In celebration of the holiday season, CREC office will be closed 23rd December - 2nd January 2018.

Creativity and Critical Thinking are central to an effective early years curriculum and pedagogy, argue CREC Directors, Professor Chris Pascal and Professor Tony Bertram, on the Nursery World blog.

CREC have serious misgivings about the content of Ofsted’s Bold Beginnings paper (published 29/11/17).

A new report on the crisis in the early years workforce has revealed that without immediate intervention, the sector is at risk of becoming unsustainable.

We are pleased to announce that the Teachers Leadership Development Programme that we ran last November, in partnership with the Birmingham Nursery Schools Teaching Schools Alliance, will be running again in January 2017.

This month's session on 10th October focused on Informed Consent. Huge thanks to Linda Shaw for supplying the notes below.

1. In the latest of our SCITT blog series, one of our SCITT student mentors shares what she thinks a trainee teacher needs to succeed in their training and become a successful, confident early years or primary teacher!

Yesterday, CREC Director, Chris Pascal, had the honour of overseeing the official opening of the brand new Goodway Nursery School building in Great Barr.

Elisabetta Biffi joined us from Italy to share her research; her visit was part of an Erasmus exchange organised through Ioanna Palaiologou. There are further notes on her work in her biography which can be accessed here; as well as links to her recent publications.

As we near the end of another academic year, our current cohort of SCITT students have been reflecting on their teacher training journey and have begun to look to the future, graduation, and the start of their NQT year in September.

The April 'Learning Circle Reflections' come from Donna Gaywood.

This month's session on 26th April focused Children's Rights and was led by Alison Moore and Aline Cole-Albäck.

We're delighted to announce that our popular Learning Outdoors in Early Childhood MA module is back from this September!

NATIONAL CENTRE FOR RESEARCH METHODS IS ORGANISING THE 6TH ESRC RESEARCH METHODS FESTIVAL, ONCE AGAIN AT THE ST CATHERINE'S COLLEGE IN OXFORD.

The Festival offers a varied programme with over 50 sessions and 200 presenters ( download the pdf programme overview). Please note that there may still be minor changes to some of the sessions.

This month's Learning Circle on March 23rd focussed on preparing for a PhD viva (defending your doctoral thesis).

HOW TO GET YOUR FIRST TEACHING JOB: ADVICE FROM CREC'S SUCCESSFUL TEACHER TRAINEES

Newspapers and websites across the UK have been reporting on the imminent threat to our nation's maintained nursery schools for the last few months:

Next week the team at the Centre for Research in Early Childhood are celebrating 21 years of raising the quality of early childhood education and care through research, training and consultancy.

Recruitment for all the teacher training courses starting in September 2017 is well underway and we’re thrilled to have already received a lot of interest in our school-centred initial teacher training (SCITT).