Blog: GM Reflect

About the Author: Jan Robinson: Early Years Consultant 

 Jan set up her own early years consultancy business in 2019 after taking early retirement from her role as Early Years Strategic Lead and Head of the Start Well Service at Bolton Council; and for the last 6 years has provided support for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s School Readiness Programme. Jan has worked in early years for over 40 years in various roles including work in schools, nurseries, children’s centres and local authority advisory roles. She is particularly committed to supporting and developing early years leaders and recognises the impact that strong and effective leadership has on the early years workforce and in ensuring every child gets the best start in life. 

This blog outlines the work that Jan has been supporting within the GMCA School Readiness Programme to develop GM REFLECT, an early years workforce competency framework which builds on and strengthens the skills, knowledge and abilities of the GM multi-agency workforce. 

Have you heard about GM REFLECT?  

You may have heard us talking within Greater Manchester (GM) about GM REFLECT and wondering what it is, how you can find out more information about it, and how you use it in your work?  

Well here’s an introduction to GM REFLECT and a bit more about why and how it was developed, who it is for – and how you can access it.

The importance of high quality staff professional development on improving outcomes for children

Supporting high quality practice is pivotal in improving children’s outcomes and the research tells us that high quality teaching can narrow the disadvantage gap. There is a growing body of research that promoting effective professional development plays a crucial key in improving practice and outcomes for children. The Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) ‘Effective Professional Development’ tool highlights that professional development (PD) can take a variety of approaches, however to ensure impact on children’s outcomes, the emphasis should be on increasing practitioner’s ‘teaching ability’ (EEF, 2025) to enable them to be able to build knowledge, motivate self and others, developing teaching techniques and embedding practice over a period of time (see image below for further details). For further information around this, please see the EEF’s Professional Development Tools: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/effective-professional-development

Investing in Greater Manchester’s Early Years Workforce

One of our priorities in Greater Manchester is to ensure that every child has the best start in life and starts school ready to learn and thrive and we are clear that our early years workforce is key to unlocking the potential of all our children.

Our early years workforce is large and varied and includes Early Education, Local Authority and voluntary sector roles. It also includes members of the wider workforce who play an essential  role in the planning and delivery of early years services, such as administrative assistants, business support roles and site supervisors to name just a few.

In 2018, GM successfully bid to the Department for Education (DfE) for Early Outcomes Funding which focused on improving delivery of our GM Speech, Language and Communication Pathway across the GM region and we delivered our GM Pathways to Talking Project. 

One of the things we often talked about in this project was how we could strengthen our collaborative working in the early years and a recommendation of the project was to develop a GM Early Years Workforce Competency Framework. We wanted a framework that would identify the knowledge, abilities and characteristics that everyone who works with early years  would have and that would recognise and increase the confidence of the GM Early Years workforce. We also wanted a framework that would support ongoing professional development and training.  We reviewed and tested existing workforce competency frameworks, but we never found one that fully met our GM context and needs. So we set ourselves the challenge of developing our own!

When we were agreeing the scope and principles for this competency framework, some of the key priorities identified by GM practitioners were the need for the use of a common language across all sectors and a focus on child development for all early years practitioners which recognises the importance of understanding about development from pregnancy to five years. 

We agreed that the framework needed to be a strengths based model that would build on the skills and experience of the early years workforce and which would support self evaluation and reflective practice. As we were developing and testing the early years workforce competency framework, we started to think of a name that would describe it in much fewer words and the name ‘GM REFLECT’ was born.

So what’s included in the GM REFLECT framework? 

GM REFLECT includes more than just a list of early years workforce competencies. We have developed GM REFLECT digital tool, a digital version of the competencies; and also GM REFLECT on practice, some case studies of use; GM REFLECT on policy, which look at how GM REFLECT aligns with current national early years policy and includes a training provider audit tool; and GM REFLECT e-learning, which are a set of related e-learning modules. So, what do the competencies look like?

GM REFLECT competencies is a list of competency statements organised into 3 tiers including: Tier 1: Firm Foundations; Tier 2: Early Years Practice; and Tier 3: Leadership Activities and Expectations and the tiers are not hierarchical – so the Foundation Tier is just as important as the Leadership Tier and they can be completed in any order.  

In the Early Adopter areas, some teams started with all Tier 1 and some of the Tier 2 components, whilst others started with Tier 1 and Tier 3 components. But there are no rules or specific expectations about this – our suggestion is to identify the components that are most relevant to your role and start from there. There is no set timescale either – we suggest that you agree your approach with your line manager.

Our feedback is that practitioners soon get used to the structure and language of GM REFLECT – its actually quite straightforward.  Each tier is made up of a number of components. Each component is made up of a number of elements. And each element has up to 3 competency statements. And this is what the tiers, components, elements and statements look like in practice: 

There is also the GM REFLECT digital tool which is a licensed digital version of the competencies and is currently in an early adopter phase in Stockport and Tameside. This has all the features of the list of competencies with a number of additional functions, enabling practitioners to use a digital platform to carry out their self evaluation. The digital tool also provides senior leaders with the ability to pull together an evidence base of workforce need at a team, local or organisational level to inform the commissioning of training and workforce development opportunities; and to compare data and identify trends. 

At the moment, only practitioners working within the early adopter areas of Stockport and Tameside can access the digital tool but we are working on a roll out plan. And in the meantime the GM REFLECT competencies can be accessed by everyone and used to support self evaluation using a 6 point confidence rating scale.  Hyperlinks have been added to the competency list which link to relevant information, resources or training to help to further develop practitioners’ confidence levels. These can be downloaded free of charge from the GMCA website – please click here and have a look.

The other more recent addition to the framework is GM REFLECT e-learning which is a set of open access, free to use short on-line courses which are aligned to the GM REFLECT competencies. They have been co-designed with Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and Early Years professionals from across GM and are aimed at the GM Early Years workforce, working in multi-agency roles and with differing qualifications and experience to improve levels of confidence across a range of competencies. The e-learning modules all follow the same format of introducing a topic, developing further knowledge and understanding of the topic and finishing with some reflective questions and activities. They include lots of different learning materials including videos of GM practitioners and a range of mixed media resources. 

The first 3 modules launched in February 2025 are:

• Social, Emotional Development and Wellbeing
• Engaging with Families
• Physical Development

Further Modules to be launched over the next few moths are: Firm Foundations; Pre-birth and the Early days; Early Years SEND; and Speech, Language and Communication.

If you haven’t already seen these free courses, please follow this link and take a look? Its free to register and the total study time per module is 2-3 hours but you can complete at your own pace, and in your own timescales.  We would love to hear your feedback so please get in touch if you complete one of more of the courses – and on completion you will receive a digital badge as evidence of your study.  

We are still working on some further resources and case studies to add to the GM REFLECT framework and these will all be added to the GMCA website as soon as they are available. These will include some sample self evaluation forms, an example pre and post training questionnaire, some conversational case studies with colleagues in the early adopter areas, and other examples of how the competency statements can be used in practice to support workforce development.

It would be great to hear how people are using GM REFLECT and we are always keen to hear about GM REFLECT in practice so please get in touch with us at the GMCA School Readiness Team. Or if you have an idea that you would like to chat through with us, please email Jane Gardiner, GMCA School Readiness Project Officer at Jane.Gardiner@greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk