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Part 1: Introduction to the YCAR study\ud Part 2: YCAR study findings \ud Part 3: Plenary.

A research project was commissioned to evaluate the benefits of Boogie Mites Early Years Music Education Programmes. The aims of this project were to understand how participation in music making programmes can support children’s development in the prime areas of Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) (DfE, 2010); these being communication and language, personal social, emotional development and physical development. It also sought to investigate parental and practitioner perceptions of the programmes. This report presents the findings from three Boogie Mites programmes: Babies, Minis, and School Ready. It was designed in three phases. During phase one, data was gathered from focus groups with parents, telephone interviews with parents and practitioners about their experiences as they happened during participation in such programmes and retrospectively after the programmes had finished. During phase two, parental feedback forms and practitioners’ evaluation forms were explored which allowed a critical synthesis of practices and behaviours before and after the programmes. These forms enabled comparisons between and within the groups. Finally, the third phase of the project explored key stakeholders’ views on the programmes through analysis of existing feedback forms. This allowed the project to gain a holistic overview of the Boogie Mites programmes. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, the authors show evidence of how Boogie Mites Music Programmes can encourage development and increase parental and children’s confidence in the use of music at home and in the settings.

Aims: To explore constructions of children’s personal epistemologies and their manifestations in three early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings for children aged 4-8 years. To explore how English educational policies and practices affect and validate young children’s constructions of knowledge\ud

The focus of this small scale research was grounded in my experience of teaching and assessing the Early Years Professional Status Graduate Entry Pathway. This pathway is a full time one year route to graduate leadership in the Early Years with children aged birth to five. However, students taking this route will have had limited professional practice experience prior to commencing their training. This research explored the student experience whilst studying at University and takes into consideration their diverse backgrounds and limited professional practice experience. It consisted of 12 participants, 7 of these took part in semi-structured interviews and 5 completed written narratives. The resultant data was analysed using a constant comparative methods (Thomas, 2013) which allowed for the construction of key themes arising from the data. There were four overarching themes emerging from the data which supported students to develop their professional identity. These being the attending weekly university lectures which had space for group discussions, the tutor’s role in promoting critical reflection, the development of formal and informal communities of practice to support reflection on critical incidents and the transition to employment post accreditation. The aim of the research was to ascertain whether transformative learning could support professional identity formation and the work of Mezirow (2006, 2009), Freire (1996, 2004, 2007) and Lave and Wenger (1991) were used to conceptualise the analysis. There is a body of work which already considers the impact of communities of practice on the experience of Early Years practitioners (Sachs, 2001; McGillivray, 2011; Payler and Locke, 2013) and this research will provide an additional lens with which to view student experiences and communities of practice.