Is There A Role For Universities In Developing Early Years Services?

Sally Pearse, Strategic Lead for Early Years for South Yorkshire Futures at Sheffield Hallam University, reflects after two years leading the project.

My background as an early years teacher, community development worker and nursery director has been driven by my belief that high quality early years provision and services are a vehicle for social justice and transforming children’s outcomes. However, since moving full-time into higher education lecturing at Sheffield Hallam University in 2015, I had felt slightly removed from this purpose, despite my continuing role as chair of trustees for a community nursery.

Sheffield Hallam is one of the largest universities in the UK, with 30,817 students and 4,350 members of staff and it recruits a large proportion of students from South Yorkshire, however the region has one of the lowest rates of participation in higher education in the UK (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/widening-participation-in-higher-education-2019). Traditionally the role of universities in relation to Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) has been to train the future workforce from Foundation Degrees to Postgraduate qualifications and to support research in this area. The regional statistics around educational aspiration and attainment led Sheffield Hallam to launch the ambitious South Yorkshire Futures (SYF) programme in 2017 which proposed working with the early years sector in a very different way. This programme was initially set up to explore if the university could play a key role in working with regional partners to address the inequality that impacted on the educational attainment and social mobility of young people in South Yorkshire. This innovation was also partly in response to two government initiatives around social mobility and a drive for universities to play a more direct role in schools (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 2015, Department for Education 2016).

SYF has three strands broadly structured around different life stages. These start at Early Years, move through primary and secondary schooling, and also cover transition into Further Education, Higher Education and wider routes into employment. I am the Strategic Lead for the Early Years strand of SYF and was thrilled that the programme was to start with early years as so often the focus when talking about social mobility concentrates on the later stages of childhood.

At the outset of SYF the small team established to deliver the programme did not know if a university would be welcomed into this space and although we envisioned that we might be able to play a coordinating and facilitating role to develop services across local authority boundaries, we were not sure how this would be received. Now, after two years and with SYF set to continue as part of Sheffield Hallam’s core business, I felt it was a time to reflect on what we have achieved together with our partners and the benefits and challenges of a university taking on this role.

The early years strand of SYF started with an intense period of work with regional representatives from across the sector to co-construct a regional Vision for Early Years and a regional approach to school readiness. This process cemented existing relationships that the university had with the sector and built new ones with strategic leaders. At the SYF “One Year On” event in September 2018 these vision documents were adopted by the four local authorities in the region: Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.

These shared visions have underpinned the range of work we have subsequently undertaken which has brought in an additional £2.2million for early years services in South Yorkshire since 2017. The projects include:

• A partnership with the Family Lives charity which now provides an intensive home visiting service for 140 two-year-olds and their families across the four local authorities.
• An early outcomes project that has enabled the development of a regional skills framework and training strategy to support young children’s speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) and laid the foundation for continued regional collaboration to transform SLCN services.
• The first stages of development of an Early Excellence Hub through the School Nurseries Capital Fund based on a partnership between a local school, Save the Children UK and Sheffield Hallam University.
• A course for head teachers and Foundation Stage leaders to support the development of evidence-based practice.
• A research project through the Shine Educational Trust exploring how Philosophy for Children (P4C) approaches can be used to support young children’s language and thinking skills.

The two years we have been in operation have been intense and it would be easy to feel complacent about what we had achieved but I wanted to find out how this had felt for our early years partners and I asked for feedback on the benefits and challenges of working with the university. The response from Family Lives provided an interesting insight to the benefits of partnership with a place-based organisation to a charity that had not previously worked in our region. Family Lives drew on our regional relationships and contacts to give momentum to their home visiting project:

Being part of South Yorkshire Futures has brought numerous advantages for Family Lives while we have been setting and delivering the ParentChild+ randomised controlled trial in South Yorkshire.
It can often take time to find the right people to meet within local authorities or councils, to mobilise a project, but this was made easy by being invited to a meeting at which the right people were all present; this meant communication and vital meetings with them could start without delay. (Senior Area Manager, Family Lives)

The size of the university and the range of professional services contained within it also offered much needed capacity for a small organisation such as Family Lives to deliver its programme e.g. the Sheffield Hallam press office issued news releases which helped in early stages of promotion. This relationship also provided benefits to the university through the job opportunities it offered to alumni:

We are pleased to have recruited some former Sheffield Hallam students into our new staff project team, assisted by Hallam advertising of the posts. Through our connection with Hallam, we were invited to the Festival of Education and the South Yorkshire Futures “One Year On” event and these helped to raise awareness of Family Lives and the ParentChild+ programme, and to build our network of contacts. (Senior Area Manager, Family Lives)

The largest project we have undertaken is funded through Early Outcomes to develop regional approaches and strategies to support young children’s speech, language and communication needs. SYF was originally approached by Doncaster LA to help to pull together a bid for South Yorkshire as it fitted with the regional vision we had just finished co-constructing and the process of relationship and vision building has created a South Yorkshire approach which in turn has made projects that are regional a natural development for us:

It was immediately felt that through the strong partnership working with the university and South Yorkshire futures the LAs the best chance of success would be to jointly bid with South Yorkshire Futures. The university was pivotal to the success of the bid and gave each LA support, direction, advice and was able to steer and strengthen the bidding process. After the bid was successful the colleagues from South Yorkshire Futures immediately made arrangements to drive the work forward and have been instrumental to all the success the project has had so far. (Service Leader — Early Years and Childcare Quality, Inclusion and Workforce Development, Rotherham Metropolitan Council)

During the bid-writing process the LAs approached the university to take on the overall management of the year-long project as they recognised the subject knowledge, project management skills and data analysis expertise contained within the wider SYF team. The drive to deliver a significant amount of work in the tight 12-month timescale has created tensions but as we approach completion, partners reflected very positively on the role of the university as an ‘honest broker’ outside of the local authority structures:

There have been some great advantages to collaborative working across the region with South Yorkshire Futures. The knowledge, skills and expertise within the Sheffield Hallam team has brought with it a new dynamic to the project and enabled progress to be maintained throughout. There has been a real value added to operational meetings and workshops with the University as an impartial body providing a more holistic perspective, a clear focus and a strong steer to meet our intended aims and objectives. (Early Years Inclusion Officer, Doncaster Council)

SYF is now working with Watercliffe Meadow Primary School, Sheffield City Council and Save the Children UK to create an Early Excellence Hub in a former children’s centre nursery adjoining the school which will provide Free Early Learning (FEL) places for two-year-olds alongside a range of support programmes and projects for young families. The innovation for the Hub comes from this partnership and the way in which the university will use this as a research base to test what works in early years and to disseminate these finding across the region. Partners have again welcomed the capacity the university brings to develop bids and projects:

We have worked closely with South Yorkshire Futures over the past 18 months in a project to develop an ‘Early Excellence Hub’. This will be a new two-year FEL provision to cater for families from our community. I can honestly say that the project would not have progressed to the stage we’re at without the ongoing support and wider expertise that South Yorkshire Futures has brought. The team has been able to draw on experts and learning from a number of departments within Hallam and other networks established through their work across South Yorkshire and beyond. The team are true research-based innovators and it has been a pleasure to work in partnership with them. (Head Teacher, Watercliffe Meadow Primary School, Sheffield)

There have however been tensions in developing work with partners and while I am very gratified that those who have contributed have focused on the positive it is right that we also reflect on and learn from these challenges. In the mid stages of some of the projects there have been challenges to maintain momentum whilst taking into account the competing pressures that each partner is under. These challenges come from a university attempting to understand and negotiate the complexity of different local authority structures and from our partners attempting to deliver their services and training in a large organisation like Sheffield Hallam:

It has sometimes been challenging as an outside organisation to navigate the procedures for booking rooms and the IT systems and equipment, but this is minimal compared with having access to the rooms in the first place. (Senior Area Manager, Family Lives)

Overall, the last two years has provided strong evidence that universities can play a significant role in supporting the educational health of their area as they bring a set of knowledge, skills, capacity and existing relationships and partnerships that can support smaller organisations or facilitate the development of new initiatives and system change. As these facilitating factors exist across disciplines this is a model that could be replicable in other areas such as health. This potential role for universities has been increasingly recognised in the Civic University agenda which aims to strengthen the connection between universities and their places. In his foreword to the University Partnerships Programme (UPP) report ‘Truly Civic’ (2019), Lord Bob Kerslake highlighted that this was mutually beneficial and especially important to all partners in these uncertain times:

...universities can be (alongside local authorities and the health sector), significant ‘anchor institutions’, able to make an enormous impact on the success of their places. While universities are vital to their places, they also need the active support of their communities in these turbulent and challenging times. Put simply, they need all the friends that they can get.

References

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2015) Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/474227/BIS-15-623-fulfilling-our-potential-teaching-excellence-social-mobility-and-student-choice.pdf >
Department for Education (2016) Schools that work for everyone: Government Consultation <https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/schools-that-work-for-everyone>
Department for Education (2019) Widening participation in higher education: 2019 <https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/widening-participation-in-higher-education-2019 >
University Partnerships Programme (2019) Truly Civic — Strengthening the connection between universities and their places <https://upp-foundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Civic-University-Commission-Final-Report.pdf>

Sally is currently the Early Years strategic lead for the Sheffield Hallam University South Yorkshire Futures Project which aims to improve the educational health of the region through facilitating and coordinating partnership working with local authorities and settings. Prior to this role Sally was the Head of Area for Early Years Initial Teacher Training (0–5 years) in the Sheffield Institute of Education. Sally worked for many years in community early years provision, establishing a Sure Start project in Sheffield and subsequently running a children’s centre nursery. Sally is the Chair of the South Yorkshire branch of the charity Early Education and chair of trustees for a community nursery.