Do you agree nursery practitioners are under pressure to juggle many aspects of their job role?
School readiness
Nurseries are under lots of pressure to get children ready for school. There is no official definition for school readiness. However, it is the responsibility of nursery practitioners to make sure that children are meeting developmental milestones by the end of nursery, for them to progress in reception. The age of children when starting school varies, between those who are almost 5 and those who recently turned 4, depending on their birthday. Summer-born children have less time to prepare for school, placing pressure on settings to ensure all children are working towards school readiness. Key workers must complete a transition document, outlining each child’s development before starting school. This enables teachers to gain an understanding of the child’s abilities and areas to support. This can be a lengthy document, which many large settings find difficult to complete due to time restrictions and the large number of key children each practitioner has to oversee. Research also shows that many early years practitioners and reception teachers have different views on what constitutes as ‘school ready.’ This can be difficult when supporting parents in preparing their child for school. Practitioners tend to agree that being ‘school ready’ involves being toilet trained and able to form friendships; however parents will often be more concerned with areas such as reading and writing.
Parental pressure
Research has suggested that Early Years practitioners should not be teaching children to read or write due to the lack of qualifications in teaching such areas. It is possible that practitioners may teach the child differently to how schools do so, in turn causing confusion when the child starts school. This can be detrimental to learning; however parents can put pressure on settings to do so. Pre-school parents will often expect a certain amount of ‘learning time’ to be happening during the day, failing to understand fully the idea of ‘play-based learning.’ Some parents will also be pushing these skills at home and then request for settings to follow this up at the nursery. There is a fine line between what is expected within the EYFS curriculum and the nursery and parental requests; it is difficult for practitioners to deny the requests of parents. However, it is in the children’s best interests. Parents often add pressure to an already stressful role. Parents can be demanding and want the very best for the children; although this is good, it can leave practitioners struggling to balance the demands of the role with parents requests.
Training
Practice within the Early Years sector is constantly changing and adapting due to policy and curriculum changes. This can put added pressure on nurseries to keep training up to date. Training opportunities are usually a financial strain, time-consuming and can involve a large amount of paperwork. Some settings may hold training out of nursery hours. However, some settings allow practitioners to attend training within their work hours. This can lead to staff being out of ratios, and spending less time with the children.
Paperwork
Paperwork causes a strain on practitioners and adds pressure to their job role. Most practitioners will need to complete a range of documents for each child during the day; this could include daily diaries or sheets, risk assessments, observations, accident or medicine forms, and registers. This can be time-consuming and can have a detrimental effect on the time spent with the children. It is important that children are put at the centre of everything practitioners do.
Developmental paperwork that must be completed regularly to assess and track the children’s learning and development can also add pressure to the job role. Tracking sheets, progress summaries, learning journals and observations are all critical in supporting a child’s development, yet due to the amount of detail required these can take a great deal of time to complete. There is a fine balance with completing paperwork, with many settings not allowing paperwork to be taken home due to safeguarding issues yet are unable to offer practitioners time to finish it out of ratio. This often leaves practitioners having to try and complete work while in the room with the children. This can be difficult for both staff and children, limiting their interactions.