The School of Education has been in existence at Kingston University for 100 years and we
are consistently rated in the top five of the Guardian League Table.
Early years education is a very distinct phase of care in education, it's specifically for
children who are from birth to five years of age.
We're really proud to be at the forefront of the delivery of a whole suite of courses
for early years practitioners to take them from their level three programmes through
foundation degrees, level four and five, the BA honours top-up programme level six and
we're also offering the post graduate masters programmes and a doctorate programme too.
I think we're quite unique in that we've been involved in a foundation degree since the
concept was first put forward, so we've worked very closely with employers, with mentors
in settings, and we've created fit for purpose courses for those people who are already employed.
We have also been running a pilot project for the first time school direct early years
with a nursery chain so we're at the forefront really of government initiatives in undergraduate
and post graduate learning for early years in this country.
Since 2003: first government directive to provide this work-based learning programme, we've
literally kept pace year-by-year with the ongoing changes so we still remain at the
forefront, being the pilot project for the first School Direct early years.
At Kingston University, some of our key features for our delivery of early years are our specialist
early years team who come from a variety of early years practice themselves so they’re
very practice based.
Within our large early years organisation at Kingston we have nine partner colleges
who help to inform and deliver our early years programmes.
The early years team make the courses inspiring for the students by keeping them actively
involved by linking what they’re doing in every day practice with the range of background
knowledge and research we're aware of here, building that together, making use of our
rich resources in the learning resources centre, both online and library and also the range
of classroom resources and learning environment resources we have here.
We work really closely with our partner colleges. We also work very closely with employers and
the feedback is always about the results for the students, the achievements for the students.
I think one of the pleasures is seeing how they have grown as a professional, how they're
making a difference in the workplace and our students become the employers, so they're
engagement doesn’t finish when they complete the course. They become the employers who
then subsequently support our students coming up behind them.
At Kingston we have been developing something called the outdoor learning environment which
is very much based on the Forest School philosophy, so we have great opportunities here now for
students to actually practice those skills, to experience that kind of work with
young children as well on a site.
Every single member of staff in the early years team at the University is currently
engaged in research. All of that research is then incorporated into the learning sessions
and teaching sessions that we have with the students so they are seeing the research not
only develop whilst they're engaging with us, but also see the results of that research.
An early years course at Kingston University is interesting because as I'm working in the
environment already, learning things on a weekly basis like theories, reading books, learning
schemes, as ways of learning with the children, it sort of ticked boxes for me so when I go
back into my setting it's easy to see how it all fits in and how children learn.
I think that the academic staff at Kingston University are absolutely lovely, you can
ring them if you need to speak to them, if you've got questions, they're always happy
to wait around and answer your queries, always making quite funny jokes actually, when you
finish work and you've done a nine hour shift already and then you come to do four hours
at University afterwards it blows your mind but then if you've got four teachers that
are all bouncing off of each other and making jokes it kind of makes it not as bad.
I chose to study early years at Kingston University through recommendation from a deputy manager.
She used to attend and she was always really happy and buoyant about attending when she
came back and she passed on a lot of knowledge. So it led me in the right direction.