Marie Shakespeare is the manager of Birth Farm Day Nursery in Suffolk. As an experienced Early Childhood Studies graduate, she achieved Early Years Professional Status on the Validation pathway with University Campus Suffolk and the University of East Anglia.
The reason I do love working with young children is because they learn more in their first five years than at any other time in their life, and you see them progress. From not be able to move for themselves, to being able to write their own name it is fantastic and the most rewarding job and I couldn’t ask for anything more.
Research has shown that the more highly qualified staff are the more they understand about child development and they do, they know why they are doing things and if you know why you’re doing things you do it more and the children then get more out of it and you challenge the children more.
Leadership is very important to enable younger members of staff to know how things should be done, to enable children to see and have experiences that are well planned and well organised, and that is what leadership is all about. It’s all about planning and organisation.
During the EYPS training, as I did the Validation pathway, I did five days in uni and you go off and think about the activities you’re writing about and things like that and you bring back what you’ve thought about and come back with ‘oh well, when I was doing this I was thinking about this and I actually want you to go away and do that now and you are then able to feed in to your staff about why this is such a good idea and they will then link in to your excitement and if they’re exciting and passionate about it as well they’ll be keen to do it.
Some of the assignments were looking back over things I’d done 18 months before and it was great to look back and think why have we changed and to be able to go to a member of staff and say ‘I’m so glad we don’t do it like that anymore’ and ‘look what we’ve achieved’. That was really satisfying and made them feel proud of what they had achieved.
Having the Early Years Professional Status made me feel extremely proud, honoured that I was one of the few that had it and knowing that it was virtually as high as you could get. It shows that you do know what you’re doing and you do understand what you’re doing and that you can lead people. It really challenges you to think about why you do what you do and it’s very satisfying to think ‘yeah, I’ve done that, I’ve thought about it and I’ve evaluated what I’ve done and I’ve really achieved something.’