To start with, some important quotations from EYFS:
From the Statutory Framework:
Key person: The named member of staff assigned to an individual child to support their development and act as the key point of contact with that child’s parents. (p 52)
Each child must be assigned a key person The key person should help the baby or child to become familiar with the provision and to feel confident and safe within it, developing a genuine bond with the child (and the child’s parents) and offering a settled, close relationship. The key person should meet the needs of each child in their care and respond sensitively to their feelings, ideas and behaviour, talking to parents to make sure that the child is being cared for appropriately for each family. (p37);
And, although it’s a rather noddy-ish approach, I’m going to pick out some key phrases:
Each child must be assigned a key person [whose job includes] developing a genuine bond with the child (and the child’s parents) and offering a settled, close relationship.
I have recently suggested that Peter Elfer‘s book Key Persons in the Nursery, while principally conerned with under-threes in day care, nonetheless has an important model for practitioners who are adopting the Key Person approach: that we should start not from the compulsions – that all-devouring “must” from the Statutory framework of the EYFS – but from the notion that this is “An approach, rather than a system” and should come from within the school’s existing, stated values. In other words, that phrases (culled from local school web sites fairly unscientifically) such as
[This school aims] To be a safe happy place, where everyone is known and valued, and where needs are accepted and met.
to help each child to be a happy and useful member of a school community thus learningto take their place in a wider society
Working in partnership with parents we enable our children to become happy, well-adjusted, confident and co-operative individuals, with the self-motivation to succeed.
can be the starting point for discussion of how this “new” idea is already in place or at any rate in germ in a school.
Card 2.4 – the card that deals with this in detail, and which, in e-format has links to further work by Elfer et al on this – is clear on practical details:
The crucial element is ensuring that the children are able to begin and end their day or session in a key group with their key person. This helps to develop a sense of belonging and connection not only with the key person but with the other children too.
And notice I’ve avoided wellbeing quite easily here. This person focuses the child and all the adults (note the working with parents element) on the tasks of adjusting long-term and short term to the job of being in a school and assists communication at a number of levels. S/he is an agent for partnership, not – at least in the later stages of the Foundation Stage – an institutional nanny. And of course not a substitite Mummy (or Daddy) either, execpt in the subtlest of ways; if, as Elfer (echoing Gunilla Dahlberg) suggests, “nursery… is a place to be different,” the relationships might very well also be different.
But what skills and attitudes does the role need? And what are the training implications? Do they differ from the training and skills suggested by Elfer?
nicktomjoe 