Child Development and Care at Telford Park School prepares pupils to work with young children. It is a practical, serious subject: pupils learn what a two-year-old should be able to do, what might get in the way, and what a responsible adult does about it.
The expected stages of development are secured first, because you cannot spot a delay or judge a factor without knowing what typical looks like. Only then do pupils weigh the things that disturb development. Every lesson opens the same way, with a quick check on milestones already learned: crawling, first words, first steps. Peps Mccrea has written about how a settled habit frees up thinking, and a fixed opening is exactly that: nothing to work out, so the mind is free for the child.
Pupils cover the milestones of the first five years, what can disturb them, the range of early years settings, the responsibilities of a practitioner, and the discipline of accurate observation. They finish with written work assessed to a professional standard, and with the understanding that in this field a careless note about a child is not a small mistake.