Teach Early Years - Issue 14.2

DR JAYNE SYMONS IS HEAD OF PRE-PREP AT EDGEBOROUGH SCHOOL Dr Jayne Symons explains why her award-winning team chose to put emotional regulation at the forefront of their practice… “Children’s behaviour is communication” W ithin early childhood education, it remains all too common to find provision focused heavily on a child’s phonetic knowledge or acquiring topic-related facts. Achievement and success are invariably associated with what is produced. The pursuit of “education” over “development” fuels behaviour management systems driven by incentives and consequences that praise compliance, overlooking the true needs of the child. At Edgeborough, an independent prep school in Surrey, we chose a different path. Our early years team has spent the past year embedding an approach centred on emotional regulation, and this focus now touches every aspect of our practice – from our language use, to the design of our environment, and even our policies. At its heart is a deep belief in the power of co-regulation and relationships to help children develop the capacity to self-regulate. This change has been guided by neuroscience, shaped by professional development, and (crucially) built from within by a team who wanted to ensure they were meeting the needs of the children in our care as fully as possible. WHY REGULATION? At Edgeborough, we have always given emphasis to the relationships that we build with our children and families, before all else. However, on reflection, this had not fully permeated into our wider provision, particularly the way that we were responding to emotionally charged behaviour. Dysregulation was often being met as challenging behaviour, with staff attention directed towards the expressed behaviour and subsequent actions aimed at stopping or fixing this (often with a misplaced reward or consequence). Looking back, our knowledge of the brain was not sufficient to shift our focus beyond the child’s actions in that moment to the wider context and what the vulnerable young child was trying to communicate to us through their behaviour. Access to training and new ideas acted as the catalyst for change. Our key staff received online training with the brilliant Dr Mine Conkbayir MBE, which ignited our interest and set us on a path of change. We then reviewed our behaviour policy and realised it was out of step with what we were beginning to understand about young children’s brains. When children are dysregulated (when they shout, push, hide or shut down), this must be met with support and empathy from us, as it is a stress response. UNDERSTANDING THE BRAIN Central to our work today is a grounding in neuroscience. We understand the child’s brain as a social organ, shaped by relationships. Drawing on the work of Dr Dan Siegel and furthered by Dr Mine Conkbayir MBE (bit.ly/45EF3Th) , in simple terms, we view the brain through the metaphor of a house and as having: 40 Teachearlyyears.com