Cross-pollinating roles: Skill sharing in EY settings

Emma Hutchinson from Music House for Children makes a case for meaningful collaboration and skill sharing in early years settings.

Emma Hutchinson running a workshop - Courtesy Emma Hutchinson

I recall some years ago arriving early at the nursery school where I was to teach music. I sat quietly as they went about their business, children dotted around in clusters, doing their thing. After a while I become aware of a sort of internal musical rhythm going on all around me. A teaching assistant sat at a table guiding a child to try Space ‘n Shapes (putting correct shaped blocks into the puzzle). Nearby, a child hummed ‘ahheeeeoooo’, swooping his arm up and down as he took off his coat, then placed it carefully on a hook. Another giggled in merry tandem with her friend as together they twisted their hands from side to side. A child stood still and watched me. Then she skipped off, humming as she went. All this, as one of the staff called across the room in a singsong voice: ‘All in a row! All in a row! Everyone together, all in a row!’

My task was to teach music because the staff were not confident or trained to teach music themselves. Yet, music was happening all around me. The more I noticed, the more I realised how immersed music is in the life of a nursery. I noticed adults supporting tidy-up time with song snippets (snatches of miniature melodies); others made repeated movements by imitating a child, thus creating fleeting moments of rhythmical play. Instead of teaching music, should I not be sharing what I saw?

‘Hey, did you know that you are all doing music with your children? That's brilliant! How did you do that? Can we share ideas?’ After all, aren't we made up of musicality through our intrinsic motives? Colwyn Trevarthen has written a fascinating article (1999) on the Intrinsic Motive Pulse which is well worth a read.

Teaching music in nursery settings

Music educators (ME) are employed in three main categories: weekly music lessons; musical performances; and immersive musical play. They are paid on a freelance basis, with no additional nursery role or influence within the setting, and music lessons are often entirely designed by the music educators. The revised National Plan for Music Education has a paragraph on the significance of music in early childhood but makes no mention of skills collaboration between the early years and music sectors.

The current climate of early years

The pandemic, constantly changing government educational strategies, and global economic climate have not been kind to either sector. Despite the well-meaning rhetoric and updated statutory framework documents and updated arts documents, the early years sector continues to struggle. The reasons for this include online teaching, a lack of resources, training-budget cuts and limited time.

Registrations on EYT courses have subsequently plummeted to an alarmingly low rate, from 2,300 in 2013/14 to under 400 in 2019/20 (Cattoretti et al., 2019). Simultaneously, the sector is experiencing increased challenges around apprenticeships. A 2019 report from the early years research company Ceeda outlined the barriers for recruiting apprentices. These include:

Lack of funds
Lack of time to support assessment and on-the-job training
The need for compliance with the job training requirements (Early Years Workforce Commission, 2021, p.7).

Levels 1–4 of training provides early years practitioners with the requisite knowledge and skills to support children's learning in a nursery setting. The statutory guidance for Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) still introduces music only as part of ‘Expressive Arts & Design’. With less financial flexibility for CPD, early years educators are reluctant to invest in additional skills since other study priorities, such as safeguarding, take precedence. Simultaneously, music educators are experiencing less take-up of bespoke music lessons in nursery settings overall.

As we collectively move into times of extreme financial restraint, it is increasingly obvious to me that educators should encourage and celebrate professional collaboration. Music educators choose either performance or teaching as an initial degree course. Teaching young children music becomes a later specialism for many, requiring personal investment, time and commitment. In this current climate it seems more pertinent than before to encourage a practical sharing of skills to bring about learning and other outcomes not just for children, but for adults too.

Shifting between roles

As a music specialist my most successful projects have involved collaboration or cross-pollination of roles. One such project (Hutchinson, 2014), lasting eight weeks, involved a speech and language therapist (SLT) and music educators (ME) working together with EY specialists and non-verbal children aged three to five. The remit of this study was to:

Collaborate with the public sector
Extend the skills of an NHS SLT and ME
Examine possibilities of a financially sustainable partnership
Highlight best practice for both sectors
Bring about positive outcomes for the beneficiaries.

Both specialists had a clear idea of how each would present activities to nurture vocalising. The SLT used a range of colourful flash cards with images depicting the topic. Her aim was to encourage two or three Mean Length Utterance (words) from the children, most of whom spoke only one word, with one being mute. The ME extended the topic through musical play, movement and other resources such as puppets.

What became fascinating about this collaboration was the desire for specialists, early years practitioners, SENCO co-ordinators and parents to learn from one another. The project became a four-way collaborative process with children at its heart. The rationale for SLT targets required specific targets that included achieving joint attention, turn-taking, social interaction and receptive skills development. The less structured, more free-flowing approach of the musical framework helped tease out all areas required for speech acquisition. Simultaneously, the ME learnt that specific components of music, such as pauses in sound play, assist in developing breath control and vocal utterance. Parents understood the significance of interacting vocally. The early years SENCO team realised that musical play was an accessible skill for them to use at other times.

This case study, like so many others, is clearly good value for money and a joy for all involved, with brilliant outcomes for the children – for examples of wonderful action research on this, take a look at SALTmusic at magicacorns.co.uk/saltmusic.

However, this is just another collaborative idea or case study requiring ‘further trials’ to get approval and be rolled out and embedded into training, delivery, impact and, above all, our understanding of what it means to be truly skilled.

The UK's training, job infrastructure and insistence on qualified status gives educators a somewhat baffling lack of desire to share skills and resources. On occasions, I got an uncomfortable feeling that different specialists were afraid I would morph into an early years or language expert and become a threat! This was simply not the case, but given our habit of professional pigeonholing, it's hard to convince people otherwise. Paradoxically, our perception of fixed specialised roles goes against the grain of how humans truly evolved; how we listened, learnt, shared, collaborated, supported and, ultimately, taught.

I want to leave you with a couple of remarkable books from which to draw reflection and, hopefully, inspiration to bring about collective, collaborative, cross-pollinated (think of the bees!), universal change. Ken Robinson (2011) writes eloquently on shared knowledge and networks. He explains: ‘We all have creative capacities, but these are related to different media and processes’ (p.137), adding, later, ‘We depend for much of our own understanding of the world on the knowledge of other people. We are laced together in networks of knowledge’ (p.169). Melvin Sheldrake (2020), meanwhile, while examining a very different topic, explores how we are all ultimately and inextricably linked.

Consider a world where collaboration and mutually shared knowledge provides inspiration and sustainability in our respective professional worlds, without the constant need to beg for support. Now, wouldn't that be a result?