Management of Provision in the Early Years Setting

Introduction:

This essay is built on the management case study. I am going to critically analyse the case study using theoretical and research evidence of the management of provision in early years setting. This will provide a critical analysis of the management of provision of the setting in terms of these factors. (a) The manager’s role and responsibilities. (b) Leadership styles. (c) Government early years policies that influence the management of provision. (d) Financial and human resources management. To understand the manager’s role and responsibilities I and my friends in decided to interview a children centre manager. I was asked to make an appointment with the manager. I called the manager and arranged interview time with groups mutual understanding. But unfortunately my mates were not ready to go for the interview. So with my lecturer’s permission I went alone to interview children centre nursery manager.

Provide relevant contextual information about the setting where you did the interview, for example is it a school-based early years provision, a private nursery, or Children Centre? Is it in a rural or urban location? Is the area social and ethnically mixed? What ages of children attend? (150 words approx I visited Children Centre in Hackney to interview nursery manager. The purpose of interview was to understand the role and responsibilities of nursery leader or manager in early years setting. The Children Centre is located in Central London under Hackney council authority. The children centre provides health and education services for children and families. The nursery provides the provision for 0-5 years old with the maximum capacity of 75 children. It consists of two baby rooms; both rooms can have 12 children in each room. Also, they have two toddler rooms; large room can have 14 children and small room with capacity of 12 children. The pre-school can have 24 children in the room. According to the manager, all rooms are full with maximum number of children and have two years waiting list for baby room and long waiting list for other rooms for children from outside admissions. According to Ofsted report (April 2014) The centre provides outstanding service for children and families and the nursery educators are supporting children to get ready to school and support them to learn numeracy and phonics before starting school.

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To understand leadership role in the early years setting it is vital to understand the contextual meaning of leadership. According to Northouse (2013, p4) “leadership have different meanings for different people and there is no common theory about leadership” It is vital to have good management to deliver good provision on children in early years settings. The management or leadership in early years settings should have good knowledge and understanding of early years foundation stage curriculum, governments policy and guidelines, current research and practice and work in partnership with parents, staff and other agencies to provide high quality provision for children. Northouse (2013) suggests that “leadership needs followers and leaders role to achieve a common goal with followers with a common purpose”. According to Blatchford and Manni (2007, p.1) effective management provides better outcome for children when there are better and warm relationships between practitioners and children. Also children learn better when practitioners use open-ended questions to give chance to children to use their critical thinking and answer with confidence.

For effective leadership role, appropriate training is essential to provide good quality of provision for the early years because, leadership role involves multi-professional work. Moyles (2006) suggests that leader and manager have different roles but complement each other. In early years the mangers role is to making sure that the organisation is running smoothly by good planning and coordination. However, the leaders role is to inspire and motivate others for change. The manager and leader both characteristics are important in education field. Therefore, it is more important especially in pre-school age, when manager, leader, parents, and teacher rapidly form relationship. It is vital to examine government’s policy to provide highly qualified and trained workforce as leaders and managers in early years settings and children centres, to provide better care and education for children and excellent working partnership with patents. A good leader always encourages the staff to accomplish set targets or tasks. The tool of supervision is a useful way to support staff by listening to their voices, thoughts, interests and needs.

It is essential to unfold government of UK’s policy on early years education. Ang (2012) states that government of UK gives high priority of training and qualification programmes for leadership to work in early years. The workforce and development council (CWDC) introduced Early Years Professional Status (EYP) award in 2007, to all graduates from different sectors to get qualification and training to work as early years professional (EYP). It is nationally accepted standards for professionals to work as a leader in children centres or schools within early years settings. The government of UK have facilitates students with full grant to accomplish the EYP status. Its Managers duty to make sure that nursery is running smoothly on daily basis and provides high quality provision for the children. For example, during my interview with nursery line-manager in Children Centre in Hackney, I asked one part of my question. [Q] ‘How do you ensure the continuing development of staffs strengths and areas of development? [A] “I use tool of supervision and appraisals to ask staff if they need any support or want to go to any training. Sometimes, I used my initiative to recommend certain training for staff such as my one staff was not confident to deal with children with challenging behaviour so I spoke to her and recommended training ‘Working with Children with Challenging Behaviour’. Also Centre teachers make observations on staff on monthly basis. It’s including outdoor play and small language sessions and literacy sessions. Teachers give comments what they observe and give copy to staff as well to read feedback from teacher and write any comments. During teachers observations if teacher feel that education officer needs support and training to support children, then we send them on relevant training or on next session teacher and the educator take the session together and educator observe the teacher to improve her techniques to run language or literacy sessions. According to staffs strengths they have been designated areas of responsibilities such as staff with creative skills is given creative area and to manage displays in the room”. Rodd (2006,p) suggests that “ the professional support provided through effective supervision helps staff to listen to and accept constructive feedback and learn to reflect upon and critically evaluate their own performance”. The new collation government policy (2013) is emphasis on to provide better child care, by raising the standards and quality and giving parents more choices. The recommendations were set out after ‘Nutbrown report’ was published in 2012.It was commissioned by the government and Cathy Nutbrown was responsible to carried out the research. According to BBC report (2012) on ‘Nutbrown Review’, the report says that early years students have not questioned on competency in literacy and maths. Professor Cathy Nutbrown(2012) recommended that “Well-taught courses and learning routes which lead to reliable qualifications can help early-years practitioners to improve their skills, knowledge and personal qualities, constantly developing in their roles….This can only benefit young children, both in terms of their day-to-day experiences in the Early Years Foundation Stage and future learning outcomes".

[Q] What system do you have in place to ensure effective assessment and early years profiling. Do practioners have time away from the children to complete this work? How do you ensure that assessment clearly informs planning for the medium and short term? [A] “When we recruit new staff , always make sure that candidate have minimum level 3 qualification or diploma in early years care and education and good knowledge of early years foundation stage curriculum with good communication and writing skills to produce well structured assessment and daily observations. All staff is taking one hour time out to do assessments or filling every week. Also every week each room is having time out to have planning meeting for one and half hour to share observations with colleges and plan for target children. During planning staff looked into medium term planning before implement activities for coming week”.