Frustrating times for both Nursery Managers and Early Years Practitioners
In early years settings, there are often a variety of different positions held by students and volunteers up to managers and owners. Nursery managers often have large workloads and because of this more and more nursery managers are becoming office based rather than room based. When encountering a problem practitioners will often turn to the nursery manager to discuss the problem, look for advice and for things to be resolved, however, this is not always the case. Many practitioners don’t feel like their voice and opinions are being heard, and that management pretends to be listening but don’t take the problem seriously or look at a way to resolve it.
The impact of a Nursery Manager not listening
There is often nothing more frustrating than going to someone for help and support and nothing changing. This can seriously impact on practitioners and the way they perform their jobs. It should not impact on the children but if you have a practitioner who is feeling helpless and worthless because they have trusted their manager to resolve a situation and it hasn’t been the children will not be receiving the high-quality care and education that they deserve and need. This can lead to a negative atmosphere within the building and often children and parents can pick up on this. Low morale can quickly knock a team down and spread throughout a setting especially if the manager is not listening to a problem that is being experienced by more than one person. This can also lead to high staff turnover which can have a devastating impact on any childcare setting.
What can you do if your Nursery manager won’t listen
Don’t panic if you are in this situation, depending on the problem there are a variety of options to ensure you get the support you need.
Here are some top tips –
• Deputy Manager – In situations regarding practice and support often you can turn to a deputy manager or room leader to get the advice you need. Everyone has different ideas on how to tackle a situation so don’t feel speaking to the manager is the be all and end all.
• Safeguarding – If you ever have a safeguarding concern regarding a child, and you feel the manager if they are also the designated lead are not listening to you can get in touch with the local safeguarding board yourself.
• Write a grievance letter – Depending on the situation you may be able to put in a formal grievance against your manager. Check the settings grievance policy and ensure your complaint is valid. If you decide to go down this route, you then have to be listened to, and the issue can longer be ignored.
• Ask to have supervision – These should be carried out on a regular basis to meet Ofsted requirements but if you feel you need one more regularly, or your setting doesn’t complete them then make management aware these should be happening. During supervision, you get to express any concerns or what you feel is going well. These should be detailed on a form and often an action plan can be put into place. Often once things are in writing, they are taken more seriously.
• Peer to peer observation – If your concern is regarding a practitioner often a manager won’t listen because it can appear to be your word against the other persons. Ask your manager for a peer to peer observation and complete these regularly. These can help identify the problems in practice that you have been trying to tell your manager about. Feedback should be given at the end of observation so once the observation is complete, ask your managers to go through it with you and to deliver some feedback. This may make the problem clearer to the manager and offer some evidence to your point.
• Learning Walk – If your manager is refusing to listen and see that there is an issue within the childcare environment such as you lack resources or there is an area that you would like to change complete a learning walk. This will highlight any areas of weakness. Again this provides some evidence to the manager that there is a need for change and that they should be listening to you.
• Parents feedback – If you are regularly hearing the same comments from parents, and you feel like a change needs to be made by management but they won’t listen to you when you are sharing parents feedback consider asking the manager to hand out parent questionnaires or ask the parents to directly address the manager themselves.
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