How can early years settings best support children of Armed Forces Families?
CREC is delighted to have been selected to work on behalf of the Naval Children’s Charity and The SCiP Alliance to expand the Thriving Lives toolkit to support the youngest children of Armed Forces Families, aged birth to 5. We welcome the opportunity to contribute to this timely and important piece of research, particularly given how it aligns so strongly with our focus on improving the quality of early years provision for all children, particularly those with specific, often underappreciated needs.
Between March - July 2024 CREC will be conducting research on the needs of the children, the families and the early years settings involved. In particular we are looking at:
Service children’s experiences and outcomes in the early years.
the current state of play in early years settings in terms of their awareness of and support for Service children.
what effective, high-quality practice supporting Service children, young people and families looks like in the early years.
Using that knowledge, we will then co-construct a toolkit of appropriate resources and support which will be field-tested by a number of early years settings through late 2024/early 2025. The aim is for the final toolkit to be launched in Summer 2025. You can find out more about this work here.
Research Phase
During this research phase we are asking early years settings across the UK to complete a short, anonymous survey to help us answer the questions above. It should take between 30 seconds and 5 minutes depending on how much experience and knowledge you have working with children of Armed Forces Families. To ensure complete anonymity and security for Armed Forces families no contact details are taken and no identifying data is requested. Completion of this survey is entirely voluntary and no setting is at a detriment if they choose not to participate and there is no incentive offered for completion either. We do however hope many early years settings will help us to generate the knowledge we need to produce an effective resource that will benefit this group of children and their families in the future.
If you would like to help us by completing the survey please follow this link.
If you are an early years settings who has a particular interest in this area and/or feels that aspects of your practice could be helpfully shared with others please do contact us on enquiries@crec.co.uk