Transcript

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JACKIE MUSGRAVE

We're going to talk about the tool kit now, looking at it in more depth and finding out how it worked in practice. And I'm very lucky today that Karen's come to join me to talk about it. She was my co-researcher while we carried out the pilot. But first of all, just tell us a little bit about what your role was when we were doing the research.

KAREN NEAL

So whilst I was in nursery, I was third in charge. So I worked alongside the management team. And I was also the family learning coordinator. So I used to support in providing parents with more information on various different things that they wanted to know about their children within the early years to help them with things relating to speech and language, health, and lifestyle. I also worked with the babies for quite a while and did a weaning course. So I offered lots of support to parents with weaning with their babies.

And I've also worked whilst there within all the different ages. So it's nice to see across the board how children grow and develop throughout all of the rooms within nursery.

JACKIE MUSGRAVE

So you had a real focus on health promotion anyway. How did you go about using the five steps? And how did they help you to decide on the focus for health promotion within the nursery?

KAREN NEAL

Yeah. So as you say, we've always strived to be a healthy nursery. We look at healthy eating. We've always had our meals cooked freshly on a daily basis. We have a cook on site. And the children have always enjoyed our meals. And we've adapted them, tried to improve them. We work with the Early Years Nutrition Partnership as well to see if we could improve them in any way on top of what we'd already done. But there's always things that you can do to make that better.

So when we looked at the tool kit, it just highlighted how everything was so interlinked. So healthy eating linked with healthy hydration which then linked to oral health and better health in general, with mental health. We looked at how obviously childhood obesity rates were on the increase and the impact that was having later then in life for things such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. It just led to so many different things. The talk, it just highlighted how important it was for us as early years practitioners to try and make a difference now early on.

JACKIE MUSGRAVE

So thinking about the five steps in the tool kit, how did they help you to identify what you wanted to do, that the healthy eating intervention?

KAREN NEAL

It just gave us a chance to take a step back and look at who we were providing for. Obviously, we were in an area of deprivation. And we already knew that. But it was looking more deeply into who and where our families were. So we did use the tool kit to do questionnaires. And just to find a little bit more background about our families first. Because until you know who you're providing for within more depth, you can't really provide the best service you can. So it gave us a chance to really pick apart our practice with our families that were within the setting at that time.