncomfortable with that but don’t know what to do’.

(‘Tom’, baby room practitioner)

It can be argued that men have an inbuilt assertion in the workplace that comes from their place in society and the way that they and their work are treated and that there is no need for them to learn additional skills. This can stem from the societal assumption, still prevalent, that men need to work and have a career in order to support their families while for women part time work has to fit in around childcare responsibilities and provide ‘pin money’ (think about the meaning behind that expression).

In the annual survey of hours and earnings 2013 these assumptions are shown to be a harsh reality and prove that, although women’s wages have increased (and it could be noted that this may just be because the minimum wage rate has increased), the gap between men and women’s wages is actually getting bigger.

• For men, full-time earnings were £556 per week, up 1.8%, compared with £459 for women, up 2.2%.

• The gender pay gap (i.e. the difference between men’s and women’s earnings as a percentage of men’s earnings) based on median gross hourly earnings (excluding overtime) for full-time employees increased to 10.0% from 9.5% in 2012 (Office for National Statistics, 2013).

Even taking this into account, there are specific reasons why men in early years childcare still need support with assertion skills.

Background to the early years sector

We attempt below to provide a short summary of the most recent – post 1989 – changes to the early years sector and workforce and show this as context for the importance of assertion skills in the current climate and regime. Since the Children Act 1989 and the move towards greater regulation of early years provision there has also been a corresponding shift towards increasing the professional status of early years workers.

Historically, as we have already discussed, the people who work in early years settings have been part time, low-paid workers and stereotypically the work itself has been seen as little more than baby-sitting. Society has seen the raising of children, whether at home or in day care settings, to be ‘women’s work’ and an extension of the naturally caring and nurturing role that women are often expected to fill. The Coalition Governments’ publication ‘More Great Childcare’ 2013 states that:

Low wages for staff working in the early years limit the scope for further professionalisation, with many staff paid little more than the minimum wage. In 2011, the national minimum wage for those over 21 was £6.08 an hour. Those working below supervisor level in full daycare settings earn on average only slightly more than this, at £6.60 an hour.

(Department for Education, 2013, p. 13)

However, post 1989 early years as a sector has been more regulated, more monitored and there has also been an interest in early years at Government level led by the Sure Start initiative. This interest in early years and the benefit of investing in it formed one of the opening statements of the Tickell review in 2011. This review led to the reformulation of the EYFS in 2014.

Investment and interventions in the early years are generally more effective in improving outcomes than investments and interventions later in life. The return on public investment in high quality early years education is substantial leading to decreased social problems, reduced inequality and increased productivity and GDP growth.

(Department for Education, 2011, p. 11)

The range of professional qualifications available to practitioners has increased dramatically in recent years. This was matched initially with generous funding from Local Authorities in order to support and enable practitioners to complete higher-level training and foundation degree levels of higher education. This funding has now tailed off with local authority cut backs and also the introduction and availability to part time students of the government student loan scheme. For a few years however, with this funding, there was a really positive influx of women who used the financial support to access the education that they had disengaged with as young people. They were now able to reclaim this education through their part time work with children. The early years sector was their route to academic success and many students went on and achieved full BA honours while working and having their study part funded by local authorities.

Post 1996 with the ‘nursery voucher’ scheme initiated by the Conservative government and then replaced in 1997 with the incoming Labour Government’s nursery education scheme the number of private day nurseries increased dramatically. Provision was also added to by the expansion of the Sure Start project from areas to deprivation initially to become the UK wide (3631 in 2010) children’s centres that offered a universal service based in local authorities.

More recently the new qualification of EYT (early years teacher) has been launched. This follows on from the previous EYP (early years professional). This new EYT has the same requirements as a primary teacher with QTS (qualified teacher status). Holders of EYT, before completing the qualification, are expected to hold a degree and also have achieved a grade C or above (or comparable) in maths, English and science. The Coalition Government foresee early years care and education being led by early years teachers in the future. Their reasoning for this is that with higher qualified staff comes more flexibility and so higher staff:child ratios. We would not agree with this reasoning as our argument is that having staff who are professionally trained does not transfer to the idea that this means that they can manage larger groups of children.

We discuss in Chapter 2 of our earlier book Leading and Supporting Early Years Teams how this move towards enhanced professionalism has also bought with it an expectation of higher qualifications within the staff team in settings. It is currently expected that at least half the staff in an early years setting are qualified to level two and above.

The Nutbrown review of children’s services that ‘More Great Childcare’ refers to recommended that: The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, from September 2013, a minimum of 50 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ Level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios. Nutbrown also recommends that there should be further revision so that, from September 2015, a minimum of 70 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ Level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios. This has not been acted on in the most recent revision of the EYFS (Department of Education, 2013).

What does all this mean?

We feel that there have been great moves forward with the recent interest in early years and renewed understanding of the importance of this work. The practitioners in early years settings are undertaking, what we would argue, is the most important job in society, that of educating and caring for the next generation and enabling parents and carers to work. Underpinning this rise in regulatory standards and the overseeing of quality of provision in early years settings is the idea that children are getting a better experience in settings and a positive start to education, taking the definition of education in a holistic way, as in including social and emotional development. Early years provision in the UK has the double edged aim of providing children with the best possible start in life and also providing safe and affordable care for the workforce in order that parents can work and contribute to the economy. In addition to this the majority of nurseries are privately owned small businesses and are in competition with each other. The two aims do not always agree with each other, as what is affordable is not always good quality.

Providing quality education and care provision cannot be done ‘on the cheap’. We believe that the greatest asset that a setting has are its staff team and this is where the money should be channeled. There is a tension in small businesses to attract the ‘customer’, that is the parent, by providing a quality provision. At present this quality is measured by OFSTED, but also by parents’ perceptions of what should be present. Both agencies prefer there to be a low turnover of staff in order to provide continuity to the children and a stable staff team. In order to do this staff need to be encouraged to remain in the setting by offering an attractive wages package. Despite this reasoning high staff turnover is a worrying issue in the early years sector and we think that the wages are still not attractive enough to keep staff in position and encourage them, not only to remain in the workforce, but to seek promotion and higher qualifications.

The situation at present is that the sector is seeing the benefits of increased provision, a structured play based curriculum and the expectation of a qualified and professional workforce led and managed by practitioners who have the knowledge and skills of teachers. There is with that, we feel, an added stress and workload burden on practitioners without the enhancement that status and pay can bring.

Why should I take all this paperwork home with me to do in my own time? I have staff phoning in sick with stress, parents refusing to pay their bills, OFSTED on my back wanting me to fill in a mountain of forms and the nursery owner going on at me to keep the costs down and stop ordering expensive paper and paints. I could earn about the same answering the phone in my local dentist, and have none ...