Dear Editor, I am writing to the website in response to the recent suggestions that childcare staff should have their NVQ 3. I am a mother, very soon to be a grandmother, and I work full time in a residential school with very little free time. My youngest daughter is at present nearing completion of her NVQ 3 and I have seen her workload and the commitment she has had to put in. I am totally of the belief that staff should undergo training and keep themselves up to date with information, legislation and should read articles, which affect their working practice. I am however seriously concerned that it would be virtually impossible for me to make such a commitment, as I am sure many other childcare staff would. I therefore ask. What is to become of us? Will we be allowed to continue in the work? I think the powers that be need to find an alternative method of ensuring that staff are fulfilling their training obligations without expecting the impossible. As I am also a Registered Nurse I have to meet all my PREP requirements to enable me to keep my registration active, this has been worked out in such a way as to not encroach too much on what little spare time I have. Am I alone in my concerns? Hazel Dickman June 1st 2000

Dear Editor, CREATING A CHILD CARE PROFESSION In my view the primary aim of the child care commission, is to build a child care profession which is sound, safe, experienced, highly professional and well regulated. It is only by achieving these goals that we can start to build a service where children will be receive a high standard of care and be free from abuse. The commission will inherit a childcare service that is fractured, where workers often feel isolated and many feel demoralised because of bad practice which has been highlighted in the past few years together with society's understandable perception that at best, childcare workers are unqualified and not very professional, or at worst potential abusers. Therefore in my view the commission must take a series of steps before achieving these aims. In this document I hope to put forward those steps that I feel are necessary. FORMING A NATIONAL STRUCTURE. Before we can start to train, educate and develop staff there must be a national structure to the child care service and staff must feel that they are very much a part of it. As the commission formulates its ideas for the future there must be a forum for care workers from all sections of the service to express their views, since they are the people 'working at the coalface.' One of the greatest assets to the pre-meditated abuser is a fractured service, in which they can take different positions. It therefore makes sense that if there is a "joined up" care service, it will make it more difficult for abusers to move around. It is also a reasonable assumption that those people who have worked at the coalface and have an in depth knowledge and understanding about the realities of working as a care worker, should have an input in building a national structure. A NATIONAL REGISTRATION SCHEME I would suggest that having a registration scheme that a) relies on staff being qualified, and b) is a system that is only negative (i.e. people who have not previously offended), will not go very far in ensuring that staff are professional, or safe. Finally, I feel that although the NVQ 3 is a good base line and I would support any initiative that would provide training, I do not believe that enough staff would be able to gain the qualification RD June 2nd 2000