www.thebabyroom.blog

The Baby Room project team is committed to doing relevant, useful, and meaningful research alongside the early years sector. Part of this commitment is using the evidence generated by our research to produce resources that can guide and improve practice. In 2025, we produced a resource for baby room educators and nursery managers titled Making our baby room the best it can be: Learning from the evidence. In this blog post, we will share more about what this resource is and how you can use it in your nursery.

The background

In 2025, we travelled across England to speak with baby room educators and nursery managers about what quality provision for babies looks and feels like. We conducted surveys and focus groups across the country with the goal of creating a rich understanding of the following:

• Quality provision for under twos in group based provision
• How professional learning feeds into the provision we offer
• Baby room educators’ sense of professionalism. 

With your help, we gathered rich data that offered insights into the state of baby rooms across the country, culminating in the largest study of baby rooms in England to date. We produced a typical research report, linked here, but it was also important to us that we created something just for baby room educators and managers, a resource meant to spark reflection based on the evidence produced and offer inspiration for practical areas of baby room practice. This led to the creation of Making our baby room the best it can be: Learning from the evidence which dives into the topics of group size, baby room leadership, relationships with parents/carers and quality more broadly.

How can I use this resource?

This resource can be used in many ways- as long as it’s supporting your practice, you’re using it right! Below, we outline some of our suggestions:

• Professional reflection: This resource can be used by individuals working in baby rooms to help them step back and reflect on their daily practice, identify what’s working well and where there’s space to grow. Throughout the resource, there are snapshots of evidence about quality in the baby room and insightful quotes from baby room educators and nursery managers working with under twos. There are also questions that prompt critical thinking about practice and how we may want our practice to evolve. Below, we share one of our slides that sparks reflection on the culture of baby rooms and the role of baby room leaders.

• Supervisions: This resource can also be used one-to-one with members of the baby room team to spark professional dialogues about how they can grow their practice and to support their professional development. Below, we include part of the section on baby room leaders. A nursery manager could work through this section with team members who may be looking to progress in the baby room, helping them to think through this route for career progression.

• Team meetings: This resource can be used during team meetings as a gathering space for baby room teams, helping them come together and contemplate how they want to work with babies and families. The snapshot from the resource offers quotes from baby room educators and nursery managers focused on making the baby room integral to the wider nursery and community. These quotes can spark reflective thinking for teams and help them work through how they want to work together to open the door to the baby room.

• Planning guidance: Finally, this resource can support planning for the baby room, ranging from approaches to curriculum to the set-up of the room as a whole. For example, one of our slides thinks through how group size influences the provision we offer to babies. It then asks us to consider how we can plan activities and routines that facilitate small group sizes and support quality. It provides a clear path to apply evidence in practice.

To access the slide deck, head over to https://thebabyroom.blog/nursery-slides/. As you try using this resource in your nursery, we would love to know: 

• What thinking does it spark? 
• What resonated with your practice, and what could be tweaked? 
• What other resources may be helpful for you as you embark on a continuous journey of developing quality provision for babies?

We want the resources we produce to resonate with the experiences and needs of the sector, so please share your thoughts in the comments below!