The Bristol Standard Development Day 2024

The weather was damp, but our spirits certainly weren’t and it might have been a rather grey and miserable day, but the Bristol Standard team from Bristol, Wiltshire and South Glos gathered together at Engineer’s House ready for a day of development.  This year’s theme was all about the power and impact of reflective research on practice and Jane Smith opened the day with a warm welcome and there was much nodding in agreement to this really being a highlight of the Bristol Standard year.

The first speakers were Sam and Hannah from Bristol University Nursery.  They have amazingly  been using the Bristol Standard for over 20 years and have been on a real journey with it, evolving how they complete it over time.  They talked with real passion about how the Bristol Standard impacts them by keeping their teams engaged and looking forward. Its completely woven throughout all areas of their setting and is a great way of supporting all of their staff team, making everyone more accountable for their role and giving everyone a voice. They said doing the Bristol Standard as a big group and having conversations within teams has enhanced staff confidence and even very young staff are speaking up and making suggestions. The environment is much more reflected on, planning more purposeful and resources and activities more carefully considered and meaningful. With staff more aware of what they are doing, they are also more willing to ‘have a go’ at things.  The Bristol Standard has also helped develop a sense of togetherness and authenticity, with families more represented and deep, meaningful connections made.

Following on from this was Freelance Early Education Consultant Jacqui Lewis.  Jacqui is passionate about reflective, researchful practice that engages practitioners in a process of continuous learning.  She spoke about how research and the Bristol Standard can be brought together in harmony and how mentors can support settings with a research-based approach.  She posed the question ‘Why are we scared to be researchers?’ and debunked the myth that research is all about research papers by emphasizing that research is actually about discovering new knowledge and understanding.  Jacqui acknowledged this can be a research paper but can also simply just be observing, thinking about things and acting.  In this way, research is a cycle of reflection and so nothing new and it enables us to notice children’s curiosities and fascinations.  She spoke about taking a ‘bitesize’ approach and only biting off what we can chew and said children are at the heart of the Bristol Standard and at the heart of research too.

The afternoon presentation was Companion Planting: building a sense of community and belonging through setting-based research, by Luci Gorell Barnes, a socially engaged artist, researcher and illustrator.  Luci told us all about a wonderful research project she had been involved with in Speedwell after noticing that the setting she was working with wasn’t engaging very well with minoritized families.  This led to Luci taking on a Council allotment with the aim of running sessions to bring people together to learn about biodiversity and to encourage them to grow some of the food they eat.  What resulted was much sharing of skills, celebrating cultural differences, respect, understanding and a huge sense of community and putting down roots.  Luci then guided us through developing our own research question through a process of ‘mapping’ and this really helped us see just how simple this can be and this left us with something we can all work with our settings on.

As well as the wonderful speakers, Bristol Standard’s very own Liz Leeson, Pat Kendall and Carol de-Beger had some thought provoking activities for us to do.  Firstly though, Liz  introduced us to the exciting new pathway, pathway 3, that is being launched in the autumn.  This will fit in perfectly with the ‘bitesize’ approach Jacqui spoke about.  Liz then organized us into carrying out an activity on celebrating strengths and got us thinking about what we would expect to see for a setting that had been on the Bristol Standard journey for a while.  She also reminded us that one of the great things about the Bristol Standard is that even with groups that aren’t doing a submission, it can be used to aid conversations with them and so they can benefit from it too.

Pat and Carol finished the day with an exercise on dimension updates and how settings can move away from lighter touch updates to doing a deeper dive, now they are doing less dimensions with the pathways. The focus was very much on encouraging settings to make their updates really celebratory and a place where action research can be recorded

It truly was an inspirational day that highlighted what a great tool the Bristol Standard is for helping settings to not only reflect but to be reserchful too.

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