In this episode, colleagues from the National Day Nurseries Association join Ofsted to discuss the report into the importance of the first two years of a child's life: Getting it right from the start: how early years practitioners work with babies and toddlers - GOV.UK

Briony Balsom  

Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition of Ofsted Talks. I'm Bryony Balsam, and this time, we're focusing on early years, on 'Getting it right from the start, how early years practitioners work with babies and toddlers.' And indeed, that is the title of our recently released report. So the research explores how early years practitioners understand the Early Years Foundation Stage framework and apply it to the education and care of babies and toddlers. So we're talking up to two years. It draws largely on a series of visits to early years settings, a survey and some inspector focus groups. So joining us today, we have Fiona Bland, who is from the National Day Nurseries Association, Kiran Singh, who's one of Ofsted's Research and Evaluation leads and was involved in writing and producing the report. And we have Wendy Ratcliff, who is Ofsted's lead for early education. Hello, everybody. So Wendy, just to kick us off then, why did we produce the report? 

Wendy Ratcliff  

Really good question, and there's a bit of history there. So when we were doing our 'Best start in life research review 'series, one of the things that came out from that was that, we're aware that there's very little research out there around babies, around our youngest children. And I think that's you know, that that's really important for us at a time when the government are looking are increasing funding, there'll be more babies in settings from September in in terms of the childcare reforms. The other thing we know that those first two years lay those important foundations for all future learning, and that babies' development just needs to be encouraged, supported, and, you know, monitored by adults. It's so vitally important to get those first two years right. 

Briony Balsom  

Yeah, so I think the report starts out by saying what we know instinctively to be the case, that those first two years are really crucial to a child's development. 

Briony Balsom  

Why is it that they're so important? Could you tell us a little bit about what forms in that child in their first two years?

Wendy Ratcliff  

Yeah, absolutely. So. If we think about we think, well, we think about the EYFS, for example, and we think about those educational programs and the primaries of learning. There's so much that needs to happen. What does happen in those first two years and the importance around you know, personal, social and emotional development, physical development, communication and language, we think of those important interactions, and I think one of the key things for us is making sure we get that balance right between care and education, because whatever we do through those interactions, those routines with the youngest children, children are learning something, and that's really important. 

Briony Balsom  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's because we know it's so important that some of the examples in the report are really so wonderful. So there's a really evocative one of the the practitioner talking about sand in a really glorious way. And you can just feel the engagement with the child. Kiran, I'm going to come to you. Can you tell us a little bit about the methodology and what, what you looked at, who you spoke with to formulate the report? 

Kiran Singh  

Yeah, yeah, of course. It was really important for us, right from the outset of this project to capture as many voices as we could and really try to be as accessible as we could for the early years sector. And we know that not every nursery could take part. We know that not every practitioner could tell us something. So we tried to, we did a lot of different methods. We first of all, we looked at existing studies and literature on the topic, and we found that there wasn't really as much as there, you know, that there should be on babies that is specific to England. We also issued a national survey to all local authorities in England, and they then sent on the survey to all their registered providers. So in effect, we were giving every single practitioner in England a chance to respond to the survey. We didn't get every single practitioner respond, but we did get a large number of responses that we could actually use, so that that was really good. We visited nurseries, not ones that were attached to schools, and we also visited child minders, and we interviewed leaders and practitioners, and we held discussions with our own inspectors about the practice that they saw in the baby rooms. So we had a we had a big data set for this, and all of our findings we triangulated across the board. 

Briony Balsom  

Yeah, I mean, it's really expansive in the breadth of who you spoke to. So what about findings? What were the key findings? If you could draw those out for us. 

Kiran Singh  

We had a range of findings from this research, but they were all really underpinned by the notion that qualifications and experience both matter when it comes to high quality practice and the importance of high quality and relevant CPD for babies. So we saw lots of good examples that demonstrated like, really good understanding of the key person role in the baby room. And it was really endearing and encouraging to see that in the baby room, the baby room practitioners really understood how important this was for the babies. It was really important for them to get to know the baby and to get to know the families. And they understood that they were that link that would make that experience really, you know, really meaningful and good for babies. Our findings also supported that that high that the frequency and the quality of interaction between adults and children are are really critical from that for that quality provision from birth. And whilst I did tell you that our survey was national, it wasn't completely representative of the early years workforce or the wider population of England, and that's an important caveat. But alongside our visits data, it did show us both, both the visits data and their survey data did show us that more needs to be done to help practitioners actually understand their role in babies and toddlers physical development. Exactly what can practitioners do that helps to support them in that physical development. And then our survey also helped us to conclude that practitioners holding qualifications at or above level four, they were more likely to demonstrate a higher level of knowledge and understanding about high quality education and care from from birth than those who held a lower qualification. And we know that might be like a really obvious thing, but it's really important for us to actually see the data that shows us that. And you know, we can talk about that confidently. We also found that when we was talking to practitioners, there were some barriers that prevented, or like delayed, practitioners from actually delivering all those high quality interactions and the high quality education and care that we've talked about a lot in the report for babies. And the main barriers were around, like, misconceptions about educating and caring for babies. And those, those misconceptions were held by practitioners, and we and we know that also that there were some challenges in recruiting and retaining skilled and experienced practitioners that that really did affect, like the quality of baby room practice and leaders talked a lot about that a lot to us. 

Briony Balsom  

Yeah, yeah. And I really want to come back and explore some some of the detail in those key findings in a minute, and we can bring those, bring those to life, a little. But to come to you, Fiona, before we go into them in in great detail, so broadly did the report ring true for you in terms of what you know about the sector and practitioners? 

Fiona Bland  

It definitely reflects the things that we talk about and hear about through our members. We know that there are fantastic practitioners out there doing wonderful jobs, and it was great to read those lovely examples in the report. And we also hear about the challenges that they're having in terms of recruitment, and, you know, being able to get those high quality staff into the setting. So, yeah. 

Briony Balsom  

I mean, I suppose one of the questions that that came to me was looking at the report was about, how do we learn from this? How do we then cascade that into training so that we're improving practice? I mean, continuous development is presumably a particular area of challenge. How can we learn from this and build this into CPD and initial training? 

Fiona Bland  

There are lots of challenges, and CPD doesn't always mean formal training. It can take place in many ways, so providers have to be really creative in how they're doing that. If they're looking at a training course, it's thinking about, what are those skills that they want their staff to achieve, what they're looking for them to get, and then making sure that they do some research, looking at the training and the training company making sure that the course that they're looking for has that theory that underpins that practice, and then it gives them that practical application, so that when they go back to their setting, they're able to put that into their practice and see where, where that fits. If it isn't formal training, then you k