British Journal of Educational Studies

ISSN: 0007-1005 (Print) 1467-8527 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbje20

Constructing The Triangle Of Care: Power

And Professionalism In Practitioner/Parent
Relationships

Liz Brooker

To cite this article: Liz Brooker (2010) Constructing The Triangle Of Care: Power And
Professionalism In Practitioner/Parent Relationships, British Journal of Educational Studies, 58:2,
181-196, DOI: 10.1080/00071001003752203

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071001003752203

Published online: 28 May 2010.

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British Journal of Educational Studies
Vol. 58, No. 2, June 2010, pp. 181–196

CONSTRUCTING THE TRIANGLE OF CARE: POWER

1467-8527
0007-1005
RBJE
British Journal of Educational Studies
Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, Sep 2010: pp. 0–0

AND PROFESSIONALISM IN PRACTITIONER/PARENT

RELATIONSHIPS
by LIZ BROOKER, Institute of Education, University of London
The Triangle Of Care

ABSTRACT: This paper draws on recent re-conceptualisations of the notions

of ‘care’ and ‘caring’ (Noddings, 1992; Tronto, 1993) to explore data from
semi-structured interviews with the parents and key workers for about twenty
children under three who were attending two London children’s centres.
Located in an environment of frequent new policy initiatives, including an
advocacy of parental partnership, it seeks to describe the ways that these
adults construct their mutual relationships, and the difficulties which may
attend this process. Class and cultural differences, as well as conflicting
understandings of ‘professionalism’ are shown to inform the development of
the ‘triangle of care’, with potential consequences for the care and welfare
of the small child on whom the relationship is focused.
Keywords: care, relationships, power, professionalism, transition

1. INTRODUCTION
Centre-based childcare for children under three is a relatively new phenomenon
in the UK, where most young children have historically experienced home-based
care from relatives or childminders until they were old enough for nursery.
Where children were in centre-based care this was provided either by private
nurseries or by Social Services nurseries, the former catering to the more affluent
sections of the community and the latter viewed as a safety net for the most
deprived. Provision was rarely focused on development and learning, and in the
worst cases was often described as custodial (Moss and Penn, 1996; Penn, 1997).
Reviewing the state of provision around the time that New Labour came to
power, Bertram and Pascal (1999, p. 14) concluded that the history of early child-
hood education in the UK ‘reveals a system which has emerged as diverse and
uncoordinated, expanding rapidly when attempting to meet periods of chronic
national need and crisis and waning in other times, and with little cohesive
integration of services’.
Since 1997, however, a series of initiatives from all parts of government,
including the Treasury, the Department for Business and Industry and the Depart-
ment for Work and Pensions, as well as the education and health sectors, has
produced an unprecedented increase in the range and scale of services for young
children and families (see Brooker, 2008a for summary). One of the effects has

ISSN 0007-1005 (print)/ISSN 1467-8527 (online)

© 2010 Society for Educational Studies
DOI: 10.1080/00071001003752203
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182 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE
been that increasing numbers of young children now attend centre-based care, as
a result of changing demographics, and of government drives both to reduce child
poverty and social inclusion by having more women in work, and to reduce
educational inequality by early intervention. The provision of a ‘nursery grant’
offering universal funded care for children aged three and four in 2004 – now
expanded to fifteen hours a week for 38 weeks a year – was followed up with
pilots of funded provision for two-year olds, in line with the findings of Sylva
and colleagues (Mathers and Sylva, 2007) on the proven benefits for the least
advantaged young children (Kazimirski et al., 2008).
In England, recent policies have emerged concurrently with newly-minted
research findings (Sylva et al., 2004), as the New Labour government has
attempted simultaneously to fund research and to develop research-based practice.
Two examples of these closely interlinked activities have been the creation of
Sure Start Children’s Centres, and the development of a curriculum framework
for children under three. Sure Start Children’s Centres include childcare for chil-
dren under three (whether publicly or privately funded) in the range of core services
they provide, enabling all infants and toddlers to experience anything from
weekly crèche and drop-in sessions to full-day provision. In terms of the curriculum
and statutory requirements, first Birth to Three Matters (DfES, 2002), and then
the 0–5 Early Years Foundation Stage framework (DCSF, 2007), set standards
for ‘care’ as well as for ‘development and learning’, including an emphasis on
relationships (between the child and key person or practitioner) and on parental
partnership (between home caregivers and setting staff). Such relationships are
viewed as crucial to the child’s current and continuing wellbeing, and to their
future development and learning, both for the ways that they inform the child’s
experience of setting care, and for the ways that they can influence the ‘home
learning environment’, which is shown to play an equivalent role in children’s
outcomes (Melhuish et al., 2008).
Within this statutory context, and in the light of a recent focus on transitions
at research and policy level (Dunlop and Fabian, 2006) it is argued that the ‘triangle
of care’ (Hohman, 2007) constructed between the child, the parent and the practi-
tioner, in the early days and weeks of their relationship, is an important field for
investigation. Considerations of the nature of care and caring, in relation not only
to young children but also to the care of mentally and physically disabled people
and older people, have been at the forefront of many recent investigations (Brannen
and Moss, 2003; Boddy et al., 2005). In this paper, the perceptions about this
relationship of both the parents and key workers of a sample of young children
are explored within the context of recent re-conceptualisations of care. The find-
ings suggest that a multi-faceted and complex construction of ‘caring’ intersects
with equally complex understandings of ‘professionalism’, both as constructed
by practitioners and perceived by parents. These important relationships are not
necessarily easy to establish, and when differences of opinion develop they can
cause distress for both parents and practitioner, which may in turn have an impact
on the child on whom the relationship is focused.
 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE 183
2. RECONCEPTUALISING CARE
The notion of care itself has been contested in recent years, first from feminist
philosophical perspectives (Noddings, 1992; Tronto, 1993) and more recently
from within critical perspectives on early childhood provision (Brannen and
Moss, 2003; Dahlberg and Moss, 2005; Dahlberg et al., 1999).
Noddings’ work (1984, 1992) is widely recognised as the starting-point for
this re-thinking, which begins with the argument that caring is a universal human
concept – because everyone has been cared for and wishes to be cared for – and
should be the foundation for ethical decision-making. Such decision-making
pervades the public as well as the private domain, since the personal experience
of being cared-for, and of caring-for, individuals at a face-to-face level should
promote a wider sense of ‘caring-about’ at a societal or global level. Human indi-
viduals, Noddings argues, typically experience being cared-for early in their
lives, and from this ‘we learn both to care for and, by extension, to care about
others’ (2002, p. 22). This more generalised ‘caring-about’ gives rise to ethical
politics and to notions of social justice and equality.
Noddings’ attempt to describe or define care includes an emphasis on the
concept of ‘receptive attention’ (2002, p. 13) in which the carer develops an
awareness of what the cared-for person is feeling or experiencing, and in turn
feels motivated to reflect on and act on these feelings. Since the care-giver is
aware of caring, and the cared-for person is simultaneously aware of being cared
for, a reciprocal bond develops which is mutually satisfying and mutually rein-
forcing: in other words, both the care-giver and the cared-for person contribute to
the relationship, and both gain from it. Noddings’ model for the development of
such relationships has its origins in the home, which she views as the ideal crucible in
which caring feelings are first forged (2002). While this model may prove unrealistic
in practice – not all homes supply children with ‘adequate material resources and
attentive love’ (2002, p. 289) – it is perfectly possible for policymakers and
providers to build their own aims and objectives around this principle of reciprocal,
attentive care. In both Birth to Three Matters (2002) and the EYFS (2007), the
idea of the key person who bonds with the child on their entry into a group setting
and remains a support throughout their early years reflects an attempt to create
these ideal conditions for development. The successful enactment of such conditions
within a sector characterised by an extremely variable quality of environment,
resourcing, staffing, leadership and so on, cannot be assumed, as this paper goes
on to show.
More recently, Dahlberg and Moss (2005) have applied Noddings’ arguments
to their project of re-thinking the nature of relationships and provision in early
childhood more broadly. They advocate that the traditional care relationships
which have evolved in European societies should be reconsidered in order to
develop a more ethical standpoint and one which acknowledges the child’s own
agency as an individual who actively contributes to the care relationship. In doing
so they call on a range of philosophical traditions of which two are relevant here:
184 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE
those of Tronto (1993) and of Levinas (1989). Tronto’s far more wide-ranging
approach to caring is to describe it as ‘a species activity that includes everything
that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so we can live in it as
well as possible’ (cited in Dahlberg and Moss, 2005, p. 74). Applied to human
relationships, this requires the qualities of ‘attentiveness (to the needs of others),
responsibility, competence and responsiveness’ (ibid). In a further development
of this argument, Dahlberg and Moss offer Levinas’ notion of ‘the ethics of an
encounter’ (2005, p. 80) as an encounter with ‘the Other’ (child or parent) in
which the professional’s role is not to know, or grasp, the other but to respect and
‘welcome’ the other as a stranger. In offering a respectful welcome, the profes-
sional is open, attentive and caring at the same time as safeguarding the other’s
difference and individuality – in effect, taking care not to try to make the Other,
whether child or parent, into ‘someone like us’. These fundamentally ethical
re-definitions of care and caring may sit awkwardly with traditional models of
childcare in which a more competent and able individual (an adult) ‘cares for’ a
weaker and less competent individual (a child).
These approaches are arguably as important in the formation of parent–
practitioner relationships as in those between the key person and the child. In this
case too, the differentials of power and expertise which are present, though less
visible than those between adults and small children, may set the parameters for
each partner’s role, agency and identity within the relationship. There is a
tendency, in considering the role of power in home–school relations, to assume
that the differentials favour the teacher, who is the professional or ‘expert’ by
virtue of her qualifications and knowledge of ‘all children’, as compared with the
parent who is the expert only in her own child’s development (and may even
misconstrue or misunderstand that). While this may often be the case (Vincent,
1996), the data discussed here show that the reverse can be true, and that parents
who view themselves as ‘professionals’ may exercise power over practitioners
whose professional qualifications they hold to be of little value. In every case, an
absence of genuine care for the other members of a relationship may impact on
the well-being of both adults and children

3. RESEARCHING THE TRIANGLE OF CARE: STUDIES IN TWO SETTINGS

Since a key purpose of early childhood provision is the well-being of the child, it
follows that structures set in place when institutional care arrangements are made
must have the child’s well-being in mind. Within the EYFS framework, and in
recent research and policy-making, it is recognised that the well-being of parents
or other primary caregivers has a significant influence on that of the young child;
similarly, the well-being of the practitioner (her professional role and status, her
daily routines and working conditions) may be considered to contribute to the
child’s development (Harms et al., 2005). Yet there have been few studies of the
variety of ways that parent–practitioner relationships have been constituted, or of
the ways that intersections of class and culture overlay the more ‘personal’
 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE 185
aspects of the bond formed by home and setting caregivers. One such exploration, a
study of childminders (Hohmann, 2007), concludes that ‘a combination of expec-
tations from parents and practitioners regarding everyday practice can either be
the basis of a trusting relationship between the adults involved in this caring
triangle, or a breeding-ground for tension’ (2007, p. 33). The ‘expectations’
which underpin the success or failure of such relationships may have their origins in
the class and cultural habitus of the participants: not simply in beliefs about childrear-
ing practice, but also in larger assumptions about values, identity, role and status.
Earlier work (Brooker, 2007, 2008b, 2008c) focused on the ways in which
children aged one to three constructed relationships with their key workers as
they settled into daycare for the first time. This paper returns to these data, and to
data collected in a second children’s centre, to consider how the parent-practitioner
element of the ‘triangle of care’ is constructed, and the variety of ways in which
‘care’ is understood by individuals from widely differing backgrounds.
In the two small-scale studies which are drawn on here, both the parents and
the key workers of children under three, in two London children’s centres, were
interviewed and observations were made of their children. The purpose of the
first study was to explore the ways that small children’s transition into group care
was supported by nursery policies and practices: twelve children aged seven
months to 37 months were observed during their first twelve weeks in the nursery,
and their parents and key workers were interviewed. The second study sought to
evaluate children’s experiences in a centre which had only recently made provision
for children under three, and similarly involved observations, focused on the
interactions between adults and children, and semi-structured interviews with a
dozen parents and eight members of staff.
The two centres share common goals and operational requirements although
there are significant differences between them, derived in part from their separate
histories. City Fields is a well-established children’s centre in an Inner London
Borough. It was launched, in the 1990s, on a site occupied by a previous com-
munity nursery, and has continued to build on close knowledge of its surrounding
community and well-established ties with local organisations and families. Its
intake comes both from the poorest asylum-seeking families and from affluent
city and media workers, and is very ethnically diverse. Staff working with under-
threes have a range of qualifications but none are qualified teachers.
Steel Street is a newer centre in another Inner London authority, and lacks the
history of local community and family links on which City Fields builds its prac-
tice. Its nursery facilities, in state-of-the-art new buildings, are largely staffed by
members of the local Asian community, although the parents using the centre
range from local business owners to high-flying city professionals, and include a
lower proportion of culturally diverse families. The team caring for under-threes
is appropriately qualified for the work (most have NVQ level 3) and is led by the
head and deputy of the centre, who are both qualified teachers.
The following sections describe and analyse the practices which structure the
developing parent-practitioner links in the two centres. They present the ways
186 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE
that some standard aspects of ‘good practice’ in under-threes provision are imple-
mented by staff, and received by parents, and draw attention to the perceived
roles and identities which underpin these exchanges. The discourses developed
by parents and practitioners are examined in the light of the perspectives on car-
ing described above, including the key concepts of receptive attention, described
by Noddings, responsiveness as described by Tronto, and Levinas’ advocacy of
welcoming the Other as a stranger. Despite goodwill and good intentions on all
sides, it seems difficult to develop practice that is informed by these qualities.

4. GOOD PRACTICE (OR IS IT?)

Staff at both City Fields and Steel Street described the importance of the home-
setting partnership to their care for children, and referred to their role as meeting
the needs of parents as well as children. Parents at both centres, similarly,
referred to their own emotional needs and vulnerability as they settled their small
children into all-day care for the first time, and returned to work. Both settings
had well-defined policies for ‘settling-in’, including home-visiting and parental
presence in the nursery, which were designed to support the parents as well as the
child.
Analysis of the interviews, however, suggests that ‘good practice’ is no guarantee
of the kinds of trusting relationships between home and setting caregivers which
might be described as receptive attention. Many of the parents expressed some
dissatisfaction with the routines and procedures of the nursery, and the ways that
these constrained their relationships. Three examples are given here of nursery
procedures which for a variety of reasons have unsatisfactory outcomes for parents,
leading to tensions, suspicions and occasional outbursts of acrimony. The practices
in question are those of home visiting, daily communications and the adoption of
a key-worker system. All are intended to contribute to the multi-dimensional care
relationship – the triangle of care focused on the child – but all are in practice
problematic.

Home Visiting
Home visits, in which the child’s key worker arranges to visit the child and
parent at home in the weeks before transition, are widely viewed as supportive
for all preschool transitions, providing ‘an opportunity for one-to-one interaction
with the family’, and for parents ‘an opportunity to talk about their child and the
school, to voice concerns, to clear up misunderstandings, and to lessen worries
and fears’ (ATL, 2003, p. 4). Both City Fields and Steel Street have policies
which recommend home visiting although many instances were found in both
settings where the visit had not taken place: in these cases the reason was not that
one party or the other expressed a preference against visits, but simply the logistics of
parental work, nursery closures or family holidays. But parents and practitioners
held rather different views of this practice. The parents’ position could be
 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE 187
described, on the whole, as passive: most appeared to have accepted the visit as a
part of the nursery requirements, rather than welcoming its benefits for them-
selves or their child:

Sara and Jane came … They asked different things – what sort of things he ate, did
he use the toilet, things like that that would help them working with the teachers – it
didn’t last that long really …. (Jim, father of two-year-old Davey)

They did the home visit, my husband was there, it was Faridah and someone else …
it was just to get to know where she lives, what kind of environment she’s in, what
she likes, what she doesn’t like. She was there and they gave her stuff to draw, crayons
and stuff. (Martha, mother of three-year-old )

Key workers, however, often emphasised the value of the visit, which they saw as
the first step towards a care relationship based on the child’s own interests:

The first meeting was the home visit and that went very well; I think he was quite
pleased, he knew I was coming to talk to him about going to nursery, so he seemed
quite happy to have us there … I was interested in just seeing what Jack wanted to
show me during the home visit, his kind of favourite things … (Sara, key person in
Toddler room)

We went on a home visit; mum and dad were both there at the time; I went with
Amy, and I did the parent interview while she played with Lawrence. He showed inter-
est in the toys and things that we took …. (Cate, key person in kindergarten room)

One strong note of dissent came from a Chinese parent at City Fields whose fifth
child was starting in the Toddler room. Joyce was very explicit about both her
reasons for declining a visit, and her resentment that she was offered no choice in
the matter. Her account demonstrates the frustration she felt: not only was she
eventually obliged to receive the visitors, but she was outwitted in several
attempts to prevent them coming:

They visit me, arranged a home visit – I don’t like it! Honestly because I have five
children and I am very busy and I don’t wish to show my mess to somebody; and
then it will take me a long time to organise my home to available […]. The visit is
arranged, I thought I must do it, I didn’t say No to them. But they didn’t say Do you
like? They just say it is arranged, so that is the means of ensuring they visit my
home. The first time I telephoned them and said I am not well, and then they were
still coming down, which I told my husband to say I’m not at home … but they say
we’re coming so we definitely should meet here because it’s really taking me a lot
of time to do big cleaning, tidy up, make sure …. Always something to show off …
they are always judging, this is the nature of human being … I really know what
they’re looking for, what they target, and I know they are looking for children’s
healthy environment, and something like that … . (Joyce, mother of Qun Yue)

Joyce’s response is a pointed indicator of the nursery staff’s assumptions about

their rights and roles in the relationship they aim to build with parents. Joyce
188 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE
admits that she ‘didn’t say No to them’ but is equally conscious that ‘they didn’t
say, Do you like?’ This oversight suggests an assumption, on the nursery’s part,
that if parents are offered practices which are viewed as positive for their child’s
development, they ought to accept them gratefully, and without question.
The nursery’s procedures for developing relationships do not in this instance
demonstrate the ‘attentiveness (to the needs of others)’ or the ‘responsiveness’
which Tronto (1993) describes as a core quality of caring. At this early stage of
the encounter it would be unreasonable to look for the genuine reciprocity which
should characterise the ‘caring’ relationship, but it may also be unreasonable for
the nursery staff to assume a commonality of responses among parents, particularly
where there is a heterogeneous parent population. In pursuing their own notions
of good practice towards the parent, they fail to spot a number of signals that she
does not reciprocate their views. Their efforts to ‘welcome’ Joyce, ‘as a stranger’,
do not safeguard her difference or respect her Otherness: instead, what is good
practice for the generic parent, and the generic child, is assumed to be good for
all. Paradoxically, it is in seeking out the expertise of parents, by home visiting,
that practitioners construct themselves as the childcare experts.

Daily Communications about the Child

Underpinning the principle of partnership with parents (DfES, 2007) is another
assumption about the good practice which supports the triangle of care: that
practitioner-parent communication is vital, and must be open and reciprocal, with
the home caregivers learning about the child’s day in nursery, and the nursery
learning about the child’s experience of home. There is an assumption, too, that
the younger the child the more frequent and detailed the communications with
parents should be; and also that, for the youngest children, physical aspects of
their care are the most salient for both practitioners and parents.
In line with these views, staff in both centres made efforts to learn as much as
possible from parents about their child’s normal routines and about their prefer-
ences for the child’s care – a flow of information from home to setting. And once
the child was attending they made regular notes on the children’s eating, sleeping
and toileting which formed the basis for a form of daily communication from
setting to home. The first of these practices – the practitioner learning about the
child’s home routine – was valued by both parents and practitioners, and received
similar support in both the nurseries. Bonnie’s explanation is very typical:

What I usually ask the parents is firstly do they have any dietary requirements, if
there is anything they are allergic to or they can and can’t have, what they like and what
they don’t like to have, do they have like a comfort toy, like if they wanted to come to
settle them in they could bring in like a comfort toy with them. (Bonnie, Steel Street)

The second practice – the practitioner communicating with parents about the
child’s day in nursery – was more contentious, in many instances revealing a
 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE 189
serious lack of reciprocity in the arrangements. Key workers, secure in the value
of their own practice, described what they did and its benefits for parents:

[parents] like to, obviously they have been here all day whatever, they don’t know
what their children have done, we have a daily sheet which has obviously what they
have had for breakfast, what they have had for lunch, tea and nappy changes, even
though that’s there it is still nice to talk to them as well which is good yes. (Tahera,
Steel Street)

... we also do the daily books that go home daily so the parents know what they
been doing. (Michelle, Steel Street)

Parents’ responses to these communications, as to the home visit, ranged along a

continuum from acceptance to annoyance. Tammy compares Steel Street practice
favourably with her child’s previous nursery, while Tuhura appears to accept the
fact that the ‘daily book’ has replaced face-to-face exchanges:

we get a sheet every day, what he has eaten and … the other place didn’t really fill
the form in properly and they’d say he’s had so much milk and you’d go to the
fridge to get a glass of milk and there is more milk here left than they are saying that
he has actually drunk … they didn’t actually fill the forms in, but here everything
seems to be written down. (Tammy, mother of Jamie)

… they used to tell me a lot before, but now because you have got them forms they
fill in you just look at that, what he has done during the day. (Tuhura, mother of
Ahmed)

Other parents’ comments conveyed irritation with the system of written notes,
and a critique bordering on contempt for the nursery procedures:

They’re not very good about things that they write down about the children – ‘Irina
had a nice time playing in the garden’. Great, thanks [laughs] I’d like to know did
she do anything that would be considered naughty, any conflicts? Done anything
new today? But hey, on balance I’d rather they spent time with my child than
writing in a book. (Anna, mother of Irina)

Anna’s irritation at the ‘daily book’ is compounded by the fact that her efforts to
engage in verbal exchanges are thwarted by the nursery routines (a management
issue over which the key workers have no control):

We’re told not to engage staff at the beginning and end of the day. Absolutely ridic-
ulous. It’s important to find out what your child’s been doing. They want you to be
there at 5.45 to pick your child up so they can lock the door at 6, that kind of silliness.
They should close at 6.15. [… ] I wait for my moment, not when they’re talking to
other parents, and I ask ‘has she been fine – or she’s been a bit grumpy? Has she
been well?’ I’d rather they just took two minutes to tell me, much prefer that ‘cause
if there’s anything I’m anxious about I can probe.
190 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE
Anna was one of a number of ‘professional’ parents at Steel Street who made
constant reference to the importance of their own work, and expressed some
scepticism about the staff’s understanding of parents’ working lives. Similar
views were expressed by Mitzi, who felt ‘patronised and irritated’ when attending a
parent workshop, because ‘most of the parents here are educated people … This
woman talked at us’. Mitzi’s perception was shared by Susie, a PR person in the
music industry, who also comments on the staff’s inability to understand ‘the com-
mercial needs of parents’: ‘In a commercial sense, if it was fully private you’d have
them bending more to parents’ needs. Here it’s slightly more to staff needs’.
The notion of prioritising the needs of children does not figure in Susie’s
lengthy diatribe. But ‘parents’ needs’ are complex, as many interviews showed.
The ‘care’ Anna demands, over and above having confidence in her child’s
security and happiness, is a service which enables her to pursue her professional
life without impediment, and her concern in this respect reflects the government
policy on women’s work which is a strong informant of childcare provision. As a
professional who is conscious of paying for childcare, she expects to buy a
service tailored to her own needs, and shows little appreciation of the nursery’s
view of good practice in the care of young children.
It may appear that any concept of responsive, attentive and mutually fulfilling
relationships is far from the minds of parents like Susie, Anna and Mitzi. Yet
their responses, like those of other mothers, often reveal a gnawing tension over
their own decisions to place very young children in full-time, long-day care, and
their criticisms are interspersed with assertions that they ‘love the staff’ and
‘think they’re brilliant’. None of the key workers who were interviewed seemed
to recognise the struggle many mothers seemed to be experiencing, or to understand
their real need for reassurance, a need which might have been met, as Anna inti-
mates, by ‘two minutes’ of a trust-building face-to-face exchange. In these
instances both parents and practitioners seem unable to take the perspective of
others, to imagine how it might feel to be the other caregiver. Their responsive-
ness, and attentiveness, is exercised within the limits of their own point of view, and
the ‘care’ which is provided represents professional rather than emotional labour.

What does a Key Worker do?

The data presented here were collected as the English government was developing
its new Early Years Foundation Stage, a framework which places considerable
emphasis on the role of the ‘key person’, an individual who is expected to form
and maintain a close attachment with both child and parent. This new usage was
just beginning to overlay use of the term ‘key worker’, a more pragmatic role in
which the individual supports the child at transition, makes plans for her development
and liaises with parents, but who ‘hands over’ the child when she moves into the
next classroom or setting.
Both nurseries in the study had chosen to adopt the term key worker with its
more practical, less emotional, connotations, although their organisation of
 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE 191
practitioners’ workload was quite different. A visitor to City Fields could iden-
tify, on her first visit, the key children associated with any practitioner, while at
Steel Street this was hard to determine, and the band of mostly young women
moved blithely from one child to the next without paying particular attention
to the key children who were listed by their name on the notice board. In
interview, some of the Steel Street staff struggled to remember who their key
children were (understandably as the room manager appeared to change them
frequently) while others discussed every child in knowledgeable detail. But at
City Fields all the key workers were a magnet for their group at some points
of the day, and had the child and family uppermost in their minds as they
planned.
Parents in both nurseries had strong views on this matter. They seemed to
agree that the practitioner–child bond, if not the practitioner–parent bond, was of
real importance for their child’s well-being:

My understanding of a key worker is that they would do everything with him, from
changing his nappy, but actually a key worker here is someone who writes down
stuff … I thought key worker meant that person would be in charge of my child, but
it seems to mean the person who does the photographs of him, writing down what
he did that day. (Susie, mother of Robbie, Steel Street)

I think the personal relationship is very important in nursery, in this age group, the
fact that you have that kind of atmosphere, because of the trust, because they are so
little, because they’re non-verbal, if anything’s troubling them they can’t tell you
what happened, they don’t really vocalise it, so you have to have that relationship
…. (Sasha, mother of Jake, City Fields)

One father emphasises the strength of the parent–practitioner bond: ‘it’s a real
bond, an emotional one, because you’re forever grateful that this person’s taken
care of your child’.
Although practitioners vary in their descriptions of the key worker role, two
main themes emerge: in Steel Street nursery most staff describe themselves as a
‘second mother’ or ‘mother substitute’, and stress the emotional bond with the
child, whereas at City Fields the staff repeatedly affirmed that ‘you’re not their
parent, they’ve already got parents’:

They see us as a friend, as educators, as another human being who is helping them
and who they can play with. (Ricardo, City Fields)

I think if you had to put a name to it I would say it’s just like having a best friend.
Somebody that you can go to, somebody that you know is always going to be there
for you. (Lilian, City Fields)

While many of the Steel Street parents are accepting of the constant turnover of
staff and the hinted-at inconsistency of care, Bonnie (an educational advisor with
two children at Steel Street), holds something closer to the official view:
192 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE
It’s so important for ideally one key person to know that child really really well and
form that strong attachment and for that attachment to continue almost with the parent
so the child is aware that person is key in the parent’s life as well.

On a daily basis, the social and emotional relationships described by parents and
practitioners are firmly grounded in the physical care given to children, and this
is where, in Hohman’s words, trust may break down and tensions arise. Bonnie,
quoted above, has concerns about these aspects too:

I understand, for example, nappies are changed on a rota basis and it seems to be
just one person who does all the nappies. Again, I can see the practicalities of that
but if I’m being very picky in an ideal world my child would have the same familiar
person changing their nappy, talking to them, and a familiar face feeding them and
helping them at meal times. […] I’m speculating, but from what I’ve seen, children
may get care from five, six, seven, adults in a day and if my child was full time I
wouldn’t be happy about that.

Observations in the nursery showed that some of Bonnie’s ‘speculations’ were

ill-founded, but her comments were a further demonstration of the lack of openness
and trust between parents and the institution. In some parents’ eyes, the care their
children were receiving was merely custodial, and in consequence it was unlikely
that they themselves could develop a caring relationship with the child’s key
worker, in which each could empathise with the other’s point of view.

5. DISCUSSION: CARE-GIVING AND CARING FOR

The issue of nappies (who, what, when and how is it recorded) was ever-present
in the Steel Street babies room, and in the interviews with parents and key workers.
(‘Doing nappies’ was a badge of pride with less-qualified staff, one of whom
pointed out to me that ‘you couldn’t work here because you haven’t done
nappies’, meaning that I did not have a certificate to prove I could). But this
discourse, though important to all those involved in children’s daily care, is a
long way removed from the discourses of care which were discussed earlier.
While the physical needs of all the children were met – their diets and allergies
and eczema creams all studiously provided for – and they were typically showered
with affection and warmth, far less thought was given to the relationship with
parents, and in both nurseries the procedures were based on a rather generalised
view of parents’ (especially mothers’) expectations. In Steel Street nursery in
particular, parental concerns over their children’s physical care were assumed to
be of the tick-box variety, and staff rarely reflected on parents’ need for reassurance
that someone knew their child intimately and gave them the reciprocal, receptive,
attention which is assumed to be present in a parent–child relationship.
Paradoxically, this failure was associated with an assumption that the key-
worker role was to act as a mother-substitute, an assumption which City Fields
staff explicitly rejected, preferring to see themselves as a friend or playmate to
 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE 193
the child. Perhaps, however, it is the case that the role of friend requires more
thoughtful attentiveness, more careful reciprocity, and a more equitable distribution
of power, than the role of parent.
Friendship may also play a part in the practitioner–parent relationship, but is
typically secondary to an engagement on professional terms. In Steel Street, many
parents viewed themselves as the ‘professionals’ – as experts who had access to
information on policies, requirements and regulations in childcare, as well as experts
in their own ‘commercial’ or public-sector employment. None of the (mostly white)
mothers who were interviewed mentioned the fact that their children’s caregivers
were mostly non-white, but this silence may have concealed an acceptance that the
staff, for the most part, had less-advantaged backgrounds and more limited educa-
tional qualifications, than they themselves. The ‘care’ that these staff offered was
assumed to be functional rather than exceptional, and it seemed unlikely that the
parent and key worker would develop a relationship of equality and reciprocity.
In City Fields, with a more diverse population of staff as well as parents, this
implicit power-differential was not evident, and both parents and practitioners
discussed their relationships in positive and non-judgemental ways. Joyce, whose
first encounter with the nursery was such an affront to her sensibilities, is an
interesting example of a parent who is won over by her subsequent experience.

… what I see is that the professional standard of care that children get here and they
need a lot of attention, they pay here close attention to security on their part, it’s not
just a professional working relationship but they are human beings also … also the
staff, they are all professional, they know how to target them and how to comfort
them. I think when you are being a truly professional teacher, basically you have
the emotional opportunity; secondly you have got the professional skills, that is
very important; too, you have the relationship with the children – although the
mummy and daddy is very important in the first stage, for the staff it is a relationship of
the children, it is very professional.

In Joyce’s opinion, Kerry’s ‘professionalism’ is a guarantee of high-quality care

for her daughter. Joyce describes her own relationship with Kerry as ‘Very good,
because Kerry is very professional teacher’, but she can also describe in detail (as
does Kerry) the strategies that have been employed to establish an intimate
knowledge of this one small child, and to promote her development as an individ-
ual. Kerry’s ‘receptive attention’ includes respect for children’s preferences for
comfort, and (once the home visit is over) concern for parents’ feelings and
choices. In welcoming Joyce as a stranger, she allows her, and her daughter, to be
different from other families.
One positive example of the caring-for which should result from the ‘ethics
of an encounter’ comes from an interview with a parent, Sasha, who is asked
about her own relationship with Sara, Jake’s key worker:

It’s quite … we chat about stuff! It’s quite informal actually although she’s his key
worker; I tell her how he’s doing, or how I think he’s doing, and stuff that’s going
194 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE
on at home, and we have a chat and a laugh, it’s quite relaxed. I think it is odd
because we’re strangers pretty much and you don’t know about each others’ home
life, but I’ve always felt Sara to be quite open in that area, quite relaxed although
it’s quite a formal relationship.

Sara and Sasha remain ‘strangers’ to each other despite their friendly and informal
interactions over Jake’s development and well-being. The relationship is a
professional one in which neither tries to ‘grasp’ the identity of the other,
although its focus is the intimate and shared care of the child. This appears to be
a relationship of openness between equals, but it is one which is not easily
achieved.

6. CONCLUSION
The rapid increase in numbers of children experiencing childcare in their first
months of life may be seen in retrospect as a minor social revolution which has
required us to re-configure our account of children’s socio-emotional development
and the contexts in which this occurs. The mutual and bi-directional ‘socialisation’ of
children and their caregivers may no longer conform to the traditional textbook
version of family and community caregiving, but to a new set of relationships in
which personal and professional roles and identities need to be negotiated. Given
the crucial impact of early experiences on children’s continuing development and
well-being, the importance of these new relationships cannot be over-stated.
Improved qualifications in the ‘childcare workforce’ (DfES, 2005) are a key
plank in the government’s childcare strategy (HM Treasury, 2004) but concerns
are widely expressed that the early rungs of the training ladder are focused on
those aspects of custodial care which are easily taught and assessed, and that the
more difficult process of developing reflective and responsive behaviours is
insufficiently heeded. If ‘care’ is to be understood in the ways that Noddings,
Tronto and colleagues have advocated – as a relationship of attentiveness,
responsiveness and thoughtful consideration between caregiver and cared-for,
which is the basis for life-long ‘caring’ attitudes towards the world and others – it
appears that our current requirements fall short of what is needed. Individual rela-
tionships between parents and key workers are fraught with opportunities for
misunderstandings, not least because of the anxieties and tensions felt by many
working mothers, and the continuing status differentials between professional
groups. But if the frameworks within which these relationships are constructed
are built on understandings of care in this broader sense, it may be possible for
not only individual parents and practitioners, but also institutions and providing
bodies, to develop a longer perspective on their role.
As Joyce’s story demonstrates, the initial distrust created by one aspect of
nursery practice can be resolved through the key worker’s responsive attention to
both parent and child, which allows for their ‘difference’ from other families to be
recognised, but through patient listening enables respectful reciprocity to emerge.
 THE TRIANGLE OF CARE 195
We may even conclude that such reciprocity may be enabled through the voicing
of differences. Discussing cultural differences in parenting beliefs, Vandenbroeck
(2009, p. 169) argues not only that disagreement is necessarily the case in a plural
world, but also that the world can become a better place as a result of it:

Once we take the voices of these children and parents seriously – not only on their
individual ‘needs’ but also on how living together is constructed … things can
never be easy any more …. We need disagreement in order to challenge what is
taken for granted and to acknowledge that our expertise is provisional and tentative.

For caregivers, both parents and professional, to acknowledge that their own
expertise is ‘provisional and tentative’ may require a change of heart, and a
change of priorities, in our workforce preparation.

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Correspondence
Liz Brooker
Institute of Education
University of London
20 Bedford Square
London WC1H 0AL
E-mail: e.brooker@ioe.ac.uk