Talking Early Years: In conversation with Louise Hannan
Unpacking The Twoness of Twos
The Government has agreed to continue the roll out of funded places for two-year-olds, with talk of putting them into schools. Many are concerned that this plan may ignore the uniqueness of the two-year-olds. To mitigate this, my colleague Louise Hannan (currently researching the emotional environment for two-year-olds) and I have refreshed the original Twoness of Twos report to raise awareness about our role in ensuring two-year-olds thrive in every setting.
The Twoness of Twos report reflects research, conducted with 23 settings, and is shaped around the LEYF Leadership Hexagon whereby the evidence is filtered via the following criteria:
Leadership and Management
Leading the Pedagogy
Leading the Environment
Leading with Parents
Leading Yourself and Others
Leading in the Community
Unsurprising, leadership was a theme that wove throughout the responses highlighting a shared concern about insufficient leadership training available with a laser focus on the two-year-olds. As Louise reminds us, a 2-year-old is not half a four-year-old and is definitely not a toddler. Being two is a distinct age and staff who work with two years olds are very alert to this.
The research also showed that staff were worried about the change in ratio and were reluctant to implement the 1-5 ratio, although that may change now that the sector has been lumbered with an unexpected tax bill. They set this in the context of children – the higher number of children arriving at settings demonstrates insecure attachments, higher SEND and self-doubting parenting. This is something Louise has seen firsthand during her recent visits to her students’ placements.
Our pedagogical conversation was shaped by the concept of emotional environments and emotional sensitivity, both of which are interconnected and highly explicit when working with two-year-olds. We referenced the importance of understanding how two-year-olds develop and moving away from the bad press they often get when their developmental stage is rather unfairly summed up as “The Terrible Two’s”.
In reality, two-year-olds are on a huge development pathway. Their brains are 75% formed and we have to create the right environment to help them continue to grow. Nowadays, we know a lot more about neuroscience, mirror neurons and how to communicate with the children more effectively. Therefore, we need to apply this new knowledge and become sensitively attuned to two-year-olds, helping them think beyond themselves, figure out how to regulate themselves, understand their space and their place in the local community and find their voice. To do this, we need staff with the ability to create language-rich learning environments with lots of play including many planned and unplanned activities that provides for their curiosity, sensory learning while also scaffolding their learning to stretch them but, most importantly, be emotionally attuned to the rhythm of the day. These days appears to be a focus on the environment looking like a show room, neither pedagogically sound, language-rich or emotionally safe, so it is time to talk more about this.
All this requires teachers/educators who know their stuff and can anchor it in practice. This is a challenge as many staff working with two-year-olds are inexperienced and find navigating the emotional world of the two-year-old tough – being two is a struggle, so they need us to co-regulate with them and manage their distress and that takes emotional competence. We need to be able to talk about how this can be a challenge in a confident and mature way and if we are leaders, develop a compassionate coaching approach where we help staff understand our own responses otherwise, we risk emotional burnout. This will lead to more people leaving the sector and we end up in a negative cycle as we don’t have time to develop people’s skills, knowledge and understanding and we are back to square one.
