www.thebabyroom.blog

Our research focuses on achieving high-quality provision in the baby room of English nurseries. Baby rooms and mixed age classes that include babies are unique spaces within nurseries and have a special rhythm compared to other classrooms. Pedagogy moves at a slower pace, care routines are intensive, and there is an ample focus on relationships and connections between babies, educators, and families. Moreover, babies are developing rapidly with the neural connections occurring in the brain during the first few years laying the foundation for the rest of their lives (Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, n.d.). 

These nuances of care and development mean that baby room educators develop special skills to work with babies. While the professional learning available to them should reflect that, this often is not the case. For example, some baby room educators may only receive mandatory health and safety trainings throughout the course of the year. Others are often assigned trainings created for toddler and preschool teachers and are forced to adapt what they learn to fit the needs of babies. 

This just isn’t good enough.

Our global evidence review clearly states that baby specific professional learning and qualifications are essential to support the delivery of high-quality provision in the baby room (you can access the report here: https://thebabyroom.blog/report-1/). Baby specific professional learning offers a space to reflect on practice with babies and families, connect with other professionals, and learn new skills.

We’re having more and more conversations about professional learning, so we wanted to share some of our thinking so far alongside some quotes from our conferences: 

We’re thinking about the importance of professional learning that is interactive and makes connections between theory and the practicalities of being with babies. 

How much of the professional learning available is hands-on and supporting baby room educators to physically try out what they learn? Having a supportive space to apply the ideas you learn in a training can make theory come alive and help educators work out what to do when they’re back in the baby room.

‘We’ve looked at making training more interactive. So, we do a provocation training where they’re physically setting up the provocations and bouncing off ideas, visiting the other nurseries. You can talk and talk and talk about what the environment needs to look like, but there are a lot of [new] people now coming through the [early years] system. Unless they’re physically doing it in the training, they cannot grasp it.’

‘The magic happens in the room. So we can talk about a little bit of Bowlby or Vygotsky, that’s really interesting. But how am I going to put that into place?’

We’re wondering about improving access to high-quality professional learning.

How can we get educators into regular professional learning that holds space for reflecting on the joys, challenges, and day-to-day practice of working with babies? It can be difficult to send baby room educators out on high-quality trainings for a few reasons, including the cost of trainings and navigating high ratios.

‘I think it’s about mentoring in the environment and enabling that to happen when we are ratio bound. [Professional] development has a nuance to it that I think people outside of education don’t understand. When you’re trying to work out how many people can I logistically send on something, which are the best people [to send], how do I make sure they’re all connected together? It’s an art form.’

We’re starting to appreciate how important it is for baby room professionals to have time to connect with each other. 

 In our first conference, some of our attendees shared how much they needed to talk with people who understood their experiences in the baby room. Throughout the focus groups, there was an atmosphere of release- of having so much to share and finally having a place to share it. There is so much learning that is shared when people have a safe and warm space to engage with each other; more than that, it’s healing and invigorating to be able to share the joys and challenges of working with babies with people who understand your experience.

Over to you!

• What’s the best baby specific professional learning you’ve had? What made it great?
• What else should we think about when it comes to professional learning for baby room educators?

Reference

Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University (n.d.) Brain Architecture. Retrieved on 02 April 2025 from https://developingchild.harvard.edu/key-concept/brain-architecture/