CONTRIBUTORS
Prioritising people for early years education
In her regular column for Education Today this month, NAOMI HOWELLS, Managing Director at recruitment specialists Class People, discusses staff retention in early years education.
Having had a baby in February, this week I faced the first heart-lurching notification that my child’s nursery worker was leaving. The person that has spent almost five months building a bond with my child, and being the secure attachment needed for confident learning and exploring. It set me reflecting on continuity in education, and the vital role we play in assuring the stability and learning of young people in the classroom.
In the UK, there is a persistent narrative of high turnover of staff in nursery and early years education, leading to the unnecessary childhood trauma. As extensively highlighted by the Princess of Wales and her advisory experts in her “Shaping Us” campaign, the first five years of a child’s brain development are crucial for making connections. What’s more, these cranial networks can last a lifetime. The question is, are we doing enough to secure these benefits.
According to Benoit (2004), having an attachment with primary caregivers is essential to developing ‘organised and secure’ behaviours, which act as a protective factor against social and emotional maladjustment. Furthermore, children with disorganised attachment – often created through the repeated breaking of bonds with caregivers – are more likely to suffer from stress, “have problems with regulation and control of negative emotions, display oppositional, hostile, aggressive behaviours and coercive styles of interaction”. These are all behavioural aspects that many teachers find themselves grappling with in the classroom, which have their foundation in early years. The analysis goes on to highlight a connection between disorganised attachments and academic capability. For example, “Children classified as disorganised with their primary caregiver at ages five to seven years, have lower mathematics attainment at eight years of age.”
Teaching is typified by long hours, inflexible schedules, and particularly for nursery workers, a lower than average annual pay, especially when compared to less challenging, less skilled opportunities. Yet when classroom attachments are so vital in supporting the development of positive attachments, it is essential that we are all working to minimise pupil disruption and maximise educational continuity.
The Government is aware of the challenges facing schools in recruiting and retaining staff, and while we are beginning to see some innovation, as yet, there are no firm solutions for the staffing shortage or wage restrictions. Instead, schools will do well to focus wholeheartedly on retention. If retention cannot be assured through high wages, then the alternative is to consider the other workplace hygiene factors that guard against job dissatisfaction, as originated by Frederick Herzburg. These include colleague relationships, relationships with leaders, recognition of achievement and good practice, rewards, personal development opportunities, the value of their work, and the support they receive.
For us as recruiters, we see the realities of schools getting hygiene factors right: higher staff retention, and better motivation and morale, compared to those that let the pressures of time and education overtake the focus on motivating staff. It is here that schools can make the biggest gains, and I would like to see school leadership excelling here. Teachers are after all the lifeblood of education, and the foundation of good lifetime performance.
24
www.education-today.co.uk
Weaving professional development into your career journey
Reviewing your professional development objectives throughout the school year can be so much more rewarding, says BlueSky Education’s DENISE INWOOD in the first of her new regular columns for Education Today.
Professional development objectives can be a little like new year resolutions.
Set with zeal at the start of a brand new (academic) year, time and workload pressures can make them into something of a cliff to climb.
That has been changing in recent years. The pressures are still there, of course, but the majority of schools now see CPD as an integral part of their improvement strategy
and one of the few really effective levers of success in the classroom.
Professional development is especially relevant to the pressures schools face today, particularly recruitment and retention. Research shows that teachers who regularly engage with professional development are far more likely to be teaching a year later compared to those that don’t.
Continuously reviewing and checking your development objectives – weaving it into your professional life and making it a habitual practice – is a valuable exercise that will help to put professional development at the centre of your practice.
And ensuring that development objective setting takes place within the context of a rigorous and effective performance management, appraisal and quality assurance framework only increases the chances of that happening.
Why is it important to review your PD objectives, and how do you make it a habitual practice? Teaching should be a growth journey in which teachers continually reflect on their practice, changing tack when needed, and using professional development to help them to adapt and develop. And, just as importantly, the teacher’s PD needs and targets should also be clearly linked into the school’s overall improvement plan.
The continual approach to PD means that if you go off track it is easy to correct your course. It is more about incremental improvement than the ‘shock and awe’ approach of working towards a long-term objective which you review at the end of the year, only to discover you took a wrong turn back in March.
To illustrate this incremental approach, take a key area of teacher practice such as questioning. Your objective could be to develop higher-level questioning, then research why higher-level questioning is important in order to improve your understanding of how it might support more able students. Once you have understood its principles your appraiser might suggest that you observe a colleague in action, discussing what you have seen with them afterwards, and then working with that colleague to further develop your skills. It’s a step by small step approach that results in significant professional growth.
The cumulative approach is growing in popularity – a BlueSky survey in autumn 2020 showed that while 90% of respondents set objectives in the autumn term, more than half of them maintained an ongoing dialogue throughout the year - but it has some way to go. Mid-year reviews are better than leaving it all to the year end, but even those aren’t as common as they could be.
Not having regular opportunities to share your development journey can be isolating, and in an environment where new and existing teachers are demanding more recognition and purpose in their roles, it could be seen as demonstrating a lack of appreciation of their contributions.
January 2024
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