A CRITICAL APPROACH TO WORKING IN PARTNERSHIP WITH FAMILIES AND WITH EARLY YEARS SETTINGS’ LOCAL COMMUNITIES This essay aims to contextualise key aspects for Early Years Educators of working in partnership with the families and the communities that gravitate around Early Years settings. Definitions of partnership and their different possible configurations will be introduced, with attention to what barriers exist to their establishment and sustainability. This will be followed by an analysis of frameworks, tools and practitioners’ attributes that can support positive partnerships in Early Years contexts complete with examples of their application. To conclude, concepts of positionality, coproduction and capacity will be applied to the context of partnerships in the Early Years in order to consolidate an empowering understanding of partnership establishment and maintenance. Hargreaves (2012) brings forward an understanding of partnership as a vehicle for the advancement of education; this is extended by Gasper (2008) to include fulfilment of the ever-evolving needs of the involved parties. Broad understandings as the above can be used on a spectrum and filled with different contents in an EY context – as noted by Tayler (2006) the role of families and practitioners and the type of interactions between them in a neoliberal market model of Early Childhood Education can be merely transactional, whilst the existence of a community variable such as a managing committee can influence understandings of partnership work for families and practitioners. This spectrum, with families and practitioners as equal agents with stakes in the provision’s principles and curriculum on one side and parents as passive recipients of practitioners’ input on the other, can encompass varied aims, such as families’ involvement in the setting’s provision and cultivating families’ understanding of and collaboration to their child’s development, or communicating settings’ priorities to the families and maintaining a steady one-way flow of standardised information about settings’ provision. The level of fluctuation described above exists in the context of the Early Years Foundation Stage framework’s lack of elaboration of what would best underpin the partnership expected of EY practitioners with families (Linehan, 2014). As a result, practitioners’ understanding can be limited to having to acknowledge the shared care of a child between them and the family, without looking at underpinning aspects such as how practitioners (and settings) and families regard one another and their respective roles and the establishment of common practice in order to promote best outcomes by that child. In order for EY practitioners and settings to move forward in this regard, interconnections between a partnership’s key principles, structure and practical applications are indicators of its effectiveness in an EY context, with equal partnerships between families and practitioners deemed to yield the most productive results (Rouse, 2012b), often thanks to the strategic focus on existing connections and areas of expertise amongst families and communities to engender genuine engagement (with a focus on personal relationships rather than just on expected actions) characterised by equal commitment to the partnership from all parties involved (Linehan, 2014). However, many barriers exist to reaching this goal. A common theme to said barriers is assumptions that families and practitioners hold about one another and their respective roles (Tayler, 2006; Linehan, 2014; Richardson, 2008). Families might either believe that they are the key educators of their children and should therefore be deferred to in all matters of learning and development (thus considering EY settings as mere care providers) or, on the other hand, they believe the latter to be exclusively a practitioners’ domain (this can be either a result of lack of self-esteem from parents, who might feel like their home environment does not foster learning opportunities worth sharing with practitioners, or of a bias towards what parents consider an overformalisation of their child’s early years, therefore dismissing the use of the EYFS to support in interpreting their child’s experiences). Parents and carers can also more directly be negatively impacted by practitioners’ attitudes towards them and vice versa – oppressive constructs around economic status, race, gender can apply either way - or struggle to engage with settings as a result of their own negative past experiences in education. Other elements that can hinder fruitful partnerships are lack of adequate physical environment for parents to interact with practitioners and lack of clarity and consistency regarding settings policies (especially around confidentiality and school transition). Financial considerations are also a barrier, both in terms of partnership falling behind other more pressing aspects for settings when allocating available resources (in particular direct involvement of parents in settings activities and the associated costs) and of parents needing to prioritise paid work over involvement in EY settings. The latter aspect also influences issues around the lack of flexibility of EY services and resulting incompatibility of involvement with family members’ working hours. Parents can also be affected by the lack of accessibility of written information provided to them by the settings (because of language, ability, and education status barriers), which can contain significant amounts of jargon, and which are often prioritised over other media of communication because of their cost-effectiveness and replicability. The combination and influence of the factors discussed above varies significantly as a result of the type of EY setting and the amount of time children attend it for – assuming equal roles in the families/settings partnership cannot be considered without factoring in the amount and quality of time children spend in either environment. As a result, partnership ought to be approached with tailored tools and frameworks according to the circumstances – an analysis of productive partnership strategies and the relevant practitioners’ attributes will now follow. Considering heterarchies, a compromise between hierarchies and networks where the overlaps and divergence between horizontal and vertical relationship gives origin to complementary solutions (Siraj-Blatchford and Sum, 2013), as a framework to support partnership working in Early Years contexts can yield productive results; this can be considered a manifestation of the nesting principle of governance, according to which common resources related activities are organized in multiple, polycentric layers of nested enterprises (Marshall, 2008). In order for this collaboration to occur EY practitioners require the ability to grasp the macro and micro dynamics their settings are part of – the EY sector is in fact very diverse in the provision it offers, and EY contextual literacy is needed in order to best handle the resources and complex dynamics present in local communities (Siraj-Blatchford and Sum, 2013). The above framework lends itself to family centred practice as advocated by Rouse (2012a), often catalysed by a common practical purpose such as increasing literacy attainment (Tayler, 2006) or data sharing management (Siraj-Blatchford and Sum, 2008), with a locus of control around families and community values. As part of family centred practice EY practitioners focus on advocacy to empower families to be engaged in education and care (Rouse, 2012 a and b). This approach requires practitioners to overcome feelings of disempowerment due to the widespread low professional standing of the community; this tends to occur when educators are able to reflect on the structural and personal factors that influence their practice and experience, thus collaboratively building an empowered profession whose members relate to families as equal decision makers (Rouse, 2012a). One of the approaches to achieve the described scenario is to adapt community visioning to an EY context; the steps of the process are co-initiating (listening to others to build commitment), co-sensing (observing the current situation to gauge potential for action), pre-sensing (allowing existing knowledge to emerge), co-creating (trialling new solutions) and eventually co-evolving (embedding new solutions; Sarkissian et al, 2010). Tools that can support this multi-layered process are conflict resolution skills such as the awareness that conflict tends to emerge as a difference of power is perceived, the ability to recognise conflict and to commit to resolving it by holding those difficult conversations necessary to build coalitions that truly support change (Family and Childcare Trust, 2017). Further communication skills for productive partnership are related to shifts in language semantics from complaint to commitment, from blame to responsibility and from policies to consensus in order to genuinely understand the rationale behind behaviours and to build trust, starting from the shared agreement that all parties’ actions – and lack thereof - are instrumental when both identifying issues and solutions (Kegan and Lahey, 2001). Furthermore, Linehan (2014) and Lidon (2012) suggest that practitioners extend their understanding of the uniqueness of each child to encompass their families in order to promote meaningful partnerships; this entails considering the beliefs that parents hold in terms of how they wish to bring up their children in order to go beyond a tokenistic effort. Adopting an ecological approach to EY partnerships based on the concurrence of messages between home and EY setting (Houston, 2015) has shown to yield positive results in initiatives such as Peers Early Education Partnerships (PEEP; Evangelou and Sylva, 2003); key to such cooperation is practitioners’ willingness to communicate very clearly about core values in their practice and the settings ethos that cannot be compromised upon, especially regarding controversial topic such as expectations and anxieties around outdoor play in all weathers or writing for school readiness (Lidon, 2012). Another key focus of EY practitioners in terms of partnership working is their organically emerging ability to create a sense of community intended as awareness of the characteristics of the relationships that hold people together, which is the vehicle for children to learn about themselves as a result of their first contact beyond the home, which often also happens to be the first point of connection between families (Connor, 2012). This process is based on undergoing informal socio-spatial mapping (Lidon, 2012) in order to draw on the knowledge and expertise of the local community the settings belong to in order to provide children with meaningful, genuine and embedded learning experiences (Connor, 2012; Hedges et al, 2011). Examples of EY partnerships with local communities and families in the form of co-operative childcare settings will be explored as follows. In the context of the large corporate scale that encompasses 79% of childcare places in the UK (Marie, 2017) parents are arguably perceived as consumers to embark upon market-based transactions with rather than participants, as growth stimulation for the benefit of nursery chains’ private investors tends to be prioritised over service provision. By contrast, it is argued that community-owned, parent-led childcare like that of the 40 co-operative nurseries in the country features better work conditions and more flexibility for parents (Otte, 2017; Jervis, 2012). This approach has stemmed informally from unmet childcare needs– these settings’ opening hours have evolved to reflect families’ changing working times, thus contributing to the rebalancing of work and family life through participation in collectively run services (Marie, 2017). It has emerged that in these settings parents learn about the EYFS and child development from the staff, thus acquiring more confidence, with an arguable positive impact on the home learning environment; at the same time the staff reports feeling more invested in the setting, thus demonstrating a mutual empowerment dynamic considered necessary for EY partnership working (Tayler, 2006; Rouse, 2012a). In co-operative nurseries parents’ levels of involvement can be based on how much their child uses the setting - in some of them parents can decide to waive the reduced fees in lieu of opting out of direct involvement. This aspect, whilst providing parents with flexibility, can arguably detract from the partnership ethos; on the other hand, it has also been posited that parents’ direct involvement might negatively impact on the quality of the setting’s provision (Marie, 2017). However, these critiques have seemingly been overruled by the consensus around the benefits of unlocking unused or underused social and material capital within local communities (Otte, 2017). Significant challenges remain in terms of these settings being accessible to all families rather than serve to just increase choice and opportunity for already privileged families – thus the efforts to provide access and opportunities (such as returning to employment through re-training and upskilling) to families with complex needs: in some of these EY settings, such as Grasshopper in London, 60% of parents hold a share, which translates into a 3% discount, and 3 free days a week for parents earning with less than £16.000 per year are also offered, alongside fees further differentiated by income bands (Marie, 2017). Another example of well-established and evidenced coproduction of education and care (ibid.) is the Pen Green centre for children and their families, opened in 1983 by parents and practitioners by re-purposing a derelict building (once a prominent school in the community) into an integrated organisation providing nursery education, family support and adult community (Pen Green Centre, no year). This essay has attempted to map out and understanding of Early Years partnership working with coproduction and sufficiency at its core (Siraj-Blatchford and Sum, 2013; Mands and Sawyer, 2015) in order to promote community capacity building (Mc Ginty, 2002) through the strategic deployment of the situated knowledges and unique positionalities of Early Years practitioners (Haraway, 1991) within their communities, with co-operative nurseries as an example of these practices. The work of the New Economics Foundation, which is currently looking at rolling out further co-operative ECE examples in the UK as a tool for partnerships between empowered communities of parents and professionals (Marie, 2017), will arguably provide material for action research for this crucial subject matter, which remains relatively elusive in terms of definable output. WORD COUNT: 2195 REFERENCES Connor, J. (ed.) (2012) Community Engagement, National Quality Standard Professional Learning Program E-Newsletter n. 47, available from earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au Evangelou, M.; Sylva, K. (2003) The Effects of the Peers Early Educational Partnership (PEEP) on Children’s Developmental Progress, Oxford: DfES Family and Childcare Trust (2017) DfES 30 hours mixed model partnership toolkit, available at familyandchildcaretrust.org Haraway, D. (1991) Situated knowledges IN Haraway, D. (1991) (ed.) Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature, London: Routledge
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