This design history post was written during the Check an early years qualification project’s alpha phase. You can read more about the project and where we are now in our project overview.
Our alpha phase builds on an initial discovery phase that concluded in February 2023. That discovery identified challenges with the existing service for nursery managers and practitioners in determining whether a qualification can be considered ‘full and relevant’.
A lack of clarity around qualifications may contribute to confusion and uncertainty for people within, or looking to enter, the early years workforce.
This alpha seeks to explore potential solutions to better support managers and practitioners and explore ways of improving DfE's workforce data to better support policy making.
What we want to learn
For this initial research with nursery managers, we’re looking to increase our understanding of 5 things:
- how and when providers use the current service
- how managers support practitioners if a qualification is not full and relevant
- what guidance and support they need, and when
- the language and terminology providers use
- how DfE’s role is perceived in this space
Indirectly, we're also using this research to begin to understand the needs of practitioners as understood by their managers.
Our research approach
We’re talking to:
- nursery managers recruited from direct approaches
- nursery managers and HR professionals who work for major nursery providers
- a selection of managers who contributed to research in Discovery
This research is being conducted as qualitative research interviews, conducted remotely, with direct involvement from across the alpha team as observers and note takers.
From this research work, we’ll be evaluating the different design approaches that might start to address some of these points for use in future research rounds. We’ll be using a series of ‘design hypotheses’ — things we believe might work well for our users and have a measurable impact — and we’ll share those hypotheses in a follow up post.