When it comes to high-quality baby rooms, we tend to think about the interactions that happen between educators and babies on a day-to-day basis. But a thriving baby room also depends on strong, supportive leadership. Leadership – offered by the baby room leader and nursery manager – shapes the baby room culture and creates the conditions needed for babies and educators to thrive. Recognising this, Durham Local Authority created the ‘Leading a baby room’ programme.
We spoke with Kathleen Lowery, Childcare Development Officer, who co-developed the programme with Debby Shaw, Early Years Development Officer, about the inspiration behind the programme and how it is shaping practice. In this blog post, we share how the programme can support nursery managers and baby room leaders to reflect on their values and apply them on a day-to-day basis to lead high-quality, thriving baby rooms.
The inspiration behind ‘Leading a baby room’
The ‘Leading a baby room’ programme is grounded in value-led leadership, which Kathleen described as leading with the values that are most important to you and your nursery. By applying those values in your practice, it shapes how baby room educators work with babies and families, and ultimately, the quality of provision.
The ‘Leading a baby room’ programme was inspired by the Durham early years teams’ experiences in baby rooms. During our chat, Kathleen shared a bit about how her journey as a nursery manager contributed to the development of the programme. When she started as a nursery manager, she felt that she did not know enough about the baby room to lead it effectively. However, she was committed to ensuring every baby’s voice was heard and that the provision responded to their individual needs. To enable this to happen, she asked for support from her skilled deputy manager, learning alongside her to build up her confidence and expertise. For Kathleen, this experience demonstrated how values can shape leadership decisions and drive professional growth. She has drawn on these insights to co-develop a programme with her team at Durham Local Authority that supports leaders to identify their own values and use them to lead high-quality baby room practice.
From values to action
In each session, the leaders reflect on their core values and apply them across different elements of leading a baby room. Recently, they discussed mealtime in the baby room and how to ensure this is a good experience for babies. The Durham early years team started the session by having leaders reflect on their own values about mealtime, including the food they like and dislike, how they like the table to look, and how much time they like to have to eat. The team then made the point- why should this be any different for babies? The leaders excitedly reflected on changes they could make with their baby room team to turn mealtime into an inspiring experience for babies that responds to their thoughts, feelings and preferences.
The Durham early years team has seen exciting changes in settings from separating out pasta with sauce, carrots, and turnips instead of mashing it all up, to adding little vases on the table to make the seating arrangements more interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Kathleen described these changes as humanising and respectful to babies and explained how this reflective approach can be applied across the day, from drop off to pick up. By reflecting on how their values are lived out in everyday moments, leaders can work with their teams to identify small changes that make a meaningful difference to babies’ experiences.
Supporting long-lasting change
While baby room educators are the ones making the practical, day-to-day changes, having leadership on board supports more than small tweaks to practice- it encourages a cultural change that lasts. To encourage leaders and baby room educators to work in tandem on ideas raised during CPD, Durham Local Authority has welcomed leaders onto more of their baby-specific professional learning outside of ‘Leading a baby room’. The LA encourages leaders to come along to network visits to different baby rooms, as well as to the ‘Oh, to be a baby!’ sessions where they discuss topics such as babies’ agency and consent.
Moving forward, Durham Local Authority hopes to bring leaders and baby room educators together in more professional learning opportunities. By exploring key ideas collectively, they aim to strengthen shared values and create lasting cultural change across baby room provision. As the ‘Leading a baby room’ programme continues to evolve, Durham Local Authority will work alongside leaders, responding to their ideas, experiences and aspirations to support settings in creating baby room cultures where babies, families and educators can thrive.
Based on our inspiring conversations with Durham Local Authority, we want to leave you with a few questions to reflect on:
- What are the values you hold most dear in the baby room?
- When in the day do the values feel most alive in practice?
- When in the day do you feel most distant from the values you’ve laid out? In what ways might the practices at these times come closer to the values you hold most dear?
- What opportunities do colleagues have to reflect together on practice and identify meaningful value-led changes for babies?
Leave a comment