As part of our commitment to the development of our staff, we hold four training days every year, covering a variety of sessions that develop skills, knowledge confidence and provides up-to-date changes within the Early Years sector.

For our final training for 2023, we held a training day on Monday 23rd October for our Northamptonshire & Bedfordshire nurseries and another on Friday 27th October for our nurseries in Milton Keynes.

Thank you so much to all our trainers who provided fantastic sessions to help inspire and expand the knowledge of our staff!

Across these two days we welcomed…

• Vanessa Dooley, who delivered a course on how to add impactful practices into daily routines, leading to outstanding results.
• Tigerlily Training, who delivered paediatric first aid training with EFAW.
• Ellie Collar, who delivered a SENDco and SEND Support Practitioner Workshop
• Tammy Redman, who delivered basic safeguarding.
• Ben Kingston-Hughes, who delivered Playful Brains - The Neuroscience of Play

We also held sessions delivered by our internal trainers. Here are some of them:

• Becky Watanabe (our Early Years Manager & Trainer) who delivered a Riding the Waves course, to help give knowledge and skills needed to help provide an enabling environment that promotes positive behaviour and tools needed to support children to calm big emotions. Becky also delivered her Boosting Babies Brains course, to help understand the importance of attachment and forming secure relationships with a key person in an enabling, sensory rich and nurturing environment.

 

• Laura Tingey (our Head of Early Years & Compliance) delivered a MASH course, for our staff to help build knowledge and confidence, and learn more about how multi-agencies work together to safeguard children, how this applies to the local authority and develop the understanding of the referral procedures they may need to follow.

 

• Kim Langstaff (our Early Years Manager), delivered a Step into Christmas course, you may be thinking that we are WAY too early to be thinking about Christmas, but it is a great time to think about Christmas crafts and activities. This hands-on, creative session focused on inspiring our staff with different meaningful craft ideas for the festive period and building staff confidence in ensuring activities follow Acorn's ethos and values throughout.

Here is some feedback from our staff:

“Brilliant and important , felt great to have open conversations and learn more about our team, lovely activities and inspiring information to take forward into our practice.”

“An informative afternoon with lots of activities to make it fun and engaging. I personally learnt a lot and will be using some of the new learning with my team in future staff meetings. Was fantastic to know what communication style everybody in the team is. Loved the de tangling activity. Overall, a brilliant afternoon, really brought the team together and gave us a lot to think about and look back to in future.”

“An engaging training course full of information and fun. It made us stronger as a team and very positive to share what we appreciate about each other at the end. Would recommend this course”

What a fantastic two days to complete our 2023 training, we cannot wait to share the new knowledge we have learnt and see what 2024 brings!