Jade Learning House Nursery, Chengdu, China
The Bristol Standard in Chengdu
The Bristol Standard team is pleased to be working with Jade Learning House Nursery in the province of Chengdu, China. We were first introduced to Joe and Julina White when they were visiting Bristol to look at Early Years practice in some of our nursery schools. Sally Jaeckle, our former head of service for EY had facilitated this visit. Joe and Julina had heard about the Bristol Standard and were very keen to use it in Jade Learning House which is a Reggio inspired nursery and the team is keen to share good practice between Britain and China. The first meeting was a long time ago just before the pandemic so we weren’t able to start anything until earlier this year.
Beth and Nicky facilitated the Bristol Standard mentor and validator training in February and then the team was ready to start their journey with Dimension 7, Staffing Leadership and Management. The nursery has a large team and decided to start off with the wider leadership team considering this dimension. Chris Erfurt, the head of the nursery, said it was quite a different way of working for his team as culturally they are not usually asked to share their views and take ownership of developments. He is already seeing results and motivation rising as one of the targets was to improve rest area facilities for the staff. Enthusiastic teachers have already begun working on this. They have done their research with questionnaires to make the process inclusive, researched what they need to get and started making a lovely space.
Joe and Julina support the team as mentors with the dimension meetings and they invited us to join them at one of these. Beth and Sally Jaeckle attended and were surprised to find they were appearing on a big screen. They found the meeting very interesting and were pleased to be able to contribute. They had expected to need translation but most people were speaking in English so they were able to join in with the discussion.
Jenny and Jenny are also part of the senior leadership team leading on the Bristol Standard and can see the benefits of using the Bristol Standard to improve reflective practice and outcomes for children. They have been instrumental in setting up Reggio inspired environments.
During the training days we were given a video and photo tour of the nursery and were very interested to hear about how the children’s interests are taken forward. We saw how an interest in soil developed to examining it closely, to growing sunflowers and making pots with the resident artist. It was exciting to feel that we were witnessing something happening on the other side of the world. We felt we learnt so much from these three days.
The team at Jade Learning House have chosen to do Pathway 1 and will be among the first to use the new Bristol Standard Online forms. We look forward to keeping you up to date on their progress.
