I’ve spent quite a few early mornings this summer building something new.
With four children at home, I’ve been getting up most days at 6am (or at least, that’s when the alarm goes off!) to squeeze in a couple of quiet hours before the day properly starts. Slowly, bit by bit, the Baby Room Improvement Hub has come together.
And now it’s ready!
The idea for the Hub has grown out of so many different strands of my work: conversations with baby room educators and leaders, research in baby rooms, workshops with teams, and the things I keep noticing when I spend time with people doing this work every day.
Because there are some challenges I hear about again and again.
Baby room educators are made, not born
I often hear about new baby room educators who don’t seem to have much confidence or “initiative”.
They can appear a little frozen when they first come into the room — unsure where to position themselves, what to do that would be helpful, how to join babies’ play, what to notice, or simply how to get stuck in.
It’s easy to see that as a problem with the educator.
But I think we need to ask a different question: have we actively shown them how to BE with babies?
Working in a baby room is its own special thing. It takes time to learn how to tune into babies, how to notice the tiny communications that are happening all the time, how to work with the rhythms of the room and how to become a confident, responsive presence within it.
That’s why one part of the Hub is about building confident baby room educators. I’ve created structured, scaffolded resources that leaders can use to help people find their feet and grow into the role.
That includes a 30-day baby room induction toolkit that goes beyond the practicalities of learning where things are and how routines work. It gets into the heartbeat of working with babies: getting to know them, building relationships, becoming responsive to their communication and helping them to feel secure and well in themselves.
Baby room leaders are leaders!
Then there are the baby room leaders.
I can’t tell you how often someone responsible for leading a baby room says to me:
“I’m not really a leader.”
You are!
And arguably one of your biggest — and toughest — leadership jobs is creating the team culture in that room.
The relationships between the adults matter enormously to what babies experience every day. Does the team feel connected? Do people feel that they belong? Can they talk openly when something isn’t working? Are people growing in confidence? Is everyone pulling in roughly the same direction?
So there’s a whole part of the Hub devoted to developing baby room leaders and giving them practical support for navigating this work.
Not to turn them into some abstract idea of what a “leader” should look like, but to help them lead the real people, relationships and challenges in front of them.
Creating a baby room with a shared sense of purpose
There’s another thread that has come through incredibly strongly in the baby room research project: vision and values matter.
The strongest baby room practice isn’t simply a collection of good activities, lovely environments or well-organised routines.
Underneath it, there’s a shared sense of what we’re trying to create here and what matters to us.
But I don’t think anyone can give you the “right” vision for your baby room or hand you a list of values and tell your team to live by them.
Those things need to mean something to the people who will live them every day.
So another part of the Hub is about helping teams strengthen their culture together. That includes ready-to-run workshops that bring whole teams together to create a shared vision and explore what it actually means to live your shared values through the hundreds of tiny decisions and interactions that make up a day in the baby room.
Professional learning specific to the baby room, led internally
And finally, there’s baby-room specific CPD – something I’m always banging the drum about!
I’m incredibly lucky to be regularly invited into nurseries to deliver baby room training, and I absolutely love doing it.
But I’m passionate about something else too: giving baby room leaders and nursery managers the confidence and resources to lead brilliant professional learning themselves.
Professional learning doesn’t always need an external trainer. And it shouldn’t require someone to spend their Sunday afternoon making PowerPoint slides!
So I’ve started creating complete, ready-to-run CPD workshop packs that give teams the chance to learn something new, talk together, reflect on their own practice and try things out in the room.
The first packs focus on two aspects of interactions that I find particularly powerful: mind-mindedness — engaging with the baby’s mind behind the behaviour — and serve and return — the wonderful back-and-forth between babies and adults that supports early development and relationships.
And there will be lots more to come.
A growing home for baby room improvement
All of these resources now have a home in the Baby Room Improvement Hub.
I want the Hub to be somewhere you can come when you know there’s something you’d like to strengthen in your baby room, but you’re not quite sure where to start.
Perhaps you’ve got a new educator who needs more support. Perhaps you’ve suddenly found yourself leading a baby room and you’re trying to work out what that actually means. Perhaps your team needs to reconnect around what matters to you. Or perhaps practice is going well, but you’re ready for the next conversation that will stretch everyone’s thinking a little further.
My hope is that you’ll find something practical in the Hub that helps you take that next step.
Everything in there is grounded in my research, my work with baby room teams and my absolute belief that baby rooms deserve thoughtful, ambitious, baby-specific professional learning.
The Hub is open now, and I’m so excited to finally share it with you.
Come and explore the Baby Room Improvement Hub — and see what might help your baby room take its next step.