A productive system of early years professional development

Abstract

Tel: 01225 384104 Jim Hordern has worked in adult and higher education, learning and development, and in local authorities in England and Wales. He has researched various aspects of education and professional development, including in children and young people's services. Word count: 5230 AbstractThis paper uses the concept of the productive system to identify some of the tensions between the stages of professional development of early years practitioners and the relationships between the various actors within the system of professional formation in England. In the context of the recommendations of the Nutbrown review a series of challenges facing early years professionalism and the design and delivery of continuous professional development are discussed. These include issues that relate to the predominance of external influence on the nature of early years professional knowledge, the significance of the early years setting in supporting practitioner learning and influences on workplace learning processes. Some strategies for strengthening practitioner influence over the productive system are briefly outlined, which relate specifically to how practitioners engage with the challenge of how CPD is organised and located as part of an early years professional identity.

Conceptions of early childhood leadership: driving new professionalism?

“…Our participants' behaviour appears to be similar to that of practitioners in the UK (Hordern, 2012;Osgood, 2009), where the focus appears to be one of compliance, of developing the leadership skills to operationalize the notions of early childhood professionalization embedded in the new quality frameworks. Certainly these frameworks were developed with extensive input from the profession (Sumison & Grieshaber, 2012) and the EYLF itself is not intended to be a set of 'rules' for professionals to follow.…”

Regions and their relations: sustaining authoritative professional knowledge

“…Thus, actors within a region may be constrained in their capacity to classify and frame knowledge, leaving the region, and its knowledge, open to be 'structured' by external forces or by alternative logics. This is, for example, evident in some of the 'welfare' professions in England, such as teaching, social work or early years, where governments have increasingly shaped professional formation (Beck 2009;Beck and Young 2005;Hordern 2013). It can be argued, however, that in order to serve the needs of professional practice, a region needs to maintain some form of stability, a capacity to resist 'structuring' and undue external influence.…”

On the making and faking of knowledge value in higher education curricula

“…While the professional and disciplinary communities were involved in the development of the EYPS (Miller 2008), the U.K. Coalition Government of 2010-2015 introduced reforms that undermined this professional status and sought to re-align early years professionalism with its 'school readiness' agenda for early years work (Hordern 2013). The consequences for higher education curricula are significant, as a system of recontextualisation that has developed through co-ordination between respective communities, and valued forms of disciplinary knowledge, is increasingly challenged by a version of what Young (2006) terms a 'standards-based approach' driven from outside the disciplinary community.…”