ABSTRACT
Listen to nursery staff talk about their experiences in coping with children who are disruptive and find it difficult to settle into the nursery routine. Laura, an experienced practitioner, begins:
More and more children who can’t or just won’t conform to our ways of working are coming into nursery now. It used to be that we had an occasional child who didn’t know how to behave, and with patience and tolerance he would settle down. Having one child like this meant that one practitioner could be assigned to watch and step in if things got out of hand. Also, the school management team would help us to get professional support, because that child was so different to the norm. But now we have a whole group of children who upset the apple cart on a daily basis, so they have become the norm, and no one wants to know. So what do we do? Just watch until all our years of work is destroyed?
