Wrap your arms around customers and colleagues

Right now ‘all the balls are in the air’! Every single day, we don’t know which of us will be healthy and able to offer care and education to our children. We don’t know which of those children will be well enough to attend nor which of their parents will feel confident to let them. We don’t know if we will have enough money to pay our staff and we certainly don’t know if we will be in business by this time next year.

The only thing we know for sure is that the past year has been the most stressful and challenging, on every level. We all know of someone who has been touched by the real tragedy of the Coronavirus, and if we are lucky enough to have avoided this in our own families, the thought of that chilling possibility lingers darkly at the back of our minds, all day, every day.

In my own limited experience, of heading up a small nursery chain, my response has been to seek out small ways in which to reach out and offer what little comfort and reassurance I can. In the practical sense, this comes down to fulsome communication and unapologetic transparency for difficult decisions and uncomfortable, demanding changes to everyone’s working norms, but it goes further. For many recent years, we have taken pride in, and picked up the odd gong along the way for, being a ‘Mental Health Aware’ company – and never has this been more important than right now.

Having Mental Health First Aiders in all settings, having a large proportion of staff trained in mental health awareness and operating a bespoke employee wellbeing monitoring system gives us quite a few tools with which to support one another. Given that the starting point, at the moment, for all of us, is ‘really wobbly’; we have taken the view that anything that shores us up and makes us feel marginally more able to turn up, function in a near-normal way AND keep a supportive eye on those around us, can only be a good thing.

Personally, as a mental health campaigner and trainer in my downtime, I know that it is essential that we talk. Talk about how we feel, talk about what worries us, talk about the barriers that we perceive in our everyday patterns and so on. So, with my employer hat on, it is vital for me, in my nursery family, to create spaces and opportunities to talk and, more importantly, to promote an overarching proclivity to listen. We all need to feel heard. As childcare professionals, we put listening to children above all else. We know that being enabled to have a voice and for what you say to be heard, and valued, is extremely empowering. This has never been more important than it is right now – not only for the children in our care, but for their parents, carers and all childcare professionals, who are being called upon to fulfil such essential roles during a global crisis.

Feedback in our organisation, via a recent brief questionnaire, indicates that the more contact colleagues receive, over the widest range of methods, (email, text, direct calls, messenger, group chat, zoom, posters etc.) from different people at different levels in the company, the happier they are. We thought that we might be deluging people with information, positive messages and invitations to hook up and be sociable. Not a bit of it! Responses ranged from extremely appreciative to demands to increase the level of contact yet further and, perhaps most tellingly, to keep up the momentum because this crisis is far from over. This certainly gave us cause to pause and re-plan our next phase of reaching out.

Many conscientious professionals are also fretting about their CPD and how their onward pathways may be affected by the limitations of the pandemic. We have found that offering all of our staff the opportunity to undertake training and development with TLC (S.W.) Ltd. really popular. The courses are written by childcare and education professionals for childcare and education professionals and it really shows! Every course is relevant, topical and really impacts practice, once assessed and certificated. The courses work well for nursery practitioners but are equally accessible to childminders and nannies – in fact anyone working with pre-school children. The great mix of remote training that can be done at a time to suit the individual learner and a little practical project to be undertaken and evidenced in the workplace has been very well received by everyone. Nursery Managers report real positive change in the areas studied, such as the Quality of Teaching or Emotion Coaching for Behaviour Support and staff are delighted with some of the topics, such as Sensory Play with Under 1s, Hedgerow & Woodland Adventure and Nurturing Imagination & Curiosity.

For an exclusive 7-minute video for readers explaining the value and ethos of the training have a look at https://tlctraining.co.uk/mortonmicheloffer/. Morton Michel customers have access to a special offer from TLC Training, you can find details here.

Practitioners have found studying in their own time and at their own pace really helpful at this particular time. For those who are parents, juggling home-schooling and amended working patterns, grabbing a cup of tea and settling down at the laptop to study, after children’s bedtime, offers a bit of ‘Me time’. For those who have had to isolate at home, due to a workplace infection, a bit of home-learning offers structure to an otherwise long day and these colleagues have been returning to the nursery full of enthusiasm for the practical project element of their TLC Unit. Being able to notch up CPD hours during an otherwise bleak time and keeping your mind positively active, rather than over-thinking the horrific daily coronavirus statistics or the latest scare story from social media, has proved to be really therapeutic.

Many of my staff have undertaken TLC Units related to children’s wellbeing, emotional security and behaviour, such as Emotion Coaching, because this is uppermost in the minds of everyone working in our industry at present. We are all striving to offer the children, and their families, the reassurance that they need, and new tools and strategies are vital.

We have all come to understand the importance of supporting our children’s emotions in their early years and many practitioners are developing coaching skills to support children’s emotional expression. We need to evolve our behaviour management techniques to recognise that it is OK for children to feel sad or angry. Presently, this needs to be viewed in the context of an extremely uncertain world where most adults are experiencing the full gamut of emotions on an almost daily basis – and it’s ok for them to feel sad or angry, or indeed, worried, anxious or depressed too. However, we have an obligation to be well-equipped to respond and support each other in these difficult times.

As a society, our developing understanding of adult mental health has led to recognition of the direct impact on young children of the emotional wellbeing of the members of their household. We recognise that if we apply focus and effort to supporting young children’s emotional awareness and expression in the short term, their long term emotional and mental health can be significantly and positively impacted. In our nursery chain, one of our senior managers, as part of her Master’s Degree, has been actively developing and trialling a new emotion coaching tool. She calls it ‘Pre-emotions’ and this teaching aid has helped ensure that staff are skilled-up and prioritising children’s emotional health. We believe there has never been a more urgent need for further investment in this area, than right now, in the midst of this physical and mental health crisis.

Many popular mottos have emerged over the past year, such as: ‘Be Kind’ and ‘It’s okay not to be okay’ - messages which readily translate to our 2- and 3-year-olds, without the need for adaptation. Some of the most basic toddler lessons start with sharing, helping each other and learning how to cope during emotional outbursts.

As we continue to move through not only a worldwide pandemic, but also a significant shift in mental health awareness, we must ensure our early-years workforce continues to do the groundwork to give children the skills they need for their life-long wellbeing and future learning. However, along the way, we can also figuratively ‘put our arms around’ our colleagues and our customers, helping to ensure that we all make it through the worst of times and preparing us to be good and ready to enjoy the best of times... whenever that may be!”

Sharon Cowburn B.Ed. established the first Flying Start Nursery in Camborne in 1993. As a qualified early-years teacher she was motivated to give children ‘a flying start’. At that time, Sharon and partner Steve had a lively 5-year-old, twins of nine months and another baby on the way so lots of motivation to meet the demands of busy families with inquisitive children! Since that time Flying Start has evolved and expanded to its present five centres spread across the whole of Cornwall and into Plymouth. Sophia, one of the Cowburn twins, is now a successful graduate nursery manager with early-years professional status and Masters degree and together they set up TLC Ltd. and so the Flying Start family goes from strength to strength.

The views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of Morton Michel.