Developing and Sustaining Children’s Centres: Learning from the Stories of the Pen Green Centre for Children and Families

With the vast recent expansion of Children Centres, many practitioners and policy makers in the Early Years field are fascinated by the growth and success of the Pen Green centre which opened in 1983 and has gone on to be a Centre of Excellence for early years care and education locally, nationally and internationally.

This book explores the philosophy and practice of the Pen Green centre, and explains the vital and rewarding journey that staff, parents, families and the community have made. The contributors to this wide-ranging and insightful book

• expore the evolution of Pen Green's celebrated 'Learning to be Strong' programme, an assertiveness training programme for young children, that has been sustained over twenty-five years
• outline how the rich nursery curriculum has developed
• show how the work using schematic theory to understand children's cognitive and emotional concerns has been documented and has become central to Pen Green's pedagogical approach.

The book concludes with a chapter on the challenges for children's centres in the twenty-first century and explores how we can develop sustainable, responsive, accessible services which work, in that they transform children's life chances.

Margy Whalley MBE is Director of Research, Training and Development at the Pen Green Centre. Margy is involved in research, training and consultancy work in this country and in relation to policy transfer and integrated services in Germany, Italy, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia.

In 2005, she won a Childcare Lifetime Achievement Award. She has published seven books, with Sage, Hodder and Learning Matters.