Counting the Costs of ChildcareThe affordability of childcare has been a hot political topic in recent years and now a new report is adding to the debate by claiming that the high cost of childcare means that it is often not worthwhile for a family's second earner to work at all. The report is entitled Counting the Costs of Child…
Social and Emotional WellbeingThe National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has just published a guidance document entitled Social and Emotional Wellbeing: Early Years. The document describes itself as "for all those responsible for ensuring the social and emotional wellbeing of children aged under 5 years", a…
Children & MediaOfcom has just published Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes, which examines how young people interact with different media types, such as television, the internet and smartphones. The report is wide ranging, examining the habits of children aged 3 right up to 15, and also how parental att…
International EducationIf you're looking for information on education in other countries, a really good starting point is the International Education Libguide from the IOE. The site serves as a gateway with links to useful education websites all around the world, and while some of the content is specific to users of the I…
Child Protection in BirminghamBirmingham City Council is unfortunately in the headlines for the wrong reasons after a recent surprise Ofsted inspection judged their child protection procedures as "inadequate". You can read the full inspection report by clicking here. …
Double DutchToday the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has published Double Dutch: The Case Against Deregulation & Demand-Led Funding in Childcare. This paper is partly a response to Affordable Quality: New Approaches to Childcare which was published in May and argued that the childcare structure use…
Research for TeachersOne for the PGCE students today... Back when the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) was still around, they published a series of research summaries entitled Research for Teachers. Each summary was around 20 pages long, and approximately 60 were published in total - the idea behind them was …
Helping Children BloomWe are getting ready to say goodbye to our flowers for the season. In our area, flowers disappear with the first frost. Although a little early, we lost a few vines this past week, but we are still enjoying the flowers. However, I understand that we must enjoy them today because they will be gone…
Education on the WebI normally try very hard to stay impartial when posting information here, by just describing what an item is and posting a link to it, and then leaving it to the reader to decide whether or not it's useful or accurate in what it says. That said, today's post deals with a new publication which I real…
Suggested Reading for Students (again)It's the first week of teaching, which explains why there's currently a daily stream of students in our office asking what Early Years books they should be looking at! So here's a reposting of a blog post which I originally wrote in June (with hindsight, the timing could have been better...):A regul…
The Cost of A Child in the Twenty-First CenturyI'm about a month behind with today's post, but better late than never... The Child Poverty Action Group recently published The Cost of a Child in the Twenty-First Century, a report which examines "how much it costs to provide children with a minimum level of participation in society", by studying i…
