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The government is expanding the funded early years entitlement to children as young as 9 months old. The full expansion will be completed by September 2025, when all children under the age of five with working parents meeting the established criteria will be eligible for 30 hours of funded provision.

More government-funded places for babies means that more babies are headed into nurseries. Baby room educators and local authorities have already started to see this rise in numbers. An increase in the number of babies accessing early years provision is exciting in many ways. We’ll see more opportunities for babies to connect with peers, develop relationships with caring adults, and have their curiosity and learning stoked from an early age.

However, our team has been discussing the implications of this rise in babies on group size, and the impact of group size on quality.

Group size is a structural quality lever. Structural quality refers to regulatable items like teacher:child ratios, teacher qualifications, and group size that impact the quality of provision in a setting. These structural quality levers influence process quality, which refers to the interactions children have and how those interactions impact their outcomes.

For example, having a ratio of 1 adult to 6 babies may mean that the educator struggles to enact care routines and isn’t able to have sustained, meaningful interactions on a regular basis with individual babies. A lack of these types of interactions will impact babies’ experiences, and by extension, their developmental outcomes. Ensuring that structural quality features are in place positively influence process quality, and the outcomes of babies.

In England, while we do have low ratios of 1:3 for children under the age of 2 years old, there isn’t a regulation on group size. However, research shows group size significantly impacts quality:

• Barros et al. (2016:127) suggests that ‘the presence of more adults in infant classrooms may not compensate for the negative effects of large group size,’ impacting on the relationships and interactions that babies have. In other words, having low ratios does not make up for unregulated group size when it comes to quality.

• Wysłowska and Slot (2020) found that the classrooms with the highest positive climate and support for learning in their research had the lowest group sizes.

• Dalli et al. (2011) suggests that small groups of 6-8 babies are ideal for maintaining a low stress environment and implementing quality pedagogy.

In the same way that high ratios can impact negatively on quality, so can high group sizes. Low group sizes can support a calm, stimulating environment where educators are supported to attend to the needs of the babies in their care and engage in ways that stoke their curiosity and learning.

Regulating group size is a key way to ensure we are achieving high quality provision in the baby room. We must be mindful of how we approach group size in the expansion- in a way that maximizes the quality of the care we provide while keeping nurseries financially viable.

Over to you!

• How has the expansion of government-funded places to babies impacted on the number of babies enrolled in your nursery?
• What group size do you think is appropriate to support quality in your setting?

References

Barros, S. et al. (2016) ‘Infant child care quality in Portugal: Associations with structural characteristics’, Early childhood research quarterly, 37, pp. 118–130. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.05.003

Dalli, C. et al. (2011) Quality early childhood education for under-two-year-olds: What should it look like? A literature review. New Zealand Ministry of Education.
https://thehub.sia.govt.nz/assets/documents/41442_QualityECE_Web-22032011_0.pdf

Wysłowska, O. and Slot, P.L. (2020) ‘Structural and Process Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care Provisions in Poland and the Netherlands: A Cross-National Study Using Cluster Analysis’, Early education and development, 31(4), pp. 524–540. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2020.1734908