'Babies are almost a captive audience and three-year-olds are beginning to want to concentrate on an activity for longer, but two-year-olds are the most demanding of all the EYFS stages,’ says Kay Rooks, early years learning and teaching adviser at Focus on Learning.
This key age group has increasingly been a Government focus, with 72 per cent of eligible two-year-olds now taking up taxpayer-funded places. While more children approaching or aged two (18 to 36 months) are in nursery, there is no less need for the early years workforce to improve its understanding of this age group’s special characteristics. ‘There is a big difference between working with a group of two-year-olds and a group of three-year-olds,’ says Ms Rooks. ‘I have found gaps in knowledge about developmental stages, particularly in school settings where they have moved staff from working with threes to twos – they think they can just deliver a watered-down version of what the threes have got.’
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