Blog

When it comes to planning for retirement, the traditional focus is on finance and rest.  It is practical and sensible, and necessary – especially in the current economic climate.  Financial pressures mean that many feel unable to even contemplate stopping work, or stepping off the treadmill fully or in part, and being able to sustain a new way of living.  Working lives are can be busy and stressful. People find themselves trapped in career cul-de-sacs and it feels like the only way out is to stop altogether. Who wouldn’t fantasise about stopping the bus?

All the thinking and preparation for a quality life experience in retirement, is often overlooked.  I wonder how transformational it would be if equal emphasis was placed on the social and emotional aspects of this significant life stage.  Because guess what, people find it really tricky, and confusing, and unsettling. So much so, there is a growing trend of people unretiring. 

Unretirement happens when, after stopping work and catching some restful and reflective moments, retirees reconsider their life-goals and re-enter the working world in new and exciting ways. Reinvesting their experience and skills in new and different ways. 

This can be driven by a renewed sense of personal purpose.  A desire to enjoy more control, and to develop and take new choices, and to create a greater sense of purpose and pleasure.  Perhaps achieving latent ambitions and long-held dreams, or seeking to make a difference to the world around us by learning new things, meeting new people, developing new businesses, undertaking charitable work, or enjoying people-focused activities. 

It is a time when we want to divorce ourselves from financial shackles it feels like we are married to.  To liberate ourselves by determining our own wage worth – whether that be higher or lower than what came before.  Or so set us free from mortgage repayments, or any spending that doesn’t feel necessary anymore.  To live for self, not finance. 

Five helpful tips:

1. Investing time and energy in planning for self at all stages of life and work, helps build self-awareness and agency. You will be better prepared for retirement and there will be fewer unwelcome surprises later.
2. Reinvent your career choices pre-retirement, be bold to create and navigate careers junctions and roundabouts. Be the person you want to be at work today, not consigning it to ‘maybe one day’.
3. Take time out to rest, reflect and re-energise when retirement comes to help reconcile what was imagined and how the reality looks and feels. What new insights and opportunities does this shine a light on?
4. Remember it is never too late to learn new things. Forget that old adage about old dogs and new tricks.
5. Retain a focus on your values, pleasures and choices, unretirement is when you are doing things for you, no-one else.

See also:

My friend has retired and I am in shock

Are you too boring to retire?

Lockdown gives us retirement clues

Recently, I’ve been watching TV, reading the tabloids and scanning the socials with a degree of professional curiosity. All about understanding the comings and goings in TV land. My spare time (and working from home time, if i am honest) has been spent avidly reading between the lines, scrutinising the verbal and non-verbal language, and analysing those super-slick presentation skills projected to viewers at home, all across the morning schedule. I have found there have been deliberate, scripted and overt behaviours, as well as covert and unconscious messages for those of interested in the world of people and work.

Why the interest – you ask?  Well, there has been something going on in TV land.  Allegedly. 

For a few weeks we’ve been led to believe key TV presenting partnerships have deteriorated, former friendships have dissolved, feuds have been fuelled to a fiery heat, patterns of old and new behaviour have been exposed, and circles of trust have been broken.  Sounds more like a drama serial than an entertainment programme, it all feels more like a deconstructed reality show.  The sparkle and polish has become tarnished, and all things have unravelled.

Something had to happen.  Time had run out. Decades long tenures on the sofa have come to an end.  I don’t really know what has happened, I have revealed my sources above. But it hasn’t stopped me thinking.  Because it has flagged several management issues and lessons that we should all listen to. 

Commercially it is important. All of this dysfunction of the ‘on-screen chemistry’ that TV executives have long demonstrated is worth millions to them and their paymasters in the form of their advertisers. When things go wrong, viewer numbers go down, adverting sales take a hit, and share prices plummet. But how could this have been allowed to have happened to HR (human resources), PR (public relations) and SV (share value)?

Longevity in the workplace is a great thing, as is experience.  I am proud that we still have some of the founder members of our business working with us almost 25 years on.  Of equal importance are new team members, and those that stay for a while before their career journeys find new challenges and opportunities.  Bringing in and nurturing new talent, experience, approaches, and ideas in the workplace gives the opportunity for diversity and difference in every way. 

Leaders need to facilitate the bringing together of established team members, and the new ones, so the best of both is harnessed.  Leaders also need to know when and how to share power and opportunity with others. That is good succession planning, by over-lapping and layering the capacity and capability of the team.  Otherwise, one day, that long established team will simply not be there anymore, and no one will be present or able to take over in their place.

Knowing when to go can be a problematic dilemma.  Leaving a great team and a positive environment can be hard if opportunity awaits elsewhere.  ‘Clinging on’ when the time is up, the culture has broken down (toxic even), relationships are irreparable, and power has shifted, and trust is lost is more than messy.  There are no winners when this happens for individuals, teams, organisations, end-users nor shareholders.

There will always be losers, especially if the decision is made by someone else in urgent and clumsy ways, and all hope of a positive ending slips between one’s fingers.  It is an indicator of management failure, laziness, and impotence across many levels.  Instead, leaders and managers should help their organisations, teams, and individuals through all of this thinking to hold everyone to account in a safe space where values and culture, open and honest dialogues, power and opportunity, and transitions and choices are open to all and result in positive experiences for all, for now, and for the future.

Now, how I do I pop all that study onto my timesheet?

This week we spoke to a wide community of professionals concerned with evidence, impact, data, and evaluation at the Children and Young People Now conference in London.  Our session focused on early years, no surprise there.  Our opening assertion was that we can and must assertively quantify and demonstrate how early education makes a difference.  Because it enables children to succeed in their educational futures.  We can close gaps before children start school, but the greatest gift we can bestow children is to switch on their motivated personal learning journeys, and to help them embrace the opportunities that school offers, and be resilient to tackle its challenges.  Early years isn’t an annexe to education, it is the second stage, after children have started learning at home with their parents.  It is a vital and equal part of the continuum of learning before children start school, and a reliable indicator of their future needs and learning potentials throughout primary and secondary. 

What is school readiness?  We were asked.  And how can early years serve teachers by handing over to them children ‘ready, willing, and able’ to be at school?  It isn’t difficult to define, describe and evidence this, even though many believe it is.  Let us tell you, to be school ready is to be happy, confident, and engaged.  It is as simple as that.  Without these two foundational skills, there is an unholy battle to be had.  And we can measure this through the Leuven scales of Wellbeing and Involvement.  Observational judgements made through informed and specialist assessments by trained early educators, who can use the scales to convert qualitative values to quantitative ones.  Data that can target support and interventions and track progress – evidencing it along the way. 

What schoolteacher would not want to work with a child, or a class that was healthy and happy, or actively engaged in what was happening around them?  Two foundational skills that we can, and we do, deliver every day in the appropriately named Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). 

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But it relies upon us as a sector to grow our confidence.  It requires us and all of those around us to fully understand the data we collect and how and why.  That means we, as a sector, and those who rely upon us, need to open up to new respectful and impact and outcome focused conversations.  And that data we collect needs to be stealthy gathered through realistic, and authentic understanding of best practice in early education.  It should not be viewed through a ‘blurry lens’ or practice from later educational perspectives (I mean schools in case you missed that). 

The early years of learning are unique and different – that is its strength, but it does get in the way when others don’t always comprehend that.  They require practitioners to understand our youngest children’s development of thinking and reasoning.  This is massively different to how assessment and testing is done later on.  The assessment of which is an art, to track and evidence children’s development.  In short, to think in the same terms as the developing minds and brains of our youngest children.  And that is an art that can be quantified, tracked, evidenced, analysed, proved, and demonstrated – all without our youngest children noticing what we are up to.  And crucially executed during day-to-day early years practice, without the need for extensive paperwork, and certainly without clutching a tablet – all of which creates barriers between the practitioner and the child, taking away significant value from the potential of interaction and best early education practice.

hey! conference 15 March 2023

15 March 2023 was a date that will go down in early education and childcare history.  For us at the start of the day, the significance was all about our first hey! face-to-face event, and a rare occasion to gather in the same room to share thinking and ambitions.  That was big enough.  However, the Chancellor had other ideas. 

The day ended with a huge gasp of astonishment after some surprising and unprecedented announcements.  Whilst rumours had abounded in the weeks and days in the run up to the spring statement, we knew from experience that early education and childcare can be all too often missed out of government’s learning and employment ambitions.  Not this time.  

Back to hey! and our event set out a challenge to the sector to consider how we all could, no should, nay must, reframe the future of early childhood education.  It was a follow up from our launch in the summer of 2022, and our hugely popular online conference in the October.  1,600 people signed up for that free three-hour event, over 950 attended on the day, and almost 1.5k people have viewed the recording since.  That all made us feel like a movement has begun.  That day in October was also when we launched our policy paper outlining the conditions and actions needed to achieve what children, families and practitioners need, no deserve, to make such change happen. 

Fast forward to March 2023, and we came together and dedicated more time in the same room.  After a welcome from Carol Homden CBE, CEO of Coram, our location for the day, we began with Jan Dubiel, hey! Programme Director.  Jan explored in more detail the policy paper and set out the actions required.  He called for a mission that could take the messages from the sector out to the wider education community, to better nurture and grow everyone’s understanding of the work we all do.  Jan asked for us all to identify the things that connect us, and not focus only on those micro-details that can all to easily and unhelpfully drive us apart.  He suggested that we need to embed the understanding and use of children’s learning behaviours and as a consequence of this; proposed the Characteristics of Effective Learning supporting the EYFS be reviewed and brought up to date. 

We also heard from a stellar line up of expert input and these contributions added extra layers of richness as they focused on key elements and focus of the hey! Agenda. They reframed their descriptions, intents, evidence and research, and processes and values throughout.

Dr Jools Page, reframed her seminal work on the concept of ‘Professional Love’ to locate it within the demands of COVID impact, especially for children who have formed their view of reality and enculturation within an atypical context. She explored the nature of Emotional and Social Development and how effective understanding, and strategies can support this and ameliorate some of the direct challenges.

Dr Lala Manners, focussed on the importance and relevance of Physical Development and how this aligns with a greater context around health, self care and appropriate development. Integrating this knowledge, both specifically and holistically will be vital to ensuring that children grow, thrive and succeed. She also proposed the establishment of a new Institute for Early Years to enable the profession to gather together the sometimes disparate voices and elevate the public perception of the status of the profession.

Sarah Tillotson from the Education Endowment Foundation brought together the current research evidence that identifies the importance of language acquisition and development and how this is integral to success, achievement and attainment. Supporting the importance of an avowedly and unashamedly ‘evidence-led approach’ ECE provision, she outlined how research supports and identifies successful strategies for implementing this for all children in the EYFS.

We all felt a collective sense of togetherness and commitment. 

All of this before lunch. 

The lunch break coincided with the budget statement and the inevitable drip feed of information, speculation, second-guessing and expectation began.  There was much chatter and it set us up for a full hour of deep debate and informed discussion.  This was ably chaired by former Nursery World editor Liz Roberts.  The room came together under the idea of a new and complete voice for the sector, a single message from a much more effective source. 

Then it was time to sum up under the guidance and insight from James Hempsall, director, Hempsall’s.  James wove into the summary the observations from the event and connected them to the emerging and eye-wateringly huge commitments being announced in the House.  We acknowledged how the sector had matured and had grown its research and evidence base significantly – all within a generation – and that must be used to inform and empower the mission.  We heard how very many policies, strategies, priorities and plans there were from all angles, and the need for us to navigate those to best outcomes.  We agreed there were dusty corners that needed attention.  All outcomes and aims need to be integrated and not segregated, and the expertise and practice of effective observation and assessment, and curriculum and pedagogy be properly presented to the public, other practitioners, and politicians alike.  And as for the news, then we must work hard to ensure fresh policy and asks from the sector are appropriately structured, delivered, and positively impactful.  

What would that world be like? We wondered…

Maybe children would arrive on their first at school, around the age of four, with much less developed personal and social skills.  They may have a deep sense of unfamiliarity, being unaware of expected routines and behaviours, they may not have many friends in school – or have the ability to readily make new ones. They might come from a large extended family and have experience of peers – but equally they might be the only (or first) child and find the social element overwhelming and bewildering. They could be distressed at detaching from their care-givers for even the briefest of moments. They would be unlikely to be used to adults they had not always known, and this could be a very challenging aspect for some children. Their experience of the world would be entirely dependent on their parents, grandparents and relatives, and possibly limited to their immediate environment and the people within it.  Factors compounded when influenced by the characteristics of disadvantage and inequality.  They may not so far had access to a broad enough range of books and media to understand there is a safe and stimulating world outside their immediate community. At school there would be many tools and materials that would be unfamiliar to them and resource areas that we currently take for granted, like sand, water and role play – all could be entirely alien to them.  

Children’s parents and families may be much less conversant with talking or working with others, or professionals, to meet the learning or health needs of their children.  Many of the early signs of children’s developmental delay, or SEND will not have been objectively noticed, nor sensitively and appropriately raised and discussed.  Children will most likely not have been referred to, or gained access to, early help or early intervention to support their emerging needs.  Their parents, especially mothers, would be economically disadvantaged by struggling to reconcile being primary care-givers and their career ambitions.

And let’s face it, the resultant pressure would start right away. Many children would not necessarily have had the experiences needed to support the conditions of their continuing learning and development.  The gradual and early processes of induction to an educational setting provided by early years providers and the enculturation of expectations would not have even begun.  Schools would have to invest an enormous amount of time working with children and families to address this deficit.  And in doing so, schools and other professionals around children and their families would need to start the process of identifying and meeting needs, and to support engagement and participation in the whole system.  Children’s progress and educational achievement would be slower to get going. Worse still, depending on their informal pre-school experiences, the divide between advantaged and disadvantaged children could be even bigger and grow even more rapidly.

All of this surely shows the importance of investing properly in early years, the consequences of not doing so are real enough.

Written in collaboration with Jan Dubiel.