Seeking new cultures of cooperation: a cross-national analysis of workplace-based learning and mentoring practices in early years professional education/training

The topic chosen for this special issue of Early Years highlights an under-researched element in the professional preparation of prospective early years pedagogues, educators and teachers in Europe. Although specific aspects of the variously termed ‘practicum’, ‘work placement’, ‘field placement’, ‘workplace-based learning’ or ‘field-based practice’ and the associated roles of ‘mentoring’, ‘supervising’ and ‘coaching’ have received increased attention in recent studies, often located in the USA (e.g. Ponte and Twomey 2014; Zeichner 2010; see the papers in this issue for additional references), the predominant focus has been on links between the university campus and compulsory schools and only rarely on cooperative practices within the generally less regulated and non-compulsory field of early childhood education and care (ECEC). Moreover, there are few, if any, cross-national studies focusing exclusively on this aspect of the initial professional grounding of pedagogical staff in ECEC systems.

The papers presented in this issue are from seven European countries: Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy and Sweden. They have emerged from a study carried out in 2014 which was funded by a nationwide Early Years Professional Development Initiative in Germany known as Weiterbildungsinitiative Frühpädagogische Fachkräfte (WiFF). One of the ‘hot topics’ in the WiFF context has been centred around the perceived need to improve the competencies of staff in ECEC settings who are expected to support trainee early childhood educators during their placement periods. The paper by Katja Flämig, Anke König and Nicole Spiekermann explains why this specific aspect of early years professional education/training, and particularly the mentoring role of educators in early childhood settings, is moving up the research and policy agendas in Germany. In the WiFF context, a group of experts including employer/service provider organisations, researchers, policy makers, university-level and vocational school professional studies staff, and practising early childhood pedagogues, came together to develop a ‘competency profile’ for the mentoring role. At the same time, a keen interest was expressed in learning more about the current emphases given to workplace-based learning in other European countries. Accordingly, a seven-country report was commissioned (Oberhuemer 2014), and this introductory article will present an outline of the aims and procedures of the study and a brief cross-national analysis of selected findings and conclusions.

Selecting the countries

Beyond the countries listed above, Norway was also included; together these countries represented a purposive sampling. A previous study of early childhood staffing systems in 27 EU member states (Oberhuemer, Schreyer, and Neuman 2010) had revealed a strong workplace component in the professional education and training policies in Denmark and Sweden, which seemed to invite closer examination. Iceland and Norway, as non-EU countries, were chosen in the light of recent staffing reforms assumed to be influencing the workplace-based component of early years professional education/training. Italy was included on the basis of reported innovatory approaches (CORE 2011) at the interface of campus-based and field-based learning. Finally, England was selected because of the increasing priority given to predominantly workplace-based, fast track approaches towards ‘initial teacher training’, representing an anomaly in the European context.

Another reason for focusing on these seven countries was the fact that the systems of education/training reflect three of the main professional profiles in European ECEC systems (Oberhuemer, Schreyer, and Neuman 2010, 490–494): early childhood professionals prepared for work with babies, toddlers and young children up to statutory school entry age, as in Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden; pre-primary and primary school professionals prepared both for pedagogical work in primary schools and in pre-primary institutions for three- to six-year-olds, as is the case in Italy and partly in England; and social pedagogy professionals prepared for work not only with young children but also with school-aged children and young people, as is the case in Denmark and Germany, and also adults with special support needs, as in Denmark.

Research procedures and questions

Field experts – university researchers with specific knowledge and experience of workplace-based learning in early years professional education/training – were asked to submit a country profile organised according to a semi-structured questionnaire. The reports were to be based on relevant legislation, research studies, national reports, position papers and other country-specific documentation and, where possible, on interviews with key stakeholders.

Drawing on the detailed country profiles submitted, the cross-national analysis focused on four questions: (1) What are the similarities, differences and distinctive features in collaborative practices between the two learning sites – professional education/training institutions and early childhood settings? (2) Is the mentoring of trainee educators, pedagogues and teachers a designated and remunerated task in early years settings, with employer support and relevant resources? (3) To what extent is the workplace-based component supported by national legislation or regional frameworks, grant-funded research, and monitoring and evaluation procedures? (4) Is a specific qualifying course required for the role of mentoring and supervising early years trainees in the workplace?

The following four sections highlight some of the main findings.

Cultures of cooperation between campus and workplace: country-specific similarities, differences and distinctive features

Workplace-based learning in historical perspective

Since the early days of emerging professionalisation in the early childhood field across Europe, significant shifts have taken place in the amount of overall ‘space’ allocated to learning phases in the workplace. If we look back to practices in the first training institutions in the Nordic countries (established mainly at the end of the nineteenth century in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, in 1935 in Norway, and in 1946 in Iceland), these reveal a common tradition of giving considerable emphasis to the workplace component, with roughly one half of professional studies initially allocated to field-based practice. Throughout the decades of gradually extending the length of professional study, and then integrating it into higher education (starting in Sweden in 1977), the relative amount of time allocated to workplace-based learning for prospective early childhood professionals in Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden has decreased steadily. The paper from Finland by Eeva-Leena Onnismaa, Leena Tahkokalliko and Marjatta Kalliala describes this precisely by referring to the specific case of Tampere: whereas the field-based component accounted for approximately 60% of the total study programme in 1955, and 46% in 1972, by 1992 it had dropped to 25%. Today, the time allocated over six semesters to field-based studies in Finnish universities varies between 7 and 11%, representing an average of 15 credits out of a total of 180 within the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). A similar line of development can be traced in Iceland, as reported by Arna Jónsdóttir.

In stark contrast to the other Nordic countries, Denmark has retained a significant emphasis on time spent in the workplace, which accounts for over one third of the seven semesters of studies (75 out of a total of 210 ECTS), as illustrated by Jytte Juul Jensen. Similarly, the main group of core ‘educators’ in Germany currently spends roughly a third of their vocational education/training in the workplace, whereas the time allocation for the Bachelor-level ‘childhood pedagogues’ is a recommended 17% (30 out of a total of 180 ECTS). Although the number of staff in Germany with a relevant higher education qualification has risen steadily in recent years, from a mere 270 in 2008 to 2081 in 2014 (Rauschenbach 2014, 6), at roughly 6% of the workforce overall, the proportion remains low compared with Denmark (58% in 2012), Norway (32% in 2011) and Sweden (54% in 2013) (Oberhuemer 2014). It is interesting to note that ECEC and the professional preparation of both the Danish and German core practitioners categorized above as social pedagogy professionals has always been – and still continues to be - strongly rooted in the welfare sector. This was traditionally the case in all Nordic countries. However, in Sweden (1996), Norway, Iceland, and most recently in Finland (2013), early childhood services now come under the auspices of the education sector.

Lucia Balduzzi and Arianna Lazzari report on a quite different kind of progression in Italy. In this case the workplace-based element traditionally played only a minor role within the low-level upper secondary education/training of pre-primary professionals, which remained the entry requirement into the profession as teacher in the scuola dell’infanzia for three to six year-olds right up until the end of the 1990s. However, in 1998 professional studies were finally transferred to the higher education sector and the workplace component developed into an innovative part of the new graduate-level course. This element was further developed and consolidated within the most recent reform in 2011, when the training of pre-primary professionals was fully merged with that of primary school teachers, resulting in a professional profile as a pre-primary and primary school professional with a master’s degree requirement to enter the profession.

The professional education/training of early years teachers in the state-maintained sector in England, who still today represent a minority group within the early years workforce as a whole, presents yet another case. From a historical perspective, two distinct overall tendencies can be observed: either to favour predominantly workplace-based learning models (as in the nineteenth century) or to favour predominantly academic studies at higher education level (as was the case for most of the twentieth century). In recent years there has been another swing of the pendulum, indicated by the significant increase in predominantly workplace-based models and initiatives of learning on the job – both for graduates and non-graduates.

Creating frameworks for more equitable and stable partnerships

Traditionally, the professional education and training institutions – today mainly universities or university colleges – were the dominant partners in the relationship between the two learning sites.

However, particularly in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and also in Italy, a number of recent initiatives have aimed specifically at establishing more equally balanced partnerships, thus supporting the development of shared cultures of collaboration between institutions with different traditions, value orientations, and working styles, and with different perspectives on learning in the workplace and possibly different understandings of what ‘learning’ is. In effect, this is leading to a distinct upgrading and clearer profiling of the role of the early childhood settings in the professional education and training of prospective early years practitioners.

The 2014 ministerial decree in Denmark sets out new requirements for the pedagogue study programme which relate both to the professional education/training duties of university colleges and to those of early childhood settings, as set out in Jytte Juul Jensen’s paper. In the policy document they are explicitly described as complementary learning milieus where essential but differing competencies and sets of knowledge are acquired. In Sweden, a mandatory framework for regulating local co-ordinating practices between the university, municipality and early childhood settings has been in place since 2011. Now, however, in a five-year government initiative which started in 2014, new ways of strengthening the previous cooperation and establishing more continuously reliable and equitable collaborative practices are being piloted, described in Maelis Karlsson Lohmander’s article. University supervisors, mentoring staff in early childhood centres and municipality (employer) representatives are all to be involved in the development and planning of the four phases of workplace-based learning. The centre-based mentors will be consulted throughout and also contribute to the final assessment of the students. Only one student per year will be allocated to any one setting, and this student will remain in the same centre throughout the seven semester study programme. (This particular aspect of the new organisational model has already been the focus of criticism, since the opportunities it brings in terms of stable relationships and in-depth learning could possibly be counteracted by the lack of experience in settings in different socio-economic milieus.) In Norway, too, the number of students per year is limited to two, for a period of sixteen weeks each, giving the early childhood centres the possibility to focus on the specific learning goals and needs of these one or two trainees. In Germany, the situation is more complex; in any one year, some early childhood centres may be receiving a wide range and high number of trainees from different social work professions, whose placement periods can vary between one day and one year in length. This makes the role of mentoring and supervisory staff particularly challenging, and these conditions have been a continuing focus of criticism by field experts (Prinz, Teuscher, and Wünsche 2014, 17).

The approach towards consolidating cultures of cooperation in Italy includes regular workshops for the main participants in the collaborative practices. Alongside the students, these participants include the so-called organising tutors in charge of the overall organisation of the cooperation between the university and local pre-primary and primary schools, the co-ordinating tutors responsible for managing the student placements, and the mentoring teachers in the pre-primary and primary schools. Both the organising and the co-ordinating tutors are regular teachers who are granted leave for a maximum of four years to be employed by the university, thus assuming roles as ‘boundary crossers’ (Zeichner 2010). The workshops themselves represent a kind of ‘third space’ for reflection, planning and sharing ideas, experiences and knowledge, as proposed by Zeichner (2010) and others and which Arna Jónsdóttir has used as a starting point for envisaging reforms in Iceland.

A further link-strengthening procedure in Italy aiming to ensure that both academic and practical-professional perspectives are represented in any decision-making, has been the establishment of a university-based inter-disciplinary committee. In this committee, academics and the various mentors work closely together in regular consultation to develop the goals, content and strategies for workplace-based learning. In Germany, a lack of this kind of multi-perspectival approach towards curricular collaboration has been criticised as a weakness in the system, in which the vocational training institutions have officially had sole responsibility for field practice (Ebert 2014).

The mentoring role in early years settings: clearly defined and appropriately remunerated?

In recent years, there has been a noticeable tendency towards consolidating and strengthening the role of centre-based settings in the mentoring, supervising and coaching of prospective educators, teachers and pedagogues. This is particularly the case in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, where this role has been assigned a new status.

Workplace-based learning in Norway is officially seen as a key element in the six-semester preparation of kindergarten teachers (who work with children from birth to six). It is referred to both in national legislation (2005) regulating universities and university colleges, and in the kindergarten act (2005) (Klages and Lorentzen 2014). Ministerial decrees set out the general roles of the service providers (employers), centre directors and mentoring staff, and working conditions and payment for mentoring staff are regulated through a collective agreement between the Ministry of Education and the relevant trade unions. The mentoring teacher is expected to have the competencies to plan and prepare the practicum in collaboration with the student in order to support – and also challenge – the student’s learning during the daily pedagogical work; to plan and conduct formal mentoring consultations related to the curriculum for workplace-based education and training; to give ongoing feedback; and to contribute towards a concluding evaluation of the student’s progress. These roles are similar in most countries, although not always so explicitly defined. In general, across countries, there is a move towards assigning students more responsibility for the planning, documentation and evaluation of their placement periods.

Compared with most other countries in the study, Norway has both clearly defined working conditions relating specifically to the mentoring role and a generous system of remuneration. Depending on whether they supervise one or two students, mentoring staff receive a basic additional payment of between 1210 and 2000 euros annually. If they have completed a relevant qualifying course for mentoring, they are awarded an additional 242 euros. Time spent for on-site meetings with the students (5 hours/week are the requirement for one trainee, 7.5 hours/week for two), for preparation and follow-up work, for meetings in the university college and for participation in continuing professional development courses is additionally remunerated. The role of the centre directors is also acknowledged and they receive approximately 48.50 euros for every placement week that is spent in the setting. Whereas all other countries (except Italy and Germany) also have agreements in place for remunerating tasks assigned to a mentor, these are less generous and less clearly defined. In most countries, however, mentoring is a specifically designated task within the centre. At the same time, and particularly in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, the country profiles emphasize that mentoring is a task for the centre team and not exclusively for one particular member of staff.

In Denmark it has been a requirement since 2014 for early childhood settings receiving trainee pedagogues to have a written mentoring plan which explicitly states how the centre will support the students in working towards their personal and professional learning goals during each of the four phases of workplace-learning. In Denmark, two of these phases are of six months’ duration. In fact, Denmark and Germany are the only countries with at least one placement period of six months or longer, and in both cases the trainees are paid during these longer placements. In Denmark, this procedure has long been criticized both by the university colleges and the trade union for pedagogues, since it can result in the students not receiving the mentoring support they need as trainee pedagogues. Recent research in Germany has shown that this practice can lead to students being treated as stand-in staff in times of staffing constraints (Viernickel, Zenker, and Wessels 2014).

Looking at the mentoring role from a specifically feminist perspective, the paper from England by Sue Hammond, Sacha Powell and Kate Smith goes beyond the policy framework level by exploring ‘epistemological and ontological inconsistencies within mainstream mentoring systems and their regulated practice’. The authors deliberate on how feminist mentoring praxis can ‘unsettle conceptualisations of mentoring relationships and challenge inequity’ in the early education systems in England and in pedagogical practices.

National and regional frameworks; research, monitoring and evaluation

In four countries – Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Italy – ministerial decrees at the national level, and in the case of Norway collective agreements, provide a regulated framework for placement periods in the workplace and cooperative practices; additionally, they assign early childhood settings a clearly defined mentoring and training function. In England, national Standards (often viewed as reductionist) regulate both the workplace-based placements of trainees and the mentoring role in general, whereas specific tasks and assignments are negotiated at the local level.

However, in Finland and Iceland, and also in Germany, there are no binding regulations regarding the work placement element of early years professional education/training, neither at the national/federal level nor at the regional/local level. There are also no requirements regarding the participation of the service providers or the leading and mentoring staff in early childhood centres in the evaluation of the student placements. In Iceland, for example, relevant agreements with early childhood settings, employers/service providers and trade unions depend exclusively on the initiative of the university.

Across all countries in this study, very little grant-funded research has been conducted on the topic of workplace-based learning and mentoring practices. Through the WiFF project described earlier, a significant step has been taken towards improving this situation in Germany, and the initiative includes federal government and European Social Fund financing of empirical research and expert reports – some of which have focused on workplace-based learning and the mentoring role of early childhood centres. In Norway and Sweden there have been fairly recent national evaluations of the field studies element of teacher education and the interrelation between campus and fields of practice as (complementary) learning arenas. In both cases these evaluations resulted in nationwide reform initiatives: in Sweden this is the five-year (2014–2019) piloting of a new collaborative model at the local level mentioned above; and in Norway a long-term national strategy (2014–2020) called The early childhood setting of the future has been launched, focusing on recruiting students for the early years study programme, improving support for newly qualified teachers in the induction/probation year, qualifying core practitioners as mentors both for trainee and newly qualified teachers, and improving and extending continuing professional development for the (mostly non-qualified) auxiliary staff in early childhood settings. Government funding of practice-based research projects has also increased, and these include studies on developing the quality of workplace-based learning and collaborative practices (Klages and Lorentzen 2014).

Qualification requirements for working as a centre-based mentor of prospective early years educators, pedagogues and teachers

In almost all the countries represented here, no qualification beyond the one required for entry into the profession (post-secondary level in Germany; Bachelor level in Denmark, England Iceland, Norway and Sweden; and Master’s level in Iceland and Italy) is needed for taking on the position of mentor. Most stipulate that a certain number of years of job experience are either necessary or desirable. Norway, since 2012, is the only country to require the completion of an additional qualification (15 ECTS) on pedagogical supervision before a mentoring and supervisory position can be taken on. In Sweden, it is a requirement within the five-year pilot study to attend a relevant course for one quarter of regular working hours over one semester. In Finland (Tampere), those participating in a new cooperation network between the university and early years settings in the region are obliged to complete a 12-hour course of mentoring training. Otherwise, in most countries both short-term and longer-term qualifying courses and modules are on offer, but these tend to vary in terms of their regional availability, and it is not obligatory to attend them.

Some final comments

This brief summary of selected findings of the WiFF study (Oberhuemer 2014) presents insights into approaches, structures and strategies for the workplace-based element of early years professional studies in Denmark, England, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Norway and Sweden, relating these to selected aspects of this component of vocational and higher education study programmes in Germany.

Beyond the country-specific differences in approach that the study revealed, recent and ongoing reforms suggest that both at the policy level and at the level of the participating learning sites, much new thinking and planning is taking place. The papers in this issue grapple with some of this current thinking, presenting theoretical frameworks and policy analyses which challenge the traditional ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ divide, trying to go beyond either/or ways of thinking to both/and approaches, and seeking to develop new cultures of cooperation to provide a framework for these encounters.

Pamela Oberhuemer