By June O'Sullivan
An inspiring, outspoken speaker, author, podcaster and regular media commentator, June O'Sullivan MBE is Chief Executive of the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF), one of London’s largest and mos
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The podcast currently has 45 episodes available.
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!
It seems strange that in 2024 parents feel the need to lead a campaign about healthy food, but with the help of the Children’s Food Campaign at Sustain, that’s exactly what they are doing. Indeed, they managed to get to meet members of parliament to share their manifesto with them.
In this podcast I speak to Barbara Crowther, Children’s Food Campaign Manager at Sustain and parent ambassador Jaynaide Powis about their comprehensive polling of over 2,000 parents conducted by Savanta and the Children’s Food Campaign which has helped determine the biggest challenges faced by parents in the current food system and their top priorities for change.
Listen as we explore topical questions such as:
Getting into your Ofsted Groove!
In this podcast I talk to Wendy Ratcliff and Sam Sleeman-Boss from Ofsted about the Big Listen, refreshed handbooks, new complaints procedure and the research review series and how they are feeling about the Ofsted Academy and the future of Ofsted. While there are some things they cannot answer yet, like how will Ofsted reshape, I am holding them to the promise of a research report on babies especially with the expansion of childcare to include little babies of 9-months-old.
The conclusion of the conversation confirms that we need to continue with our OBC to keep engaged with our regulator so we have a voice in what is often a national debate that only focuses on Ofsted in schools.
The next London OBC is 31st of October, get your ticket here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/london-obc-october-2024-tickets-1007508564237
Listen to this to help you get into the Ofsted groove.
Slow Pedagogy
Slow pedagogy calls for compassion where we actively do something to address suffering.
During Covid, the LEYF staff running our 15 nurseries for key workers had a call with me at 3pm every day. I looked forward to our chats and it wasn’t long until they we talking about how the reduction in numbers of children, time to play, less curricular demands and fewer wider issues was positively impacting on the children and they in turn were slowing down the pedagogy to allow the children time to just enjoy being children.
Let’s think about slowing down early childhood in the world of fast living and undesirable excess is the message. Let’s ignore the government or business ethos of targets and consumerism. It isn’t working! No one is satisfied!
Have a listen and tell us what you think.
Baby, It’s Time
Do you think babies are a focus of care and education policy enough? Do we have a baby policy blind spot? We think so!
This is the subject of my conversation with Sally Hogg, Senior Policy Fellow at the Centre for Research on Playing Education, Development and Learning better known as PEDAL.
Why has this issue become so important now? Well, because of the speed of the childcare expansion. From September, babies from nine months will be able to access a nursery place. Getting it right from conception to two years is more crucial than at any other stage of learning. The brain development in babies is startling. Just imagine the baby brain as a firework of synaptic connections, fizzing across brains and forming strong cerebral pathways.
If you are interested in the Under 2's and what makes great practice, listen to my conversation with Sally Hogg and share it widely. You know the drill!
It’s fitting that this podcast is being aired on International Children’s Day because Sir Al is a huge advocate for children over his very busy and noteworthy 50 years. His message is powerful, and he pulls no punches about his frustration over the failure of our country to take seriously the importance of children, and particularly those in the Early Years.
“Every child should be given the resources to achieve her or his full potential. Now, why don't we have that being articulated, let alone actioned? It is utterly dire in my view.”
He despairs at the serious erosion of the basic humanity of the caring services and his new purpose is putting compassion back into compassionate care that we provide for people, especially children.
“There is a mismatch between our wonderful science and all of our services and the dismal failure of politicians to recognise the importance of children “.
“…chiselled in letters of stone over every Department of State should be this. We need healthy, educated, creative, resilient and happy children, with the life skills to become the productive adults of the future and the competent parents of the future.”
Reflecting on Every Child Matters which he describes as the world's best policy programme for children (one for which he proudly shared across the world) – it was the brainchild of the Labour Party, then destroyed by a triple whammy. The Coalition government dismantling it without any serious debate, then austerity followed (and its dreadful impact on families), followed by COVID. Effectively, it was the destruction of the world's best policy programme for children which he despairs does not appear to be top of the Labour manifesto.
We discuss the low birth rate, the old age dependency ratio between working adults and the elderly, fertility rates, immigration, the science of attachment, brain development, synaptic connection, his book The British Betrayal of Childhood and much more…
Listen to his call to action and get involved. Start by listening and sharing this podcast…
In this podcast with Prue Leith, we discover that Prue’s approach to life is summed up by her autobiography, “I'd Try Anything Once” and the more she talks the more you believe it! From posh white girl in South Africa to judge on Bake Off, food dominates Prue’s career. Her passion is undimmed as is her patience with the stupidity of politicians. She provides an entertaining but thoughtful summary of her efforts to put small children's health and access to food right at the centre of modern politics. We might even end up with a Masterchef for Nursery cuisine.
Listen to Prue’s stimulating take on what we should do!
“I see myself as the Benjamin Button of Education” In conversation with Dr Ger Graus.
The power of play is recognised within the Early Years sector as essential to children’s development. Playing is a child’s right and is our main teaching tool. As Friedrich Froebel said so eloquently back in 1837, “Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul.”
Yet today, we are limiting children’s opportunity for play more and more. I still hear people’s stories of how children as young as three are told to ‘Finish your work and then you can go and play’ or ‘you are behind with your work, so you miss playtime’.
My podcast guest is Dr Ger Graus OBE who was the first director of KidZania, which went on to be one the fastest growing global educational entertainment brands, with 28 locations around the world. I first met him in 2016 when I visited KidZania to see how we could adapt the experiences for children aged three and four. We were defeated by the safeguarding implications of letting children have the freedom to explore without adult supervision.
For Ger, Early Years is not a place to drop off a child for a few hours to get a reprieve for parental responsibility but a place of education and care, with staff doing their best to educate children. A child is everyone’s responsibility! He argues that our job is to create an education which helps children navigate the technological revolution. To do that, Ger is keen that we agree what 10 experiences every four-year-old should have.
What do you think?
According to Barnardos, it is estimated that there are up to 310,000 children every year with a parent in prison in England and Wales. And for those children, this can lead to poor physical and mental health and significant trauma, especially as some of them will have witnessed some of the criminal activity or even the arrest of their parent. It is not unheard that no one collects a child from school because they have been convicted at a court hearing earlier in the day. Can you imagine the impact on a child?
These conversations led to an introduction to Andy Keen-Downs, CEO of PACT. He described the125 year-old children’s charity within the prison service as a well-kept secret! In this podcast he tells us more about PACT and the National Prisoners Helpline 0808 808 2003 which provides lots of support and information for families and had 30,000 calls over the past 12 months: Prisoners' Families Helpline (prisonersfamilies.org). There is some support for older children and professionals: For children | Prison Advice and Care Trust and For professionals | Prison Advice and Care Trust but this podcast is all about what we can do in the Early Years to help. Here is a taster statistic that will make you think!
Six out of 10 boys with a father in prison will follow their father into prison, and they're more likely to go to prison than to go to university.
One of the LEYF managers recounted a story that sadly supported this statistic. She remembered one of the children aged 4 announcing that her Dad was in jail and when she grew up she would go to jail too. She said:
“I will be a burglar because I am very good at creeping around and climbing”
At LEYF we have now developed a pack for the Early Years sector in collaboration with PACT to help people respond when they know or suspect that a child’s parent may be in prison. It is such a sensitive situation requiring deep levels of compassion to navigate because people remain very ashamed of the situation. We know that when families are able to support the prisoner , reoffending drops by 39%, which is significant for the children living in those families. Our job is to remember that we must never write off children of prisoners and reject the expression of ‘the apple doesn't fall far from the tree’.
Every child has promise and if you believe this and you want system change then listen to the podcast!
My first Podcast of 2024 is an interview with the very delightful Matt Arnerich, Director of Brand & Comms at Famly – an Early Childhood Platform that bridges the collaboration gap between the grown-ups who raise young children. It supports around 6,000 Early Years providers and families to communicate, share information, run their business and learn new things. Whilst we don’t subscribe to Famly’s platform at LEYF, we are very supportive of its work.
I wanted to talk to Matt about his international perspective of Early Years Education and Care (EYEC), what he thinks are the benefits of digitalisation for pedagogical practice and clarify the difference between digitalisation and digitisation (who knew?!). I was also keen to hear his take on AI in the Early Years, which is something I am very interested in understanding better.
As background, Matt’s international take on the Early Years began at home with his Mum working in the sector. His family heritage stems from New Zealand, Europe and a bit of Irish! He has lived in Denmark for the past seven years, his partner is from Finland and he is working with Famly across the UK, Denmark, Norway, Germany and the US.
We started our international exploration in Denmark, a country that is often cited in a somewhat rose-tinted way by the press as a great example of providing access to affordable high quality EYEC. The Princess of Wales visit there in 2022, as part of her campaigning for The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, highlighted the emphasis the Danes place on the importance of childhood and playing freely away from panicky parents. Here, they actively want their children to enjoy being children and be able to play indoors and outdoors all day long. They start school aged six but nothing in their PISA scores suggests that this approach is failing them. In fact, they are much higher up the scale than the schoolified US and UK. Matt quoted the great Sir Ken Robinson who reminded us that a 3-year-old is not half a 6-year-old, right?
To hear about the other countries and discover the huge funding crisis in the US, the shift in Government expectations in Denmark and the sheer size of certain church groups in Germany which run the kindergartens, you will have to listen to the full podcast.
Do you know the difference between digitalisation and digitisation?
It’s a subtle difference but it is significant in terms of the outcome. We digitalise tasks to make them simpler like using programmes on iPads to capture observations with a Grammarly, checking to correct the write ups. Digitisation is taking something in the real world and making it digital for the sake of making it digital. Like trying to have a programme to record fridge temperatures which would be done ten times quicker by just writing it on a sheet of paper and pinning it to the fridge. The warning here is to understand the difference and don’t cause yourself more aggravation by complicating a task that is better on paper or using digitalisation to raise parents’ expectations. You end up a slave to your iPad, failing to see what’s happening around you because you are bent over the iPad writing up what has happened earlier!
Finally, I asked Matt about AI (Artificial Intelligence) because I know he is exploring how to use it more efficiently and I am learning more and more about it so I can use it sensibly, and not be scared of it. I suggested he might consider developing some webinars about using Chat GPT which I think would be rather helpful.
In a world that is now undeniably digital, with disruptive technologies arriving at breakneck speed and continually changing how we live and work, the need to stay connected and collaborative has never been greater. This not only makes us more productive and efficient when done correctly, it allows us the time to focus on what matters.
The podcast currently has 45 episodes available.