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In our research on quality in the baby room, we have been thinking about value a lot. Recently, we have been asking: do baby room educators feel recognised for the work they do?

The Early Years Alliance report (2021) titled ‘Breaking Point’ shed a light on how the chronic undervaluing of the EY sector is taking a toll. They shared that of the 35% of people who were thinking about leaving the sector, 77% felt undervalued by the government. Feeling valued for the work you do is important to job satisfaction, recruitment and retention, and by extension, the stability of the sector. This, in turn, has an impact on the quality of early years provision. This problem around feeling undervalued is reflected, or sometimes felt even more severely, in the baby room. We’ve started hearing from baby room educators about recognition and status:

‘I feel like the older rooms do get more recognition than we do. I feel like we’re with the babies and we’re the ones that are having to settle them in and stuff like that. I feel like the preschool [teachers], they get more appreciation from parents than we do.’

‘I think it’s for the parents to show us more recognition. I don’t think they understand what happens in baby room generally. Like, they just see us as babysitters, which is not true. We do a lot more than a babysitter.’

Feeling undervalued for working with babies is (sadly) common across the literature (McDowall Clark & Baylis, 2012; Davis & Dunn, 2019). There’s a false assumption that working with babies is ‘easy’ or attributed to maternal instinct as opposed to a carefully developed, professional skill (Shin, 2015; McDowall Clark and Baylis, 2012). This even extends to the professional learning available, with baby room educators often getting training that doesn’t reflect the nuances of working in the baby room (see Professional learning in the baby room – www.thebabyroom.blog to read more):

‘You don’t really get much training for the baby room. I think we’ve only had a few. Like, I’ve been at my workplace for almost four years and I’d say we’ve only had probably one or two. It’s very rare that we get training.’

This isn’t an isolated problem: There are connections between how we value the workforce and how we value babies. Throughout the literature as well as our team’s previous conversation with baby room leaders, many researchers have identified ideas that circulate about babies that are quite damaging, such as:

• babies as helpless receptacles of care who need protection (Rockel, 2009)
• babies as incapable and not able to do anything (Halls and Sakr, 2024)
• babies as unable to talk, and therefore not important to be listened to (Duhn, 2015).

The culmination of these discourses result in society falsely viewing babies as ‘just being cared for’ until they are older, more capable, and ready to enter formal education. This leads to baby room educators often being misconstrued as simply ‘minding’ babies as opposed to skilled experts in championing child development, curating stimulating and loving environments, and laying the foundation for the rest of children’s lives (Halls and Sakr, 2024; Davis and Dunn, 2019; Goouch and Powell, 2012; Osgood, 2011). 

There’s a parallel here- how we think about babies spills over into how we think about baby room educators.

Points of reflection

I want to offer some questions we can think about as a sector as we work towards raising recognition and status in the baby room and continue developing a vision of quality for the baby room:

• Can we attune and respond to all the things babies do in the present- not just the things they don’t do or will be able to do in the future? 
• Can we radically re-envision how we engage with the baby room? Can we do quality with babies, in a way that asks, ‘What does good practice look like from your perspective?’
• How can parents, nurseries, and wider society work together to recognise and value the professional skills of baby room educators?

Our team is headed to York in about two weeks to continue the conversation on quality in the baby room. Keep an eye on our blog and social media accounts for all the latest updates on the project!

References

Davis, B., & Dunn, R. (2019). Professional identity in the infant room. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 44(3), 244–256.

Duhn, I. (2015) Making agency matter: rethinking infant and toddler agency in educational discourse, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36:6, 920-931, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2014.918535

Early Years Alliance (2021) Breaking Point: The Impact of Recruitment and Retention Challenges on the Early Years Sector in England. London: Early Years Alliance. Available at: https://www.eyalliance.org.uk/sites/default/files/breaking_point_early_years_alliance_2_december_2021.pdf

Goouch, K., Powell, S. (2012) Orchestrating professional development for baby room practitioners: Raising the stakes in new dialogic encounters. Journal of Early Childhood Research: ECR 11(1): 78–92.

Halls, K., & Sakr, M. (2024). Constructions of babyhood among baby room leaders in the UK. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 23(1), 18-30. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476718X241279348 

McDowall Clark, R., & Baylis, S. (2012). Wasted down there’: policy and practice with the under-threes. Early Years, 32(2), 229–242.

Osgood, J. (2011) Narratives from the nursery: negotiating professional identities in early childhood. Routledge.

Rockel, J. (2009) A pedagogy of care: Moving beyond the margins of managing work and minding babies. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 34(3): 1–8.

Shin, M. (2015) Enacting caring pedagogy in the infant classroom. Early Child Development and Care 185(3): 496–508.