Q&A with Julian Grenier

7 min read:

What aspect/experience/moment from your own childhood education has had the biggest impact on you as an adult?

I think I can remember my first day at school, aged five. It was a boys’ school and in my memory, I came in with my mum and the teacher took me over to where a group of children were playing with wooden blocks. The teacher said, ‘This is Julian’ and I felt really weird about my name. I wished I had a more usual name, like my cousin James. I think I just watched whilst they all played with the blocks and didn’t quite know how to join in. Years later, when I was studying for the diploma in The Emotional Experience of Learning and Teaching at the Tavistock Centre, this memory came back. It convinced me of the importance of the key person approach in the early years and supporting children’s emotional wellbeing. I was working in a primary school nursery class where I couldn’t really do anything with this, but I held onto the thoughts and the emotions. When I visited Woodlands Park Nursery Centre in 1998 before applying to be deputy headteacher there, I thought – ‘Wow, this is a place where all that stuff really matters’ and I was hooked!

Funnily enough, I was approached by a woman recently at a conference and she was the parent of a child in that nursery class. Her son had really struggled to settle in, and the staff had been quite dismissive and more or less blamed her for making too much of a fuss. Because of the course I was doing at The Tavistock, I insisted that she should be allowed to stay and settle her child in. She remembered the nursery as a positive time for him. Now, he has a diagnosis of autism. He’s just finished studying for a PHD. I hope the little things I did made a difference.

What is on your list of key things that make up high quality provision for children in the early years?

I’ll think of this as an essentials shopping list, so:

• Highly qualified staff, who really love the children, and work well together.
• Close connections with the local community.
• A wonderful garden.
• Evidence-informed practice together with professional judgment and common sense.
• Ambition for every child and an understanding that early years is where we can make the biggest difference.

I’ll leave it there – 5 seems like a good number of essentials.

With the positive move away from statements and tick-lists, we have been encouraged to use our professional judgement to support children’s development. How can we support those who are either new to working in the early years, or who don’t feel confident in their own professional judgment?

I really like the book ‘The Intentional Teacher’ by Ann Epstein – and its focus on thinking through why we do things and what we think the children will be learning as a result of the interactions, activities and routines we offer. I think that reflecting on this and talking together as a team is a good route to furthering our professional expertise and confidence.

What would you say is the purpose of observation in early years education? And has this changed with the EYFS reforms?

I think the purpose of observing children is getting to know them. Children in early years are often having their first experience in a group, away from close family. Over the course of the early years, they will gradually start to understand what it means to be a ‘pupil’ and how to meet the social expectations of school. Because they are still young and inexperienced, they need us to understand their individual ways, how they think and play, what motivates them. Observing children as they play and learn is the best way to get to know them, I think.

How can observations be used to support parental involvement in their child’s setting and with their learning and development?

I think we’re living in an incredibly exciting time where anyone with a device like an iPad can make short clips of children playing and learning, which only a decade ago would have required lots of expensive equipment. So, I think using video, via platforms like Tapestry, is the most powerful way to engage parents.

At Sheringham Nursery School, where I am headteacher, Melissa Prendergast is leading a project with Dr Kate Cowan and Professor Rosie Flewitt to support children to reflect on short clips of their play and learning. It’s about giving children more agency and helping them to develop their metacognition. Sharing that with parents is incredibly powerful, and it’s equally powerful that parents can share clips back.

There still seems to be confusion as to expectations when it comes to assessment for children with learning differences and disabilities – how can we ensure that our monitoring processes are child-centred for all children?

I agree, this is a real problem at the moment. Lots of practice at the moment seems to be about tracking or monitoring. We spend lots of our time entering children’s small steps of progress into various specialist journals, online or on paper, and then amassing evidence to demonstrate the next step. I think that gets things the wrong way round. Instead, we need to use a structured process of formative assessment. We need to build a holistic picture of the child’s learning needs. Then, we need to think through what sorts of strategies are likely to work for the child, considering the evidence about effective pedagogy, and any advice from external professionals. That needs to be put into action, with the involvement of the whole team. Everyone working in the early years needs to be a specialist in supporting children with SEND.

Finally, we need to review the impact carefully, and either modify our plan, or move onto a new one. All of this needs to be co-led by parents, and also include the child’s voice. I think this approach, exemplified in the EEF Guidance Report Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools, offers the best chance of success, but only with adequate funding and professional development for staff.

Do you think enough information or training is available for educators to understand the intersectionality of Race and SEND in the EYFS?

No, there isn’t – and also there isn’t enough discussion of the overlap between child poverty and SEND. Children can get wrongly described as having ‘special needs’ because the culture of their setting or school is very different to their home culture, because of bias, conscious or unconscious. We all need to think more about this and learn more from the experiences of children, young people and their families. Inequalities can all-too-easily pile on top of each other, and children suffer as a result.

Which early years theorists and/or individuals inspire you to be a better teacher? What have you changed as a result of reading their work or speaking to them?

There are so many people I could mention here, so I’ll stick to one – I’d especially like to mention Iram Siraj. When I was a young deputy headteacher at Woodlands Park Nursery Centre, Iram was really kind to me. She was patient with my limited understanding of how children learn, and gradually opened my eyes. The Centre was in the EPPSE project and was also involved in a group Iram was running then called NANCE which promoted more integrated approaches to education and care. Iram helped me to understand how education and care can weave together, and that pedagogical leadership was vital. She was enormously helpful when I was studying for my doctorate in education at the Institute of Education and made sure I had a clear plan and had thoroughly considered my methods and methodology before I undertook my research.

What has been the biggest change that you’ve noticed in education since you started out as a teacher?

It has to be the increased focus on early years. We still have a long way to go, of course. But in my first school, when the nursery teacher or nursery nurses were off sick, the headteacher would just pin a note up on the door saying, ‘Nursery Closed’. He explained this was because it wasn’t statutory. That was in a supposedly progressive primary school in Tower Hamlets, East London, in the 1990s. It’s unthinkable now.

If you had an entirely free weekend – what would you choose to do?

Oh, so many lovely  things come to mind – this is definitely the hardest question. So, I’d opt for a weekend away with my partner and daughter. It’d be somewhere beautiful and rural, maybe the Peak District or the Lakes. We’d spend most of the days walking after a nice brunch – brunch is a bit of a family tradition. As well as walking, the day would certainly  include a nice tea shop – a cream tea or nice cake.  In the evenings we’d cook for each other and watch a film or a great series. I’ve just realised, food seems to feature quite a lot here!