Michael Pettavel: Working in early years contributes to a higher cause

With academics and researchers tripping up over themselves to highlight the problems facing children under five, there seems to be a paucity of centralised thinking about how to co-ordinate a response to what has already become a crisis. Teachers and early years educators know only too well what the impact of the pandemic and chronic levels of underfunding have led to, and it begs the simple question of ‘What to do?’.

We know from our own experience what one and a half decades of austerity, sidelining and ignorance results in and I am sure that there is much more than we are currently aware of. Crises don’t always just appear – sometimes they are made.

By now, you will be pretty familiar with my opinions about the status of the early years in current political thinking. You can see how the research and solutions put forward by the Government’s own chosen advisors is simply ignored – think Sir Kevan Collins, Henry Dimbleby, John Penrose; the list just goes on. Whatever Will Quince finds in Sweden, it will make no difference (probably a good thing, to be honest). I hope he also drops into Finland so he can ignore that too.

So what are the solutions? Maybe there aren’t any. Perhaps what we have to do is to realise there isn’t a hero riding over the hill and that we don’t simply do this job for the huge amount of kudos that it brings to us. We won’t receive the likes on social media, the offers of advertising contracts or the awe-inspired murmuring of others as we pass by. We will, however, be part of the solution and not the problem.

We will help the recovery of others who have little choice or currency. We will offer an opportunity to belong to a world where kindness and equality are more important than self interest at any cost. We will go to bed each night and be able to think that in some small way we have done something worthwhile.

I know that we can’t live on fumes, that many, many people are really struggling and that a lot of them work in the early years. If there is one small consolation, it must be that at least our work allows us pride, self-worth and makes us better than perhaps we would otherwise be.

Every day thousands of us turn up to work in nurseries simply because we want to. Why? Because we know, we understand and we care. Maybe we are already the solution to the anxiety and uncertainty that shows on many of those small faces that greet us each morning.