First full week

Last weekend I had a delightful day at the seaside with an old friend.  Just the right combination of sea, sand, fish and chips, gentle strolls and that companionship that fits like a comfortable jacket from the back of the wardrobe.  I can’t say we went for a walk but we ambled up the prom enjoying first the people and the beach huts and then the open stretches of sand and pebbles, the crumbling cliffs and the relative solitude only a couple of hundred metres from the busy prom and pier.  There was a lot of seaweed, and both being Radio 4 listeners, we had heard last weeks’ programme about collecting edible seaweeds from a beach in Cornwall and were able to identify and taste Fucus vesiculosus from the low water mark.  This beach is well known for witch stones with round holes worn through by the water, often seen arranged around local houses to keep the witches away, so I had one eye to the ground in case I saw one and the other to the horizon for that sense of space, air and the regular patterns of time and tide that put the viscissitudes of daily life into proportion.

At seven forty-five on Monday morning it was straight back to the viscissitudes!  First job was to find the children’s registers for the week.  That’s the trouble with a new job, even the little administrative details following their usual pattern are a challenge.  I am so lucky in that I have the woman who has been a very capable acting manager and set the Action Plan for pulling the nursery out of trouble, to shadow for the first two weeks.  It is easy to feel overwhelmed when everything is new at the same time.  I learned by spending the second day entirely in the office that in order to stay grounded I am a person who needs to see and interact with the children and staff every day, certainly at the beginning. 

I have started to arrange and carry out staff interviews, starting with the more senior staff with the dual purpose of identifying their strengths and interests and discovering their feelings about the rapid decline in quality of the nursery and the process of support offered to get out of being considered as a ‘setting of concern’.  It is early days to be sure but my feeling is that I have a highly qualified and skilled workforce in comparison with the average nursery.  So why did the standards fall so low and so fast?  Certainly they have had several people in the management role in the last year, so lots of changes, but my gut feeling is that the difficulties go further back.  My observations of practice in the rooms show me that while there are certainly difficulties there are also some lovely, supportive and positive relationships with children.  So many of the problems of staff seem to be directly related to low staffing levels and over reliance on agency staff who don’t know the children.  This has largely been sorted before I arrived.  My own appointment precedes the starting date of four or five other staff by only two or three weeks.

There is so much information to be absorbed that there are many points at which I feel that my head is about to explode.  I have found that the best antidote is to go out into the nursery and talk to a child!  One little boy asked me “Which room are you in today?” and was a bit disappointed when I said “The office, I am afraid”.  “You should be in here" (the pre-school room) he said.  Perhaps I should have explained that I shall be in all the rooms at different times.  That’s a better way for both of us to think about where I am really based!