FdA Early Childhood Education

This module provides an in-depth exploration of equality, diversity, and inclusion, supporting you to critically engage with a wide range of theories and models that underpin inclusive practice across educational and care settings. While inclusive practice is embedded throughout the programme, this module offers a dedicated opportunity for you to deepen your understanding and apply theory to address complex societal inequalities.

Building on foundational knowledge from year one, you will extend your appreciation of how socio-political factors, inequality and power influence participation. You will examine your own values and beliefs in relation to equality, diversity and inclusion and consider how these may affect yours, and others, professional behaviours

This practice-based module is designed to enable you to explore your professional practice working with children, young people and/or families. This module is concerned with ensuring the continued success and quality of provision within the education, early childhood and youth sectors. 

The key aspects of quality, effectiveness and success are dependent upon a workforce who is reflective, competent and skilled within their subject specific areas. The overall aim of this module is for you to gain a practical and theoretical understanding of the importance of reflection, particularly in challenging personal and professional practice. 

This module will also analyse principles of practice including competence frameworks, which aims to support you to develop your capacity to engage in informed, constructive reflection. 

This module explores the theoretical and practical foundations of supporting learning and assessment within early childhood educational settings. It integrates key themes from both pedagogy and assessment, offering you the opportunity to develop professional knowledge and skills that reflect contemporary practice and debates. You will critically examine pedagogical approaches and assessment strategies, and their application to practice. 

This module supports you to consider how to adapt and differentiate support and assessment practices in response to complex needs and within a range different learning environments, also exploring the adult’s role within play, sustained shared thinking and responsive interactions. The significance of working in partnership with parents, carers, and other professionals will be a key focus. You will explore the importance of key transition points in early childhood and the role of assessment in supporting smooth and emotionally secure transitions.

The Practitioner Research module provides you with the opportunity to design a research project. You will be introduced to the broad principles of research design, by engaging with the process of a literature review, you will develop subject knowledge pertinent to the area of inquiry. Ethical issues will be addressed, including the key principles of informed consent, anonymity and confidentiality. You will be introduced to a range of data collection methods and techniques for analysing and presenting research findings and this will be supported through lectures. You will expected to collect primary data from your fellow students within the class, and will then be guided to write up specific elements of your project for the assessments.