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Care and educational services for children under eight years need better co-ordination. At present, services are inconsistent in terms of care, education, time and staff training. Service providers need to share training and resources, and must work together. They should plan their services and evaluate the impact new services will have on existing ones.

Communities in the UK are seeing a sustained shift in the balance of care of babies and the youngest children from families to nurseries, with a particular emphasis being placed on early learning. Yet a basic question of whether nurseries should be modelled on the intimacy and spontaneity of family interactions or the more professional and planned interactions of school has remained largely unaddressed. The assumption has been that the multiple tasks now expected of nursery, including education, child care, health promotion, family support and child protection, can be integrated together, and much attention has been given to this. Much less attention has been given to the way different staff respond to these different conceptions of roles and tasks and how they interact with the personal and professional priorities and concerns of the staff themselves.Using the conceptual framework of `primary task' taken from the organization studies literature, the article explores the interplay of these different and competing tasks through an intensive nursery case study. The article concludes that recognition and understanding of both professional and personal tasks and how they align or conflict is important to our understanding of the behaviours and responses of children and adults in the nursery system.

Emotions play an important role in our nursery relationships – and child development. The University of Roehampton's Peter Elferexplains

As early years care and education services have moved towards greater integration of organisation, so have attempts to achieve greater integration of practice within individual settings, taking full account of the relationship between the emotional and cognitive domains of children's learning.We argue in this paper for an approach to understanding each child's learning, that is constructed taking account of the relationship between the emotional and the cognitive domains of the observer or practitioner and in discourse with others in the nursery system. Such a construction excludes any notion of objective certainty or exactness but, provided it is open to rigorous external scrutiny, is seen as a source of richness and relevance to the meaning of the observations.Rigorous reflective professional practice therefore involves psychological and pedagogical states of uncertainty. Such practice involves the capacity to tolerate the anxiety associated with uncertainty. It also involves a commitment to a continual process of making meaning of the observations through the negotiation of concepts and underpinning values, the nature of further evidence to be gathered and the terms of discourse with others in the nursery system. The paper concludes by illustrating such a process in relation to one child aged 31 months.

In the third part of this series marking Early Education and Nursery World’s tenth decades, Dr Peter Elferexplains why the job of raising the status of, and investment in, caring for the under-twos is not over

Peter Elfer explains the origins and features of attachment theory, and examines the implications for early years professionals

Evidence of the reality of attachments is all around us: the two-year-old playing in the park, venturing playfully further and further away from his watchful father but running back as soon as he feels alarmed by a large dog, other children or some other perceived threat; the three-year-old arriving at nursery, clinging to his mother with all his might. Even in adulthood, tearful goodbyes on railway stations or at airports speak of the pain that can be involved in partings. The most stable and mature of adults speak of the lurch in the stomach that betrays the feelings of anxiety at finding themselves facing a new situation or being separated from loved ones.

By pooling experience and expertise, early years practitioners could bring about real advances in under-threes provision, say Drs Peter Elfer and Jools Page

The author acknowledges the work and contribution of the late Elinor Goldschmied to nursery education and childcare in Great Britain. He admires Goldschmied for her rigor, clarity, humanity and capacity to listen to other people's feelings, including babies and young children, and considers her a brilliant model of a key person. According to the author, the legacies of Goldschmied include her clarity about the key person role and her pioneering work on the Treasure Basket foundation.