New blog begins

I am sitting in the bright sunshine in the back garden of my auntie’s house in Exeter.  Next Thursday I start a new job as Nursery manager in a Children’s Centre.  I confess it is not ideally what I want to be doing with my life right now but I am sure it will be better than the hotch potch of temporary jobs with which I have filled my time in the last six months.  Don’t misunderstand me, I have enjoyed them, especially doing one-to-one support for a four-year-old who is probably somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but the average wage for them all was well under £10.00 an hour and I am fed up with being supervised by less qualified and experience people who do not always put the child’s experience at the centre of their decision-making.  Of course that is not always as simple as it sounds, the system in which we work does not always put the child’s experience at the centre of the rules and recommendations that we have to follow, but for me that should be a constant reference point.  I confess that lately I have often found it difficult to keep my mouth shut so I am looking forward to a job where quality of service is my responsibility and I have a duty to say what I think!   I have been teaching others how to run good services for children for most of the last four or five years.  Now is my chance to see whether I can actually do it myself!

A little tributary to the river Exe runs across the bottom of this garden and invading Himalayan Balsam provides the only splashes of colour apart from a pot of marigolds next to the kitchen door.  The grass is tidily trimmed but the beds are neglected, offering only shades of green, but I can hear the wind shimmering the leaves of the silver birch and something is rustling in the Gunnera beside the pond.  The cats are enjoying the sunshine and my auntie is resting upstairs.

I guess this week between the ending of all my temporary jobs and the beginning of a proper job is a time for reflection and relaxation before the fray.  The nursery I am going to has been outstanding in the past but it has been going through a bad patch and it has been difficult for me to understand exactly why.  I hope that it will become clear quickly so that I know how to approach the problem of falling standards.