Have I spelt that right? It looks very wrong.
Anyway, this morning I took another trip out to the park. I was amused by the way so many parents ignored our presence when they realised we weren’t parents, avoiding eye contact, stepping away from the item of equipment we were using and so on. I suspect they may have thought we were some kind of charity or children’s home as we had a couple of children with physical difficulties with us – they were also ignored and avoided, which I didn’t find amusing, but instead rather sad.
This afternoon I spent in the office. We have a timetable for next year which sees me having two office sessions, 3 elementary sessions, and 5 in the children’s house. Next is EYFS curriculum planning, training, elementary curriculum planning and so on. Oh, and I had a wonderfully bizarre conversation with the local council about the funding for the early year sessions – over the next two terms which are 15 and 12 weeks respectively, they are funding 13 weeks each term. I wanted to know how I was supposed to fund 13 weeks when we’re only open 12 – I was told that if we have a holiday club, then we could fund the children through that. The drawback being that for families who miss more than 25% of sessions can end up with funding being reclaimed, so it seems a little unfair to designate a holiday week for older siblings as a week that could affect their attendance rating. I was then told that I could effectively shift the funding to the autumn term, allowing funded children to attend for 14 weeks of the 15 week term, but we wouldn’t get the extra money for it until the January payment came out.
All makes huge amounts of sense doesn’t it? Still struggling to understand why this funding runs on the financial year instead of the academic one, and also why it is only available in term time but doesn’t cover all term time. Hohum. No wonder parents get horribly confused. Oh, and it doesn’t actually cover anything like the fees of a 2 1/2 hour session in pretty much any private nursery – it’s set up to cover the costs in school nurseries which are allowed to have staff ratios of 1:30 rather than 1:8, and tend not to have to pay all sorts of other costs as those are covered by education and building budgets. Apparently nurseries are going out of business all over the place as you’re not allowed to charge top up fees either, and it’s just not particularly financially viable. Factor in all the surestart excellence centres that are being opened as well, and you can imagine that yet more parental choice is going to disappear.
After I’d hurt my head with all of that, we turned our attention to the EYFS (spit, campaign against EYFS learning goals here) and a particularly interesting little booklet from the DCSF, ‘Confident, capable and creative: supporting boys’ achievements, Guidance for practitioners in the Early Years Foundation Stage’. Both of these were discussed extensively at the staff meeting, and lots of loud discussion was held around the banning of weapons play – an approach that Big’s previous nursery took, and to a large extent I have taken at home too. Now I know we’ve discussed this on here before, (interestingly, I think that the news story I linked to is one referred to in the link above about the booklet, so I guess I was wrong last time, they are saying let them play with guns) but having thought about it more since, I am concerned that the knee jerk zero tolerance to all weapons play is not necessarily the right way forward. I think I’d like to read We don’t play with guns here: War, Weapon and Superhero Play in the Early Years (Debating Play)
to take this further – might see if I can get A to buy it for school. There are a couple of other things I think we could do with as well.
So it was an interesting end to the evening as that was up for discussion – we didn’t make any changes to policy there and then, but I am going to be continuing the discussion. Any points you’d like to contribute can be made in the usual place.
Leave a Reply