Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) is the post-graduate level professional accreditation programme for leading practitioners in the early years sector.
Since its launch in 2007, EYPS has become recognised as the gold-standard in early years training and is the only government endorsed accreditation for the early years workforce.
At Staunton Montessori we have four Early Years Professional Status staff. This is an unusually high number of EYPS qualified staff in a setting, possibly the highest in the UK.
More than just a title:
Recent national research published by the Department for Education (DfE) reinforced the importance of investing in graduate leadership across the early years workforce and highlighted the unique and pivotal role EYPS’s play.
The ‘National Evaluation of the Graduate Leadership Fund‘ (July 2011) found that EYPS has a measurable impact on quality across an early years setting, over and above that of employing a graduate who doesn’t hold the status.
Head teacher Robert Staunton trained at Northampton University with Professor Denise Hevey, to obtain the postgraduate qualification of Early Years Professional Status (EYPS).
Robert now works with Northampton University’s Department of Education mentoring and assessing post-graduates taking their EYPS.
“EYPS has been a really valuable experience. The intellectual stimulation of mixing with other dedicated and experienced professionals has been highly memorable. As professionals in a school setting you have to guard against being isolated within your local field; the short pathway put me in touch with a peer group that I hadn’t previously had, we exchanged knowledge, supported one another. That mix of knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm was very helpful in finding ways of dealing with situations, for example with children with autism or other special needs.”~ Robert Staunton
