Training Talk - Make Room

The best outcome from a training course is that it continues to impact practice years after it took place. This is the case at the Palace Day Nursery in Milton Keynes, where staff have redesigned internal spaces, replaced toys and resources and boosted collaborative work with parents since completing an enabling environments course in February 2018.

Acorn Training’s Becky Watanabe delivered the session to the setting’s 13 practitioners during their monthly staff meeting. She began the two-and-a-half-hour evening session by giving a presentation. She then asked staff to set up for the day, before giving feedback.

Manager Sayyeda Meghji booked the session after studying enabling environments within an Early Years Teacher Status qualification. After taking over the nursery in 2016, she wanted to implement changes, but says staff struggled to understand how they would work. ‘Our rooms were all very colourful and bright,’ she says. ‘We always have some children with additional needs. When the environment is too busy it affects them. We wanted to work on creating a calmer environment.’

The course helped convince staff. Afterwards Ms Meghji replaced carpets with wooden, neutral-colour flooring, and painted the walls a light magnolia. ‘All the display boards used to have really bright backing,’ she explains. ‘We changed to hessian. The environment automatically looked calmer.’

Ms Watanabe helped explain how staff practice linked to the Characteristics of Effective Learning. She covered many topics including equality and diversity and supporting children’s emotional needs. And the training included an audit tool, which Ms Meghji uses to review practice.

As a result, Ms Meghji says children appear calmer, parental involvement has strengthened, and staff reported that it was easier to focus on children’s interactions in the new environment. ‘This course led to so much,’ she says.

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