Early years practice has changed significantly over the past few decades.

Today, schools report that they have many more children arriving into Reception who are not ”school-ready” - whether in terms of their learning or their personal, social and emotional development - than ever before.

Yet the early years workforce has not significantly changed to adapt to those different needs.

It’s not because there isn’t evidence to suggest what might work better: robust research studies such as the Effective pre-school, primary and secondary education project show that better levels of staff qualification in the early years are associated with better outcomes for children.

Meanwhile, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)’s guidance on the deployment of teaching assistants offers many findings we can sensibly apply to the early years.

Drawing on this knowledge, here are three areas where changing our approach to workforce training and deployment could make a big difference to our youngest pupils:

1. Support for children with delayed communication

We’ve got plenty of evidence to show how we could support communication needs better.

In nursery settings, programmes such as WellComm and NELI PreSchool can make a big difference at a whole-class level, while also helping teachers to identify which children need additional support. We should invest in staff professional development so that these approaches become the norm.

But universal programmes in the nursery years can’t meet every need, which is why the targeted Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) in Reception is so important. Repeated trials of NELI show that it improves outcomes for children with weaker language skills, helping them to catch up with their peers.

However, many schools find it difficult to allocate staff to run NELI, given the other demands on their TAs. It’s time to target extra funding to the Reception year so that schools can employ additional trained TAs to run this evidence-backed intervention.

2. Safe practice with personal needs

The annual Kindred Squared school readiness survey reports that 2.4 hours of teaching time are lost every day to toileting support in Reception classes.

The whole early years system - private nurseries, childminders, health visitors and family hubs - needs to improve support and guidance to parents, so that children are out of nappies between the ages of 18 and 30 months, as advised by the Institute of Health Visiting.

All the same, there will always be some children with medical needs in Reception and nursery classes who are still in nappies and others who will have the occasional accident.

However, there is a staff deployment change that would help: schools should consider ending the culture of requiring two members of staff to be present when a child is helped with toileting.

Not only does this take too many people away from working with the other children, but it can also be upsetting for the child concerned. NSPCC guidance may help schools to balance the requirement for safe practice with the safeguarding priority of upholding the child’s dignity.

3. Review staff deployment practices

Elsewhere, it’s common for children with special educational needs and disabilities to spend stretches of time in TA-led intervention groups, especially during Reception sessions on core areas of learning, such as phonics.

Yet, as the EEF explains, “pupils who struggle most should spend at least as much time with the teacher as other pupils, if not more”.

To make that happen, we might first rethink some of the traditional roles played by different staff. Is it more complex to lead a scripted phonics session for the class, or run an effective session for a small group of children with SEND? Many TAs are already skilled enough to lead phonics sessions, and many more could be trained to.

To make that work, schools would also need to build in more planning and review time for TAs. It would make sense for every Reception TA to be qualified (for example, as a level 3 early years educator) and for their pay to reflect the importance of their job.

A long-term investment

All these proposals require up-front funding. However, they would offer long-term benefits to children and to the whole school system.

After all, improvements in children’s early language skills are associated with better long-term prospects in school and in life, while better early intervention and support for children with SEND is associated with lower numbers of education, health and care plans in secondary education.

Instead of balking at the cost, let’s see extra spending on staff in the early years as a great long-term investment in our children and all our futures.

Julian Grenier is the co-editor of Putting the EYFS Curriculum into Practice (2nd Edition)

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