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On Saturday April 26th, the baby room team welcomed 50+ delegates to West Offices in York! We were so inspired by this passionate group of baby room educators and nursery managers. One of our delegates shared their learning from the day below:

Cassie Holland’s workshop, The rhythm of the baby room: So much more than a daily routine, imparted the importance of slowing down in our practice with babies. Dr Gemma Goldenberg helped us to think about how we can nurture babies’ brains to support their growth and development through our pedagogy in her session titled, The neuroscience of the baby room.

In this blog post, I want to spend some time thinking about this delegate’s hope for the future of the baby room: ‘Confident, experienced staff that understand the development of babies.’ Our team’s biggest takeaways from the day resonate with this hope, detailed below:

• Following trends from our conversations over the last few months, there are many “baby room educators by accident”. These are the educators who didn’t choose to be in the baby room, and sometimes didn’t even want to be there. However, once they are there, they really understand the deep meaning of the work they do, love it, and are committed to learn more. 
• Building on this idea, our delegates felt that having experience in the baby room during qualifications is important to support their practice. Qualifications shouldn’t just be about theory, but about seeing pedagogical approaches modelled, and being given the space and support to try them out. They felt that current qualifications do not support baby room educators to understand what it actually means to be in the baby room and to be with babies. Pulling on our previous conference recap, the connections between theory and practice are not strong enough (see blog post: Getting it right in the baby room: A recap from the London conference – www.thebabyroom.blog).
• In the same vein, our delegates craved more CPD that spoke to the realities of working in the baby room. They were particularly keen on having face to face sessions and access to mentoring/coaching.
• Finally, the team at York LA shared that, as a result of the conference, they would change their language to refer to people who work in the baby room as ‘baby room educators’! This is a massive shift that speaks to the importance of the work that happens in the baby room and recognises the specialised professional skill set of baby room educators (for more on status in the baby room, see our last blog post: Value and status in the baby room – www.thebabyroom.blog). 

It’s been a joy to see the impact spiralling from this project already. In just two short weeks, we’ll be headed to Norwich, so stay tuned for more to come.

Over to you!

What are your thoughts on our key takeaways so far? 

Do they resonate with you, or do you have a different experience?