Linda’s Blog
Linda Baston-Pitt, PurpleBee CEO and co-founder of the PANCo qualification,
shares her thoughts, insights and advice.
The importance of being physically active in the Early Years
This is part one of a FAMLY blog series from Linda Baston-Pitt on the importance of physical activity and development in your Early Years setting.
Staff Health and Wellbeing: Getting active
How should settings encourage their practitioners to take up more physical exercise? Linda shares her thoughts and Kindred Nurseries PANCo’s reflect on how they support this within the setting.
Staff Health and Wellbeing: A weighty issue
What is being done nationally and at individual nursery level to tackle staff obesity? Linda shares her thoughts and Katie, a PurpleBee PANCo Pioneer explains how she has supported staff at her setting.
Four steps to developing an effective wellbeing strategy
The pandemic has shaken our lives but at the same time has exposed what is important to us. Linda shares her insights about how to develop an effective wellbeing strategy.
How digital learning is transforming the workplace
Linda discusses in her blog how digital learning is transforming the Early Years workplace and shares tips about what you should look for and expect from high quality online learning.
Health and Wellbeing: Taking root
The PurpleBee Start Life Well Wellbeing-in-action Toolkit and Award Scheme was born from our desire to create a wellbeing platform that helps all settings to solve and meet the real wellbeing challenges that they face with ease.
Communicating the wellbeing message
The need to curate and communicate information to support staff wellbeing has never been more crucial. So how do we communicate through wellbeing boards? Linda Baston-Pitt explores how in this months blog.
Where there is wellbeing there is a way!
Leaders and managers are constantly dealing with not just managing their nurseries but also the negative impact of the pandemic. In this blog, Linda details how to integrate wellbeing into leadership.
Ofsted: The focus is on child and staff wellbeing
Kirsty Mulvaney, Senior Ofsted Inspector for Early Years, has invited PurpleBee CEO Linda Baston-Pitt to speak about PANCo at the up and coming Ofsted team meeting in February.
What does the early years sector want for the coming year?
Read the excerpt from Linda Baston-Pitt as seen in the published Nursery World Article: ‘What does the early years sector want for the coming year?’
Leadership: Staff Well-Being
Staff well-being is more of a focus than ever under the new Education Inspection Framework. Annette Rawstrone from Nursery World reports. Read the excerpt from Linda Baston-Pitt, PurpleBee Learning here.
Working on wellbeing through winter
During the long, dark winter months it can be difficult to keep morale high and especially difficult this year with potentially more lockdowns and isolation. Linda talks about the importance of wellbeing during the winter.
Start Life Well
Whether you’re a nursery, school, after school club or childminder our goal is to it make easier than ever for every setting to create a healthier environment for children, staff and parents using our NEW Start Life Well toolkit and Award Scheme.
Leading well through Covid
Over and above your settings essential health and safety assessments, there are some essential skills and abilities that you and your team need to possess that can help you to navigate your way through the crisis. Find out about the 3 ‘R’s’ of Early Years Leadership.
PurpleBee PANCOs are leading the way!
A huge well done to our first group of amazing students who have worked exceptionally hard to become fully fledged Physical Activity and Nutrition Coordinators having achieved their PurpleBee CACHE L4 Award: Become a PANCo.
A PurpleBee and CACHE collaboration!
Good health and well-being is essential for people of all ages, and the best way to form healthy habits is to start from a young age. This is why the Physical Activity and Nutrition Co-ordinator (PANCo) role in Early Years settings has been developed.
Wellbeing for all in Early Years
What a fantastic weekend at the EY Matters inaugural Health and Wellbeing for All in Early Years conference at Bath Spa University. It was an action packed day, full of discussion, sharing ideas and reflection.
Putting wellbeing at the heart of your organisation
Wellbeing is more than the absence of illness. Wellbeing describes an optimal state of thriving, of doing and being one’s best. It is a complex combination of psychological, social and physical factors.
Chinese student teachers visit Cambridge to learn about Early Years.
The project led by Linda, CEO of Cambridge Early Education and Purplebee was the result of a collaboration between CEE and Hubei College.
Kindred Nurseries and PurpleBee PANCo Project
It was a great privilege to spend the day in London in the company of such an enthusiastic and passionate team of Early Years leaders from the Kindred Group.
Wellbeing: Time to Join the Dots
Wellbeing is experienced when we feel good and we feel that our lives are going well so it’s not surprising that we all have a different idea of what it means in practice.
Let’s go further and faster for child health and wellbeing
Child obesity is headline news again – and not for good reasons… In today’s blog Linda explains why every setting should have a PANCo.
Becoming a Positive Leader
A group of Early Years professionals from an award-winning nursery in Cambridgeshire were the first ever to achieve the new PurpleBee ILM Positive Leadership Award.
Looking after Mental Health in Early Years
PurpleBee is supporting Mental Health Week – PurpleBee CEO Linda Baston-Pitt identifies five top tips to help encourage wellbeing in Early Years
Lever those assets!
Linda Baston-Pitt affirms the need for the sector to pull together and calls for more brainstorming events like the Early Years Workforce Roundtable, hosted by CEEDA.
The PurpleBee and the PANCo
Linda, CEO PurpleBee, also developed the PANCo role which recently scooped the Nursery World Health & Wellbeing award.
Making Communication SOAR
Really effective communication is what makes a nursery business stand out, says Linda Baston Pitt, CEO of PurpleBee Learning.
Children First!
If there was ever a time for policymakers to put children first, based on some of the alarming statistics that are emerging, it has to be now! Read why we support the Children First campaign.
Leading the way online
Lisa (OSH) & Gemma ( PurpleBee) introduce the online mentoring programme they devised and piloted, which helped win the Training category of the NMT Nursery Awards.
Are your staff happy?
Our sector now appreciates the importance of child wellbeing as an integral part of the curriculum, but we need to ensure that our staff are also on board if we want them and our nurseries to truly flourish.
Mindfulness Masterclass
PurpleBee delivers a Mindfulness masterclass in Cambridge. We had a fun filled day with lots of time to practice mindfulness and to explore how we could embed it into our daily practice and lives.
Who am I?
We often fail to identify or make best use of our people’s strengths. Linda Baston-Pitt suggests a fun way of turning this round and building your team’s self-awareness and confidence.
Motivation through learning
Do you want to create a motivating environment? Then we need to think hard about how we can work harmoniously together learning in the workflow.
Maintaining Excellence
Linda Baston-Pitt congratulates the sector for its enthusiasm and dedication despite the challenges, and urges the government to support this excellence in real terms.
Play to your strengths
We all like to think we have a great deal to offer the people we work with but we are not always good at articulating just what our strong points are or how we use them.
Active Movement – A behavioural programme for health
Health and wellbeing are top of the political agenda. This article looks at how a programme developed for business is impacting on the lives of young children.