A Right to be Children: The Importance of the Design Architecture

The importance of architecture to Early Years is often misunderstood. The building is part of the enabling environment and needs to be designed to support learning by creating the right environment and resources both indoors and outside. They are also integral to meeting the sustainability pillars; economic, social and environments in their design for example where they are situated, and how they support local communities and the local biodiversity. Nowadays, people are thinking even more about the towns and cities, the city of play and how to make them child friendly and position schools and nurseries as community catalysts.

If you are interested in design and want to understand why it matters and how we need a strong relationship with architects, then listen here.

Sarah Ronan is the director of the Early Education and Childcare Coalition (EECC) – an organisation made up of 35 members which represent children, parents, providers, the Early Years workforce and the wider business community.

Like many others in the Early Years sector, Sarah's journey is deeply personal. Her own experiences with inaccessible childcare, combined with her passion for women’s issues, led her to work with organisations like the Women’s Budget Group and Pregnant Then Screwed. She firmly believes that access to childcare is a core feminist issue – not only for women as parents but also for the predominantly female workforce in the sector. It also shines a light on the broader politics of care and its critical importance in society.

Building a coalition in the Early Years sector is no small feat. It requires both time and resources, especially in a field as diverse and market driven as this. The first year of the coalition's work focused on laying the groundwork behind the scenes –aligning priorities and getting everything in place before officially launching its efforts.

Key to this is producing robust research evidence and effective policy solutions, both of which require significant energy to drive the movement forward and, according to Sarah, this has been lacking in Early Years for some time.

Her long-term ambition is for a movement that is not just a formal group of people but one that weaves together all the informal structures, dynamics and mechanisms that exist into a powerful catalyst that can become a force for change and therefore a force for good.

Sarah raises the challenges of a coalition which are not just keeping the energy powered but also securing funds to create the communication content and lead the advocacy to get in front of the right people. It is these individuals who can help drive the change needed to create a fair and accessible service for all children and their families.

So, have a listen to a master class on developing networks and coalitions in an Early Years that must do much more to share our powerful message with politicians, policy makes and the public.

There is a lot of concern about recently qualified staff who appear to find adjusting to the workplace a challenge and seem to have emerged with degrees which are low quality. As an employer of nearly 1000 staff, that is an issue, because my job isn’t simply to recruit staff but to succession plan ( and I don’t mean that in a Brian Cox sort of way!).
Therefore, these concerns which I am hearing about from many quarters are of concern. But are these facts or rumours and setting out self -fulfilling prophesies? Is it just university ranking snobbery?

So, I asked Professor Eunice Lumsden, from the University of Northampton who heads up the Childhood Youth and Families Department and is responsible for a whole suite of degrees from undergraduate to postgraduate, that cover a raft of subjects including early childhood studies, education, social work to working with children.

Listen to find out what this means for us as employers and university and college teachers!