Running Head:EARLY YEARS SETTING

Early Years Setting



The Key Factors That Influence the Management of an Early Years Setting

Providing early year setting for pre-school children can be enormously rewarding, provide a much-needed service for local communities and most importantly, give children a great start. Much research has shown that high quality care and education can help all children to achieve, is reassuring to parents and makes a huge difference to the development and wellbeing of children. This fact sheet provides an overview of the key factors in deciding whether to start a new early years setting.

Opening a provision requires commitment and research. Time spent at the start on making sure you understand your community and that the setting will be sustainable and affordable for the local community, will prove invaluable to the long term sustainability of the group. When starting up your provision, the Early Years Team at your local authority should be your first port of call. Local authorities have a duty to support early year's providers in order to ensure that there is sufficient childcare to meet the needs of parents in the local area. Most local authorities have a Business Support Officer who offers business information, advice and support to help new and existing providers achieve sustainable high quality services.

As the first Early Years Professionals (EYPs) reach the point of validation and are awarded Early Years Professional Status, many different examples of leadership of practice are emerging. These illustrate the diverse facets of the role.

However, a more specific definition of leadership in the context of Early Years practice would seem to be needed that captures the essence of leadership of practice. Even within the Children's Workforce Strategy (DfES, 2006:29), the references to the new 'strategic leadership role and the core skills, knowledge and values' that go with it seem to sit more comfortably with the models illustrated through the National Professional Qualification for (school) Headships (NPQH) and the National Professional Qualification for Integrated Centre Leadership (NPQICL). Whilst these offer valid pathways for leadership development and training, for those who are leading organizations, they are not the models that best fit the need for a clear definition of leadership of practice.

Indeed, the juxtaposition of the developing Children's Centre agenda with the emergence of Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) is creating a situation where urgent clarification is needed of the distinctiveness of the two types of leadership. The emergence of the role of Early Years Professional is fundamental to the Government's agenda to improve workforce skills, knowledge and competencies and to raise the quality of children's experiences in the early years Children's Workforce Development Council (CWDC), 2007a). Candidates seeking validation for Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) not only have to demonstrate that they can meet the 39 Standards 'through their own practice'; they also have to provide evidence that they can 'lead and support others' to do so (CWDCa 2007). It is this 'leadership of practice' as a defining element - indeed one of the three ...