- Offer a welcoming, calm, caring environment that is inviting and will make babies feel they want to come and play.
- Implement a Key Person Approach, so that each child and their family have a special person to relate to, share information with and rely on.
- Provide professional development and supervision to support attachment relationships between key persons and children in the setting.
- Develop close partnerships with parents/carers, learning from their knowledge and expertise about their baby.
- Transitions and admissions are phased so that only one new child starts at a time to allow them to settle in gradually.
- Ensure the Key Person Approach underpins all provision for babies including personal care events, play and daily interactions with parents/carers.
- Arrange for staff absence to be covered by educators who are already familiar to the children.
- Allocate a secondary key person who takes responsibility for the care of babies when their key person is absent.
- The number of changes children make between groups and key person is reduced to as few as possible during their time in the setting.
- Organise working patterns and activities to allow the key person or secondary key person to be available to support babies and toddlers and their parents separating and reuniting at the beginning and end of the day.
- The day is predictable enough to give babies a sense of security but is flexible enough to respond to individual children’s patterns.
- Offer continuity and consistency for babies by the key person undertaking all their key children’s care needs; moving through each part of the bathroom, lunch and sleep routine together, rather than children moving from one adult to the next. Design the environment to limit the number of times the key person has to leave the room. It helps for example, if the bathroom and feed preparation areas are en-suite.
- Group rooms are as home-like as possible and are decorated with photographs of the children’s families and other significant people, animals and places.
- There are low adult chairs that support educators when they are bottle-feeding babies and which also allow children to climb up onto their laps.
- Develop play opportunities centred on objects babies bring from home, as these help them to make transitions and experience continuity.
- Plan to have one-to-one time to interact with young babies when they are in an alert and responsive state and willing to engage.
- Create opportunities to sing to and with babies and young children.
