Training for Early Years Education and Childcare in Europe

News

A pan-European innovation in early years training

Aspirations to improve the way childcare professionals are perceived in the UK and to do something innovative in workforce training led Early Years Childcare to become involved with the European Union's Leonardo Programme. NMT visited the company's headquarters in Hove, Sussex, to find out more.

Early Years Childcare was founded in 1989 and now has nine nurseries and seven out-of-school schemes, caring for more than 1,000 children and employing over 300 staff. The company has always provided very strong support for its staff, recognising from the outset that staff development programmes must be well resourced and constantly reviewed. However, Managing Director Julie Bates and her team believe that our education system and traditional routes into early years training do not always allow childcare workers to achieve their full potential, thereby inhibiting the growth of the workforce as a whole.

From her observations during more than twenty years in the (childcare) sector, Julie believes that if childcare workers have not had a positive educational experience whilst at school, then poor-quality vocational training compounds the problem and helps maintain the low educational status of the profession.

Why the Leonardo Programme?

Significantly for Early Years Childcare, the European Union's Leonardo programme focuses on innovation in vocational training. The programme (named after Leonardo Da Vinci) also seeks to promote European co-operation in qualification and vocational training. One of the key principles is to look at ways in which vocational training lead to trabsferable skills, so that workers can use their training to work in other European countries. Another principle, again with innovation at heart, is to develop projects that support the most vulnerable people in the labour market.

Early Years Childcare applied to the Leonardo programme and secured £280,000 worth of funding in order to develop their training project, which they have decided to call TEECHE (Training for Early Years Education and Childcare in Europe). This award represents 75% of the total cost of the project, which is the maximum that the Leonardo programme will award. The remaining 25% will be match funded by all the partner organisations. The development project will run over two and a half years.

How the programme works

Beryl Carroll, TEECHE Project & Business Development Manager at Early Years Childcare, describes how the Leonardo programme operates: 'We had to submit the aims and objectives for our training programme and indicate how these matched the Leonardo criteria.'

'The Leonardo programme specifies that applicants must identify European partners with whom they will work in a group. These partners may not necessarily be from the same sector. Together, the partners must access skills from a variety of sources to complement the aims and objectives of the project. The partners must also ensure that the training proposals developed are appropriate to the whole of the European Union.'

Across the UK, 102 organisations applied to the Leonardo programme and 22 were successful. Early Years Childcare was the only successful childcare business from the UK, although the London Borough of Camden EYDCP is one of the partners with whom Early Years Childcare is working. The other UK partner is Worth Media, in Brighton, who will be offering technological support and developing the website for the project. There are two partners from Austria: Bfi Steiermark (one of the largest institutions for vocational adult training in Austria) and Volkshilfe Steiermark (the largest provider of children's day care centres in the region of Styria). The fifth partner is SCO Kohnstamm Institut of the Universiyt of Amsterdam, in Holland.

'One of the really exciting things about working in this way', says Julie, 'is the process of exchange - we can learn so much from our European partners. We can draw on the best of what works in other countries, look at why certain approaches and traditions work and consider whether there are elements that we could use in the UK. The culture of Early Years Childcare has always been to explore, to challenge. It would be very easy for us as a company to remain where we are, keep on doing what we are good at - but we want to look outwards and develop new ideas.'

The ten work packages

Over the two and a half years the partner organisations, individually and jointly, will work on 10 work packages to develop the training. These are:

• Project Planning
• Research (identifying the skills gap and analysing need)
• Developing the European training model
• Looking at national training packages
• Designing the pilot project
• Implementing the pilot
• Evaluating the pilot
• Refinement and finalisation of the Europeam model
• Dissemination (in reality, an ongoing process)
• Project management (also ongoing)

Nursery Management Today - 2003