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The purpose of the paper is to consider the opportunities and difficulties in developing health‐promotion work in early years settings in the UK.

As the first study of its kind conducted in the UK, a multi‐method approach was adopted involving: an overview of health‐related guidance and of effective interventions in early years settings to promote health among young children; 26 interviews with key informants in the early years and health fields, regional coordinators for the National Healthy Schools Programme (NHSP) and Foundation Stage regional advisers; a survey of 145 local Healthy Schools Programme coordinators with a response rate of 75 per cent; and six case studies of early years settings representing promising practice in the promotion of health and wellbeing.

There is considerable enthusiasm for health promotion work within early years organisations, and interest in developing such work in early years settings. The study suggests that building on existing early years curriculum frameworks, developing partnerships between health and early years professionals, engaging both parents and practitioners, and adequate national and local resourcing will facilitate development of health promoting work in the early years sector.

This paper and the outputs from the study offer useful evidence for health and early years professionals who are developing health‐promoting work in early years settings.

The paper reports on the first study of its kind in which the perceptions of both early years and health professionals are brought together to consider the issues involved in developing healthy early years practice.

The purpose of this paper is to report on how early years practitioners worked with the ORIM Framework to support work with parents to promote early literacy experiences.

Co-produced Knowledge Exchange (KE) was used to develop and evaluate work with parents to facilitate their young children’s literacy. Information was gathered in discussion groups, interviews with parents and practitioners and feedback from all the parties involved.

Practitioners and families engaged with each other in the further development of an established literacy programme, and families demonstrated “ownership” of the co-produced knowledge after the end of the project.

Project design in co-produced research and KE is necessarily flexible. The focus is on practitioners’ knowledge and ownership of the process, sharing knowledge with parents and enhancing children’s experiences.

Practices that can enhance parental engagement in their children’s early literacy are varied and multiple and ORIM can be used flexibly to plan, develop and evaluate innovative and community – (and family –) specific practices.

Where parents have more knowledge of children’s early literacy development they are in a better position to support them; for learning communities there are implications in terms of future development of work with families to support early literacy development.

This paper contributes an original approach to the co-production of research with early years practitioners. It also identifies specific issues around the ethics of ownership in co-produced research.

Several ideas exist about social justice and how inequalities can be tackled to help families and children in poverty. The Coalition government released the UK’s first Child Poverty Strategy in 2011. Pervaded by neoliberal ideology, the strategy mentions “empowering” pre-school services and practitioners within the childcare market “to do more for the most disadvantaged” (Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Department for Education (DfE) 2011, p. 35). The purpose of this paper is to bring to light how Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) practitioners across England have engaged with policy discussions and adopted expectations concerning their place in addressing child poverty.

Using a phenomenological qualitative research design the paper draws upon 30 interviews with pre-school practitioners in three geographic areas of England. All interviewees worked with families and children in poverty and were senior ECEC practitioners within their pre-school settings.

Many interviewees shared the Coalition’s construction of child poverty as a problem of “troubled” parenting. These views pervaded their interaction with parents and intersected with the regulatory influence of “policy technologies” to influence their practice within a context of austerity cuts. This limited practitioners’ poverty sensitivity and their promotion of social justice. Therefore this paper concludes by critiquing the contribution which ECEC practitioners can make to addressing child poverty.

The findings suggest there may be a need for poverty proofing toolkits in the pre-school sector.

This paper provides a rare insight into how pre-school practitioners have engaged with, adopted and adapted assumptions about their role within policy discussion over child poverty and the promotion of social justice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine why the uptake of free milk in a particular nursery class was low, to explore the meanings children attribute to drinks given to them in school and those brought from home, and make suggestions as to what might be done to improve children's intake of free school milk.

This paper is based on a case study of a nursery class attached to a primary school in West London. A total of 24 morning sessions were observed, comprising of 72 snack times. In addition, interviews were carried out with parents and early years' practitioners i.e. teachers and nursery nurses. Children's views were elicited through use of narrative observations and an activity using their drinks' cartons.

This study found that these young children linked drinks brought in from home to having choices whereas drinking school milk was associated with having little or no choice. Unlike school milk, drinks from home were linked to stories of personal identity and family life. The children seemed to exert pressure on their parents to provide them with a drink from home and appeared to be attracted to drinks that included representations of characters from popular culture as well as particular brands.

This research is based on one case study, therefore issues raised may not be generalisable to all nursery settings.

This paper encourages early years' practitioners to look in detail at how they organize snack times and the way that this might contribute to negative perceptions of healthy foods/drinks. It offers practical suggestions around how the uptake of milk could be improved in a nursery setting, emphasizing the need for the active involvement of the children. In addition, the study highlights the importance of informal as well as formal discussions with parents about food and drinks. The study recommends that improvements need to be made to early years' practitioners' initial and subsequent training in this area, given the significant role they play in health promotion.

The value of this paper lies in the way it elicits the active participation of young children in the research as well as the focus on the minutiae of nursery practice and its implications for promoting healthy eating/drinking.

This paper aims to provide a summary of current policy and research related to pre‐school overweight and obesity, and to provide a rationale for why early years settings are being placed at the forefront of strategies to address the problem.

The paper is based on a narrative review of current research, policy and practice.

Today 22.9 per cent of four and five year olds are overweight or obese. The Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives strategy is a cross‐government initiative, which aims to make England the first major country to reverse the obesity epidemic. The pre‐school period represents a critical time for interventions, which could prevent excess weight gain and its associated physical and psychological damage to health.

Practitioners in early years settings have a significant contribution to make to promoting the healthy weight of children.

Concerns about overweight in childhood have received much attention. This paper seeks to raise awareness of the importance of the pre‐school period, and to provide a useful review of current research, policy and sources of support for those who are best placed to address the issue.

This paper aims to outline a knowledge translation (KT) case study undertaken as part of a multi-component research programme aimed at evaluating new parenting supports in the earliest years. The study aimed to: explore the influencing factors relating to research use in an early years context; and to use the findings, at least in part, to execute an integrated KT plan – to promote stakeholder engagement, greater research visibility and to enhance the understanding of findings emerging from the research programme.

A mixed-methods study was embedded within a large-scale, longitudinal research programme. In the present study, a national survey (n = 162) was administered to stakeholders working with children and families throughout Ireland. A series of one-to-one interviews were also undertaken (n = 37) to amplify the survey findings. Also, one focus group was carried out with parents (n = 8) and one with members of the research team (n = 3). Several dissemination strategies were concurrently developed, executed and evaluated, based partly on survey and interview findings and guided by the knowledge translation planning template (Barwick, 2008; 2013; 2019).

The main factors influencing the dissemination of evidence, as identified by the stakeholders – were: a lack of resources; an under-developed understanding of research use and dissemination; insufficient collaboration and communication; and conflicting stakeholder priorities. Despite these challenges, the research programme was found to benefit from a multi-component KT plan to achieve the outlined dissemination goals.

The KT planning process allowed the research team to be more accountable, introspective and to work more efficiently. This helped increase the likelihood of more targeted and successful dissemination of the research findings, delivering a better return on research investment.

This is the first study of its kind (to our knowledge) to provide important insights for stakeholders in Ireland and elsewhere about how to improve the dissemination process. Effective KT planning can ultimately help to bridge the research-policy-practice gap and enable the effective translation of high-quality evidence in the early years’ sector to enhance outcomes for families in the shorter and longer-term.

Early years policy and services have been subjected to substantial and rapid reform over the past 20 years. This article provides a brief overview of legislative and policy changes over this period, with a particular focus on regulation and workforce issues, and traces the enduring influence of the Children Act 1989 to the present. It identifies a paradigm shift in early years services from a world view based on public health and care and on devolution of responsibility, to one in which promoting children's learning and development is core and centralised regulation and national standards are seen as essential. This is reflected in changed responsibilities at government department and regulatory body level. Despite these major changes, the article concludes that the key principles of the Act ‐ in terms of children's rights, parents' responsibilities, listening to children and inter‐agency co‐operation ‐ are still apparent.

Reflects on the experiences of trying to manage a radical initiative in a traditional organizational setting as co‐ordinator at Pen Green Nursery Centre, which has tried to reconcile the conflicting values and practices of education, social work and community development.

The paper aims to explore the role and the involvement of local community within the context of Malaysian early childhood centers (nursery and kindergarten).

The research used a mixed method with a questionnaire survey in the first phase and qualitative interviews in the second phase. Quantitative data were obtained from a survey completed by 3,519 staffs from nursery and kindergarten all over Malaysia. Qualitative data were collected from individual and focus group semistructured interviews conducted with 140 participants of the Malaysian public and private internal and external stakeholders ranging from the relevant personnel of the early childhood care and education (ECCE) centers (administrators, teachers and practitioners), academic experts, regulatory agencies and parents.

Survey results indicate that the parents and community involvement with ECCE centers from the perspective of the management and practitioners is in the medium category. A total of three overarching themes were identified from the interviews, namely expertise collaboration, resource sharing and operation monitoring. There exists diversity in terms of community engagement and cooperation with ECCE centers.

The findings are expected to provide valuable guidelines to ECCE centers' management and leadership in the aspect of community involvement where it could help to enhance their efforts of providing quality learning experiences for young children attending their centers.

This study is part of a larger longitudinal and mixed methods project examining the quality practices in setting the standards in the Malaysian National Quality ECCE framework. These findings contribute to the understanding of community involvement with ECCE centers in the Malaysian context.