Why Staff CPD Isn't Changing Classroom Practice

Yeah, definitely.

Firstly, it was... from a selfish point of view is that I listened to lots of podcasts outside of the early years industry.

And then I thought, well, I want to listen to something in my industry, but there isn't really anything that is very consistent in terms of like, I know every Monday morning at 6am, there's a new episode released and I can listen to it on my commute.

Um, There wasn't anything that was, yeah, exactly, good quality enough in terms of the sound.

There would be constantly I'd be turning it up or turning it down.

And the other thing was in-depth topics.

So I don't want to hear about outdoor play again and that it's important.

Yes, we know that.

But actually, let's go deeper into deeper issues, into the research, into the theory or practice.

So I thought I'd create the podcast.

And then that turned into much more than a podcast.

it turned into that advocacy piece because I could see that the sector wasn't, the earliest sector in particular is not respected enough in terms of, you know, they're not professionalized enough.

People don't see their expertise because, oh, they're not teacher.

They don't have qualified teacher status.

They're just a practitioner.

I always call them educators rather than practitioners because I feel like educators are a lot more respectful.

Some people in early years call their educators teachers, even if they're not QTS teachers.

which is a whole other podcast, I think, about wording and professionalism

and

qualifications and everything.

But yes, it's very much around...

The voice of early childhood is very much around giving the sector a voice and listening to diverse range of voices.

So giving not only those... academics and consultants and experts a voice on the podcast like we usually hear from those kinds of people but also allowing educators themselves to come on the podcast and talk about their practice allowing students carrying out their dissertations their masters or PhD to come onto the podcast and take us on a journey with their studies and tell us a little bit about you know their their research what's coming up so then that that academia that research is not stuck there it's actually influencing practitioners straight away rather than oh we still need to peer review then publish it in these different journals and the journals are behind a paywall and that's another big thing accessibility is I wanted the voice of early childhood platform the website the podcast to be accessible to everyone so it's all free to access there's no initially I thought oh maybe I should make it into a bit of a CPD platform and make things behind a paywall, like little courses and things.

But that would just take away from the fact that I wanted it to be very accessible.

So accessible in terms of everything's free to access, no data wall, no paywall.