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This paper explores the impact of lecturers' individual current doctoral study on their own and collective constructions of self in a changing Higher Education (HE) policy context. It focuses on how lecturers, drawn from a professional knowledge background, make sense of new institutional requirements for new lectures to have doctorates. The lecturers themselves, through 'facilitated collaborative auto-ethnography', generate the substantial data and analysis for this research. This study exposes the enormous pressure of the doctorate on their lives and reveals different ways in which they resist particular forms of language, affiliations and positioning within their institution. However, of particular significance in this study is their own agency and collective voice, through using their developing cultural tools of research to 'be' researchers, in and beyond their own doctoral studies, in order to understand their own changing identities within HE. The study therefore reveals complex, contradictory and unexpected responses to HE policy.

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Recent workforce reform in England has sought to increase opportunities for practitioners who work outside the maintained (school) sector to gain graduate status. Whilst these opportunities have generally been welcomed within the sector, this has created dichotomous tensions for the ECEC workforce. The traditional construction of the ECEC practitioner assumes a lack of educational and social capital (Osgood, 2009). Its associated dispositions do not necessarily fit with the alternative construct of the Early Years Professional or Teacher who, through gaining educational capital in the form of a university degree, will be sufficiently equipped to enact the normative and performative discourses which dominate educational and social policy. These tensions serve as the focus for this study, which was concerned with examining how a group of graduate practitioners were endeavouring to broker their competing professional constructs within their own workplace. The research argues for the necessity to establish professional, relational spaces within and across the field of Early Years Education and Care in order to have a greater understanding of the value that all early years professionals can contribute to pedagogical practice.