By removing transitions, Little Beehive boosted occupancy by 30%

There are lots of ways to approach transitions. If you ask your local nursery how many rooms they have, it will probably be three: Babies, Toddlers and Preschool. With this setup, children usually transition into the next room when they reach a certain age. 

This three-tiered aged-based system and the subsequent transition policies, for me, are the most damaging expectation in the Early Years sector in Scotland (and potentially the UK). 

I know that's a broad statement, and to many people might seem preposterous because “it’s how it’s always been done”. Children move to the next room when they turn the right age or when they are ‘ready’.

But why do we do it like this? Is it not a bit inconsiderate? It almost certainly doesn’t place value on the relationships that children have with their peers or key workers, not to mention how disruptive a process this can be for the staff and the classrooms.

When children were moving up the nursery as they became ‘ready,’ we had 25 to 40 transitions between rooms each year, and more than 30 new starters, who also required a settling process. That’s a lot of transitions.

What about the impact that all those transitions have on the child, the staff and on the other children in the room?

After speaking to staff it became clear that in a nursery with an age-based transition model, they weren't getting to be Early Years Educators. And that makes sense. How can you plan for the next day, let alone the next month if you don't know all the children that are going to be in the room and if they will be settled?  

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The impact of too many transitions

Many people have told me that when a transition is done well and correctly, it won’t cause much disruption, if any. And, on the face of it, this might be true. The vast majority of children will transition absolutely fine. But what about those who don’t? 

The Scottish government's policies are supposed to focus on "getting it right for every child". But, what if doing something for one child has a negative impact on another child?  What about getting it right for every other child? What about the staff?

• Focusing on individual children’s transitions can mean the rest of the class suffers. This isn’t intentional, or because our team aren't skilled, but because there is a lot of work required in transitioning children between rooms. While we are focusing on the child who's transitioning, the rest of the class gets less support. 
• If we need to bring another person in to support the class while this is happening, it quickly gets time-consuming and expensive. 
• And for the child? Moving rooms is scary! They might need a lot of 1-on-1 time with a staff member, they might not settle at all, or we have to restart the process by inviting the parents in. 
• Worst of all, we often have to do a transition regardless of "readiness". 

In the age-based transitions model, we may have a child waiting to transition into a room on the back of another child transitioning out of that room. And, even if the older child isn’t ready to move up, we can’t keep both children in the room because we don't have any flexibility in ratios.

The problem with occupancy under the traditional model

Historically, our nurseries would be occupied by about 65%, on average, over the academic year. At our Kirkcaldy setting, our previous occupancy model was as follows: 

• 12 babies 
• 15 toddlers 
• 32 pre-schoolers

The more pre-schoolers you have (compared to the younger children with higher ratio requirements), the more occupancy you can have over the academic year. 

But the problem is, with this traditional model, each child occupies two spaces in the academic year: the space they are currently in, and the space they will be moving into. For example, if we had 15 toddlers in August (ages 2-3), they must transition into the preschool room at some point within the new academic year. 

This means that we had to keep 15 spaces (of our 32-capacity room) open for these children. These toddlers might move within the first couple of months, but some might not have moved until the following June or July – it depends entirely on their birthdays and "readiness". 

But the short and long of it is, we have a room that is at 50% capacity at the start of the year. 

Now, you could fill it up with part-time or temporary contracts, but what parent wants to take a place that they will be ‘kicked out’ of in 8 months?

That's the problem. Now, let's look at solutions.