Blog

Almost every aspect of work is delivered by a team, whether it be small or large.  And we all need to be asking how our teams are structured, performing and changing every day.  And if you are the leader of the team, everyone relies on you to immediately know the answers to these key questions and behave in ways the team needs.  It’s made even more difficult because teams change all of the time.  You can have a wonderful cooperative team on Monday, and when you come into work on Tuesday, the whole world has changed.  This is because teams are living things, they constantly change as people come together in different ways, or they leave, or they join as new members.  Any change to a team’s membership will cause the team to change in very small or significantly large ways.

When I am delivering leadership and management training, I ask you about your experience, your strategies, and training in the leadership of teams.  Nine times out of 10, you tell me that being a team leader is not something you ever imagined you would do, and you’ve not been on any formal training.  So, if that’s you, you certainly are not alone!

So what are the tell-tale signs for a good team?  First you should know who is in the team and what their roles are.  If someone does not know what their role is, how can they interact with others on any level?  Good teams have definable memberships, everyone should be clear about who is in the team or not.  And in doing so, this creates a real sense of group identity.  There should be a feeling of interdependence and interaction that builds into the team’s ability to act together as one. Do you experience your team members discussing their objectives, assessing ideas, making decisions, and working together towards targets – if they are, you’re in a good place!  If not, ask more questions.  Think about your team, how well does it communicate?  Does everyone know each other’s roles?  Is everyone striving for excellence under common goals and vision?  Does everyone follow the leader?  Do you know your strengths and weaknesses?  Is there a culture where everyone appreciates individual input and team effort?  Do your answers match those of the team as a whole, or those of each individual member?  Do you need a second or third opinion?  As the leader, are you being told the truth, or are you seeing the reality? What does the team need from you as its leader?

What is clear, is good quality leadership and management of teams links directly to the quality of a product or service.  Knowing your teams and being able to adjust your leadership behaviours is the secret to this success.

What to know more?  Two of my favourite team management models I would recommend are: Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership and Bruce Tuckman’s Group Development developed in the 1960s and 1970s.  The first shows us when as leaders we should use different leadership styles: telling, selling, participating and delegating.  The latter shows us how teams change through forming, storming, norming, performing, and an often forgotten about later addition of adjourning.

So many managers I meet can be anxious about working with volunteers.  Sometimes there is a great sense of fear and uncertainty about how to find and support volunteers.  Often there is a little embarrassment about asking someone, who is not paid to work, to undertake tasks.  When I deliver training on working with volunteers, these are the first barriers and issues we have to deal with before we can move on to real practical considerations.

Like in staff recruitment, safeguarding is of paramount importance when selecting a volunteer.  The process should be exactly the same as employing members of staff. Importantly, volunteer recruitment gives you the opportunity to not select a candidate who does not meet your person specification.  It may seem obvious to say, but it’s amazing how many practitioners I have met who were afraid to say ‘no’ to a willing volunteer that was unsuitable. Sometimes our overzealous health and safety culture also prevents us from taking volunteers.  But there are ways forward that safeguard the welfare and health and safety of all involved.

This is a great opportunity to include the community, and extra capacity and skills into your business.  It can widen the impact and benefits you give to your community. Crucially, it can help you raise your quality, or bring new ideas.   Let’s be clear, this is a two-way relationship.  There are benefits for you and for the volunteers.  Think: what can your staff team learn from a new and skilled volunteer?

Who volunteers? Lots of people volunteer from all walks of life, and from all ages and stages of their careers and lives.  Some volunteer for brief periods.  Others for most of their lives.  What is volunteering?  Volunteering England defines volunteering “as any activity that involves spending time, unpaid, doing something that aims to benefit the environment or someone… other than, or in addition to close relatives…  Volunteering must be a choice freely made by each individual”.   Using that definition, I guess many of you reading this article will think you do lots of volunteering, at least unpaid tasks – now and in your own early career development.  But it is a serious concern, there does need to be practical support and supervision in place, this is a professional practice and quality issue.  Policies and procedures protect you, the volunteer and your children and families.  They also make things clear and professional right from the start.  I firmly believe that the more you put in, the more your volunteers will succeed and contribute to your setting, and ultimately achieve their goals.

Why do people volunteer?  It is a way to develop a route into employment by providing the peace of mind their children are being cared for.  And through volunteering we can help parents, and others for that matter, with routes to employment for their first time. We can also help with returning to employment after a break.  And for some returners to work, like women returning from a maternity leave, a positive confidence boosting experience as well.  We are told the days of having the same career for life are over, and many of us could have 2-3 different careers, and we are working longer into retirement, so volunteering helps people to make those changes in direction in their employment.

Some people simply want to try something new, give something back, or add interest and flavour to their CVs.  Or they focus on the softer outcomes of meeting new people, making new friends, being social, or getting to know the local community.  The emotional benefits can be transformational.  Feeling part of a team, feeling valued, building self confidence and self-esteem are all vital for an individual’s well being and self-actualisation.  They are also the skills and qualities employers look for in job candidates, and in well-functioning ‘performing’ teams.  There’s going to be plenty of people needing this step into employment in coming months.  Let’s do our bit to help them.

The board brush recommendations in the children’s commissioner’s report (Best Beginnings July 2020) are difficult to argue with. They include the common calls for more.  More funding, more provision for families, more joined up services and more outcomes. The case is well-rehearsed and contains familiar evidence.  These arguments are won each time. It’s what happens next that is key and how sustainable these actions prove.

At least we have formal and recognised evidence of need and impact now.  It wasn’t the case 20 years ago.  We just knew it.  There is a necessary focus within the report on supporting children from birth and in their first two years, particularly:

• Relationships with parents and carers
• A safe home
• Language and cognitive development
• Behaviour and self-regulation
• Physical and mental health

As someone who has worked at the front of national implementation of early years entitlements, I would also like to see a growth in provision. For all outcomes, not just attached to a single or artificially differentiated aim like working families or children’s learning outcomes.  Learning should be a goal, but it should sit alongside with equal emphasis on health, child development and tackling inequality and disadvantage.

The familiar tale is told in the report, that children can fall behind before they start school.  That is correct and it is a strong and cogent argument to invest in early years.  But is it just me that wonders why schools are seemingly struggle to close any gap afterwards throughout primary and secondary?  After all, they are working with children for 12-14 years after their pre-school years.  Sounds like it may be time to do more with the school sector.

The Social Mobility Commission (June 2020) noted there is no national over-arching strategy for early years and child development.  Does there need to be?  Is it just an easy call to suggest we do?  That one is up for debate.  I don’t think we need much more top-down directives.  I’d prefer for us to have the resources and freedoms to do what we know best locally.  Could or should this be driven by local government, such as the Greater Manchester example cited on page 20?

I’d like to see a better deal for the early years sector.  Of course I would.  But to achieve that we need better data. Particularly about the diverse early years delivery chain in the public, voluntary and private sectors (see my blog on dinghies and cruise liners). Research surveys published by sector groups are well-intentioned but in my view they are unreliable and clearly aren’t convincing decision-makers effectively enough.  They are letting the side down.

The ideas of hubs in Best Beginnings are a rehash of the Sure Start children’s centre argument we won almost 25 years ago. Instead, is it more important we effect the systemic and practice changes that we know will change lives?  Surely this will be more sustainable than bricks and mortar.  And it could help us avoid wasting too much time and effort building up an infrastructure, only to see it eroded over the next generation.  Too many former children’s centre buildings lay testament to that.

We are still in an over-complicated environment.  There’s plenty of services.  A lot anyway.  Too many unjoined up services and all sorts of things for new parents to learn about and navigate.  Something magnified multiple times when a child has SEND.  A complex parental journey made even more challenging when families feel their child doesn’t fit the one-size-fits-all model.

Laming (2003) told us to break through the artificial barriers between professions involved in children’s services (education, social care and health).  I’m paraphrasing of course, but the principle that drove reform back then was about sharing the drive and ambition for shared outcomes for children.  We should not and must not lose that.  There are plenty of services, midwifery, health visiting, speech and language therapy, troubled families, and if you are lucky children’s centres (or their local equivalent or remodelled version).

The report recognises that not everything it calls for requires new investment, instead it is more about reorganisation.  But I know enough about the public sector to know that restructuring is not always welcome or effective.  Instead services need the flexibility, the power and the resource to concentrate on delivery and to be given half the chance to innovate and create organically.  Without the diversions of ‘flavours of the month’ or knee-jerk reactions to today’s issues.  Restructures all too often stymie innovation and demotivate the workforce.  Not always, but often.  We should all resolve to keep a firm grip on the rudder of the early years ship.

The early years and childcare entitlements are a messy patchwork of criteria led and single-outcome focused initiatives, and the gaps are glaringly obvious when funding stops and other types of support, like Tax Free Childcare, are expected to fill them.  They are awkwardly described and enveloped in jargon.  Sometimes, indeed often, parents give up as the investment to gain seems disproportionate and overwhelming when there’s plenty of other things to manage.  We must do more to make the parent journey through this easier, faster and more rewarding.

Too many times ministers have sought to leave their short-term early years mark. What’s most important here is we ourselves, as a sector, overhaul early years, with full ministerial support for generations to come.

I don’t think parents should have a guarantee of support or a national infrastructure of hubs, that for me is too input focused.  Instead we should be more focused on rights and outcomes.  Then parents will take their empowerment and we will all achieve what we share as outcomes.  And I think the ambition of consistent checks is unachievable, just as consistent Ofsted inspections are a challenge.  There’s too many variables in play for that.

But I do agree, that we should have:

• A coherent strategy with a cabinet level minister to help drive and resource it.
• Clear pathways for accessing services for parents.
• Better data that informs decisions in the sector.
• Shared outcomes and intra-sector respect.
• Checks, early identification and coordinated interventions where needed.
• An extended childcare offer, 30 hours universal for two-, three- and four-year-olds for those families that need and want it. Free to the families that use it.
• And more should be done to create a gold-standard early years workforce, and a career strategy integrated with schools, that attracts the professional respect and parity it requires.

In the early years sector, our diversity is our strength.  We have individual childminders working from their homes with small groups of children, we have sessional playgroups based in multi-use community buildings, there is full day provision in nurseries, schools and children’s centres.  We also have connected settings collaborating in hubs, and emerging, small, medium and large chains.  There are super chains too, international and huge, with very many settings attracting capital investment funds.  Early years and childcare is a local and global concern.

That’s the good news.  Kind of.  Our diversity is also our weakness and biggest challenge.  It means we cannot compare like-for-like.  You cannot compare a dinghy with a cruise liner.  They both do the same job; they transport someone from A to B, over water.  But in dramatically different ways.  This leads to all sorts of inequalities and practical barriers.

It makes the job of government deciding what and how to fund such difference enormously challenging and something that results in many on the receiving end considering it to be unsatisfactory.  When it comes to funding, there is a lot people don’t agree on.  Yet we are asking everyone in the sector, regardless of the model to work with children in exactly the same ways, for the consistent outcomes.  We can agree on that.

There is a place for all types of settings when they meet the needs of the parents in the local community who need, want and prefer to use them.  All should have equal value. Surely more can be done to take the best of what we have and get rid of the worst of the circumstances we find ourselves in.  Economies of scale afforded in larger organisations allow for the capacity and ability to grow and develop, and to participate in the wider roles of the early years practitioner.  By that I mean things like getting involved in partnership working, teams around the child, early identification and intervention, and connecting with other professionals who can provide specialist input.  This takes time and money, something not everyone has.

There are things that are taken for granted in early years that we don’t see later on in school-age learning.  For one, children don’t usually attend more than one school at a time for their primary or secondary education.  And the school workforce has a recognised status and structure, pay scale and qualifications framework.  Most schools look and feel the same.  There isn’t the diversity there is across early years.  I am wondering whether these established trends for multiple provider use are sustainable, or indeed in train with changing parental preferences in a COVID-19 and post lockdown context.  Will we see a strong demand for single-use settings and will this influence parental choices and provider delivery models?  Workforce reform has long been called for and remains something to be addressed so equality and quality is achieved once and for all.  The solutions should not be to turn every provider into a cruise liner, or a dinghy for that matter, but if we don’t manage the market and the workforce to protect diversity and choice, there will be no real choice left.

A little unseasonal this metaphor given The Sound of Music usually airs at Christmas time, and it’s the hottest day of the year, 32 degrees, but a discussion today made me think. Are some of us falling into the trapp (pun intended) of listening too intently to the rigid rules, specified outcomes, targets and multiple measures put in place by others to govern our work? Are we just like the children running towards the captain’s whistle-calls? The ones he used to rule the household before he saw the light and his affections transferred to his children’s new governess.

There will always be well-intentioned people who sit in offices and work very hard to develop rules, regulations and guidance with the purpose of raising standards or achieving consistency. This is a fact of life. We must get used to it – I am afraid. The best ones understand the value of consultation and collaboration with stakeholders and experts.

The law is the law. It is something I advocate following – of course. They are not all perfect and some need changing and bringing up-to-date. That’s for another day. But guidance is guidance. It is designed to be helpful and to advise how legislation and the ‘musts’ can be implemented. It is not the law. Instead it is a suggested path to your destination. It is such a huge shame that people don’t do things unless they are in guidance. We should. And if things are taken out of guidance for brevity’s sake, it does not mean we shouldn’t or couldn’t still do them.

Living and working in locally locked down Leicester has really turned me off guidance. It is all too obvious when you know it doesn’t match reality. So, follow it if you wish, pick and choose from it, or decide your own route. All those options are within acceptable bounds. Indeed, they should be encouraged. Once you accept this, then the options are limitless.

We can do lots of things that are not in guidance. We must. If we free ourselves from the shackles of guidance then we can better use our learned skills and experience and become innovators and creative beings. Just like Maria when she broke the captain’s rules and let go of her misplaced dream of entering the convent. It surely worked.

Maria knew the power of treating people as individuals, developing trust in relationships, and the joy and happiness to be found in play. Her methods all leading to self-fulfilment, learning and positive outcomes, love and change.

We too can include these principles and values in our practice even if they are not explicitly written in guidance. We can design our own routes to the destinations we are tasked with reaching. I frequently say that no-one has become an example of best practice by following guidance to the letter. And examples of best practice become the new inspirations for the next guidance, so we must play out part in the improvement cycle. If you innovate, you lead, you create the new solutions and best practice, you become a leader. And sooner or later even the most stubborn captain will come round to your way of thinking. Let’s all be Marias! Merry Christmas.