Blog

Six months in and work has changed immeasurably.  We now do so much online and our connections with clients which were already strong have only got better.  We have pivoted, reviewed, become smaller and leaner, remained business-focused, and ensured our sustainability and scalability (as much as we can) – all of which followed our own advice to others.

I was in Vienna for the weekend of 13-15 March 2020.  It was touch and go whether I should have made the trip in the first place.  Media reports of an approaching pandemic were a melee of information and scaremongering, misinformation and denial.  By the Sunday it was clear public opinion and government policies were shifting.  There was a risk we wouldn’t be able to get safely home.  It was time to bring forward the flight and get back to home and work.

It was time for a plan – and then another one.

There was surprise and a palpable sense of relief on Monday afternoon when I arrived in the office.  We sat down and looked at what might happen.  Using our best guesses and a weather eye on the worst-case scenario.  We scoped out how live training events, field work and projects could be put on indefinite hold.  We agreed what we could or should be doing in the office for ourselves and what we ought to be saying to clients.  We got it about right.  Although by the next day things had moved on so rapidly, we had to review those plans and redraw our strategy.  We talked about what we needed to get through this.  Like many, we were contemplating a few weeks inconvenience.  This is the moment people starting to work from home if they could.  Office based support staff stayed on.  By the end of the week, their work had slowed to a glacial pace and we sent them home on paid leave.

Things started to stop.

We waited.  The world started to shut down.  Events, training and projects were postponed or cancelled with no clear plan about what might happen next.  The team kept in touch through tele-conference calls, at some point these turned into pretty unsuccessful video chats.  It was great to connect, but often there wasn’t much to update.

We kept on working from home, doing what we could, and taking leave or time owed back.  Of course, we were all staying indoors.  We were balancing doing what was needed at work with useful occupations at home.  Cooking, cleaning, getting around to those jobs not yet done, and box sets and reading of course.

Entering the online world.

One of our key projects (TALK Derby) moved to online and remote delivery.  The funder, DfE, sensibly set out the expected parameters of what should happen next so we had good assurances from that point.  And the package of Government support exceeded our expectations.  I cried with relief upon hearing about the Job Retention Scheme.  That made a huge difference to our survival.  With schools and early years and childcare providers closed or focused on essential services for keyworkers and vulnerable children, our income had stopped.

We decided to get onto the front foot by tentatively converting our training offer to online delivery.  We started to get to grips with the technology as well, taking advice from others a little further down the line than us.  We were determined to be ready, willing and able for when the enquiries started again.  And we were.

Making sense of guidance, briefings and tools. 

Then we started noticing the reams of guidance issued by government.  And we took the time to read and scrutinise it.  We know from experience that having this time whilst having to do the day job would be a real challenge for local authority early years teams.  This was especially the case as they were also at home, adjusting their delivery and supporting the sector.  So this is when we spent our own time producing analysis and summaries of guidance.  We were reading it, so others didn’t have to.  We were able to highlight the key points, the pertinent actions, the updates and revisions, and shared our views and opinions to guide actions.

We also developed briefings and ideas.  All for free and sent out to our mailing list.  I must say I have never written so much – briefings, programmes, analysis, opinion pieces, blogs (by the dozen), magazine articles and chapters of books.  We also developed models and tools, I worked with an illustrator to give them a bit of morale-boosting ‘oomph’.  We did things like ‘getting smaller to be sustainable and grow again’, ‘approaches to change’, ‘parental childcare preference use change’, ‘factors affecting providers’ and ‘childcare sufficiency assessment within a COVID-19 context’.

A community together.

All this investment promoted a massive response.  Our inboxes and phone lines were full of gratitude, requests, questions and I have to say quite a bit of reaching out just to unite on a personal, social and community level.  Not since I set up the business 20 years ago had I experienced such energy and connection.  The sense of community and comradeship was very strong.  It started to feel natural being online with colleagues and clients.  Suddenly a ‘phone call didn’t seem enough.

Our early adopter clients like Oldham started talking to us about what we could do to help their work through this.  We workshopped the context and challenges and revisited what traditional support might look like, and what must change this time around.  It was a creative process – I really loved working with Jenny together on this.  Hempsall’s also started bringing together clusters of 6-8 LAs together for online idea sharing and updates.  We were in this together and it showed.  As a result, we developed the ‘Finding Your Way Through’ programme of information sessions, business workshops and one-to-one support – all online for LAs to commission.  So far, we have delivered the programme in 12 LA areas and growing.

One member of the team returned from furlough – a great relief.  Because those training requests (things like safeguarding in particular) and commissions had started to come in, they went live and felt good.  In contrast, we launched a Business Future review.  A necessary but painful process that resulted in three redundancies and one reduced role. Our infrastructure had to respond to how everything had changed for now and most likely for the future to come.

Hempsall’s Coffee Breaks. 

In June and July 2020, we held 30 online LA early years meetings, clusters and networks.  As we all got used to them they were starting feeling like a regular feature of the week. Attendance was steadily growing and requests were coming in thick and fast.  In July we launched Hempsall’s Coffee Breaks.  These one-hour free sessions pick a topic (things like health and wellbeing, provider business support, business sustainability, sufficiency planning) and hear short input from Hempsall’s or LAs.  The remainder of the 60 minutes allows for discussion and questions.  Now, Coffee Breaks attract up to 120 attendees each time.  They have become an invaluable and unique opportunity to get together and focus on the day’s issues, with other people also tasked with the same challenges.

What next?  Networking, schools, sufficiency and more.

We have recently started a national programme called ‘In The Region’.  It is regional networking for LA early years teams – about two hours at a time.  The first two sessions are free and then we ask LAs to fund subsequent meetings.  They are rolling out now and we expect a full programme across the autumn.  Everyone has a chance to provide a brief local update and then the remaining time is given to discussion and questions.

We will also be launching our dedicated programme for schools getting to grips with their early years provision in this changing context.  We aim to help them understand changing needs, demands and preferences, and to develop models of delivery that meet the needs of schools, families and the local childcare market as well.

We are enjoying working with the Local Government Association (LGA) on special webinars and action learning sets all about sufficiency and sustainability.  With hopefully more collaborations to follow.  There has been a growing demand for our childcare sufficiency assessments, and we have been working hard on how they should be delivered with COVID-19 in mind.

Our Finding Your Way Through programme is under constant review and is adapting well to the new issues we find each week and is anticipating the challenges ahead throughout what will be a testing and long autumn term.  We relish the opportunity to do more of the out of school sector and anticipate there will be greater need for one-to-one business support for providers moving towards the spring term.  That seems like enough for now.

It is said “social value is the quantification of the relative importance that people place on the changes they experience in their lives” (socialvalue.org).

So how do we quantify this change?  Can we count it, and what measures are useful?  Is it something we can standardise or is it something that is an individualised concept?  Society has had thousands of years’ experience counting money.  Money spent, money brought in, money saved.  We are well practised at counting physical things, bricks, mortar, miles of roads.

Such approaches have limitations when applying to concepts less financial or concrete, like social impact.  Perhaps we need a new concept of maths, one that is capable of measuring social matters.  Maybe we don’t, and shouldn’t attempt to measure in numbers, instead using ways to artfully recognise and celebrate qualitatively.  It all represents quite a challenge to those more concerned with the finite, overt and obvious – the hard stuff.  You know those focused on evidence and science.  But there is a need to have a common understanding of social value.  It needs to be easily described, committed to and promoted widely – meeting the needs of artists and scientists.  If we don’t, then there is a huge risk of misapplication, misunderstanding and mistakes being made.  People may become disinterested and demotivated about such matters.

There is nothing worse than tokenistic actions that scratch the surface of intent and impact.  Social value and its implementation should not be a box-ticking exercise, it should be one that concerns itself with real change and impact.  Then people can appreciate and notice and value the soft stuff – things like behavioural change, feelings and thoughts.  And get excited about it for themselves and the people effected by their work or life choices.  There is a need to be patient too, something I learned through the UK Sure Start programme from 1998.  Too many people just did not get that social change can take a generation or more.

Social is a term used to describe many things for me.  It prompts me to think about other words like: people, communities, groupings, interpersonal interactions, mobility, education, care, health, behaviour, connections, relationships and friendships.

I wonder, what is your perspective?  What does the term social value mean to you?  What examples and experience can you identify that demonstrate a social value you have experienced yourself?

Examples of the social value we might experience are the people we meet and connect with.  Last night I met up with a friend I made when completing my last university course.  We have a great friendship – is this the social value of lifelong learning?  Perhaps it is, because the hard stuff was the study and the qualification.  The social value was the personal growth and the relationship I developed.  And our relationship has helped us put into practice our learning and helped our work.  Yet how do you measure that?  There isn’t a standard for a friend, or a model for how one uses new knowledge in the world.  Is there?

There are obvious and strong links to equality here, which is essential.  However, I worry social value can run the risk of getting muddled with various diversity initiatives. Inclusion is a good starting point, but the values of fairness and collaboration and power-equality are close behind.  These principles are more easily measured I think – the things that we can demonstrate in terms of the workforce profile and its development and opportunity, sharing of all resources – including but not exclusively money, and who makes the decisions.  We can evidence if a policy exists, the intent, but how do we evidence its application and impact?

As a psychotherapist I am all too aware of the complexities of quantifying, assessing and measuring anyone’s mental health and well-being.  It is far from a consistent system.  And who am I to judge anyway?  These are personal and mostly subjective human judgements even in a professional counselling relationship.  It is an imperfect art and science.

To not consider social value is to miss a corporate trick.  It has the possibility to make a much bigger difference through all the personal and professional actions we take.  By recognising, valuing and measuring our social value impact we can plan better, collaborate more richly, and consider the longer-term ripple effects of our decisions and the positive difference that can be made.  It is the added value that sets us apart from the crowd of competitors.  We can learn from it, investment out should see investment back in return, which increases the chances of what we do next having even better social value.

For years our leaders and decision-makers have attempted to persuade society to stop, reduce consumption and use alternative technologies.  In response, we have collectively made relatively small attempts to curb our behaviours.  As a society, we have creatively used off-setting theory and meagre attempts to reuse and recycle.  We have continued to justify our addictive desires to drive, fly, move around, see each other, eat world foods and generally buzz around like busy global bees.  Much to the chagrin of those who hold the purse strings to the world’s finite resources.  We have watched disapprovingly as wars are waged over them.

That was until this year.  Covid-19 has been the single most effective mechanism that has achieved what our global leaders have wanted us to do all along.  Which must be enough to germ the seed of any conspiracy theory.  It just seems far too convenient for my liking.  Instead, maybe it’s coincidence, if you believe in them.  Perhaps it is a fortunate convenience – but for who?  And for how long will these new ways of working and living be a feature of daily life?

Society, both social and business, has been rebooted.  Someone somewhere has switched us off and turned us back on again.  For now, anyway.  We’re fast approaching the milestone of six months with the reality of the pandemic.  Our lives, routines and preoccupations all changed.  Holidays are spent at home, or nearby, at least mostly in the UK.  Those not yet able to let go of a foreign holiday have run the risk.  Many squeezing in a two-week quarantine before the start of the new school term as I type.  Social events like birthday parties, weddings, get togethers and even funerals have been curtailed.

Despite shortages in those early days, international food chains have remained and supplies of the all-year-round produce haven’t been affected.  In quiet moments in between growing a few vegetables I look up and watch the freight flights – packed with such goods – soaring over the house, where once holiday flights were.

Our global worlds have become local communities. The car is more a weekly not daily feature.  Our miles travelled have become steps taken.  The goal of achieving a dramatic reduction in consumption has been achieved.  The office commute is now the equivalent of walking into the next room.  Work has become smaller in many ways.  Although online video meetings have brought so many clients and colleagues closer.  Working at home means we need to be our own IT departments, literally controlling, ‘alting’ and deleting for ourselves. COVID-19 in turn is powerfully controlling society, successfully altering our behaviours and deleting previous ways and people’s lives.  What happens next remains to be seen.

So, today was GCSE results day. ‘O’ (ordinary) levels in old money. A day I recall well – mine were in Orwellian 1984. The official end of school for me. Which was indeed something to celebrate. A sad and disappointing one academically though. I needed three passes to do my BTEC in design and that’s what I got. Only just. With an A, a B and a C. A tear came to my eye when I realised all that effort and the trauma of attending school had resulted in four fails. They promised me seven. That’s what they predicted. But that day I learned for sure what I already knew. That the school had let me down.

Today almost passed me by until a friend just messaged about her son’s results. A reasonable set I must say, and he is a talented young man. But his real sense of disappointment was echoed in his mum’s text. It can be really hard to be defined by a number, for all that effort to be reduced to a grade. This year, things have been especially difficult, frustrating and uncertain. Hence this blog.

It’s so unsatisfactory, particularly when children are put under so much pressure to work so hard, for so long. Seemingly at the expense of spending time doing other things that make balanced young people – like hobbies, exercise, vegetating on the sofa, or lurking in their rooms in a cloud of disapproval and latent anger. Yes, studying is important at school, but it does not, and should not define anyone’s ability to continue to study after school and throughout life. I am a keen advocate of lifelong learning – the demise of which in universities is something I lament. It’s not dead yet, it still has a pulse, but it really could do with a good defibrillation. That way I truly believe our universities will be more sustainable in the future and will cement links with industry to boot. Something that has the potential to help universities publish much better, and much more relevant and useful, research.

What a shame we don’t measure children and young people’s attitudes to learn, their capacity to do so, confidence, social and employability skills, teamwork, and their ability to be self-starting and curious learners. All skills they need when progressing on to FE and HE, and indeed their working careers. I think we should. But that is an art not a science.

I won’t bore you by falling into the trap of listing the academic achievements I’ve had since leaving school. But they don’t reflect the results I left with. I flourished in FE and at every stage then and since someone has said to me I could do more and go onto the next level – when I had my doubts. I felt for those not receiving their BTEC grades today. My course was a challenging and stretching and technical one. It gave me an amazing foundation. And I never imagined I would be the first family member to go on and do a degree at university. But I did and I was. I didn’t stop there, and I don’t think I have finished yet either. For anyone out there feeling that sense of disappointment today, live with the emotional response, then when you are ready dust yourself off and plan your future. Take my advice there is one out there.

Summer is still here, as the title of this blog reminds us.  But autumn term is fast approaching, a fact that is very much occupying minds in the early years world.

Looking ahead, I am being told a growing number of early years providers are saying their expected numbers are higher this autumn compared to last.  How could that be?  Especially given we are also hearing stories of closures and uncertain or uncommitted re-openings.  Well, in some areas, autumn term 2019 was a little slower than usual.  There is also a strong message that those providers who were able to remain open throughout lockdown now perhaps have stronger relationships with families and have attracted new families to their provision in addition.  And with changing employment, travel and household patterns, families may be looking for something different, or could be choosing to stay with these new settings.  This means some settings will be in more demand, some less so, and of those this could be an emergency.

I am told repeatedly by local areas that closures of early years and childcare settings in recent weeks and months have commonly been attributed to existing pressures and conditions prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.  They have not been as a direct result of the pandemic.  So what next?  The ability for LAs to provide full early years funding (for funded places based on previous levels of attendance), access to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme until 31 October, and gradual and cautious increases in take-up may be enough to sustain some settings until the end of autumn term.  This will not be the case everywhere.  Half term will be the next tipping point, especially given its proximity to the end of furloughing and likely spikes in redundancies or changing employment terms and conditions.  Another factor is the choices schools will make to their delivery models and how their decisions will affect the delivery models of the PVI sectors.  This is something that should be done under the spirit of effective business relationships, not in isolation or disregard for other small businesses or charities.  There may be enough in the support pipeline to achieve survival until the end of autumn term and the Christmas break.  But it is what happens next that has the potential to be a biggest challenge yet.  How are parents actually using provision, what are the income streams and what are providers’ abilities retaining the capacity and capability to survive and thrive?

On the flipside, many areas are also reporting new group care openings and new childminder registrations, these are encouraging and hopefully will meet changing and redistributed need, demand and preferences.  It would be an additional challenge, an own goal, if such provision was set up in competition with existing settings.  By monitoring trends and identifying risks in the sector, or sub-sectors, we may be able to target support and interventions where they are needed.  Every area is different, and so is their childcare supply, its type and proportional splits in the maintained and PVI sectors.  These affect local expectations and patterns of use and marry-up with local employment and social behaviours.

Whatever, everyone, whether considering closure, maintenance, re-opening, or expansion needs to have the ability to read the intentions and actual behaviours of parents and families.  I urge everyone to think about human behaviour as a huge factor in how need, demand, and preferences for childcare use are employed from now on.  This is something to watch under intense scrutiny.  It will most likely change, shift and be unpredictable throughout the twists-and-turns of the next phases of the pandemic and economic response.  This is because there is a big difference between intent and actual.  It’s like putting a towel on a sun lounger.  Are people really intending to use a place they have registered for, or are they doing what they can to ensure it is there should they decide to use it in the future?  We should all be mindful of what people are saying now, watching with hawk-like interest at the start of tern, and observing carefully how patterns of use are manifesting throughout the weeks to come.  It’s a long term and the stakes are high.