This paper describes the findings of a qualitative evaluation of an early years' intervention, I Can's Early Talk ( ET) programme. ET was designed to improve speech, language and communication outcomes for children aged 0-5 by focusing on enhancing practitioners' knowledge and skills. The research focused on children aged 3-4 years and was conducted in 14 Sure Start Children's Centres across England, using a combination of observations and interviews with practitioners, centre managers and local authority staff, along with a questionnaire survey of parents. Findings revealed improvements in practitioners' confidence and practice as a result of participating in the programme. The results also suggest that participating practitioners felt their capacity to understand and reflect on how to support children's speech, language and communication improved, particularly in the children's centres which had been accredited for over six months. ET was also found to offer a balance of support and challenge which consolidated and extended good practice and identified areas for development where practice was less effective. In addition, some of the challenges, which characterised and ultimately enhanced the research process, are described.

Strengthening the home-school partnership is a strategy to raise achievement levels and to engage 'hard-to-reach' parents with education in the UK, however this political ideal has been critiqued as exclusive and based on a white, middle class model. This article explores how six asylum-seeking mothers manage their children's early years education, with a specific focus on the concept of parent-partnership. Asylum-seekers in the UK are stigmatised in the media and one of the most marginalised groups in society. The mothers participated in a three-hour group interview with questions, ranking cards and discussion interpreted into the home languages. Findings highlight tensions in language learning, a lack of appropriate cultural resources, perceptions of teachers as experts, and differing values as desired attributes for their children. The implications of these findings extend our knowledge of an under-researched group of mothers and young children and, if replicated, may inform future early years practice.

303 that, only in this way, when professionals can provide appropriate contexts for all issues of diversity, can children really have their identities valued and celebrated. The concluding chapter by the editors encapsulates the challenges of ‘rethinking and doing’ diversity in the early years. Indeed, the readers may feel that they have been on a journey – a rather bumpy journey – that has come full circle. The issues that confronted the reader at the beginning have only served to present more challenges, more questioning and more refl ection on early years practice. The strength of this book, in the words of its editors, is to ‘push ourselves beyond personal comfort zones’ (p. 278), and that is the fi rst of many challenges that readers of this book will encounter. Readers will fi nish this book to discover that the journey has only just begun.

The bio medical expert literature, although contested, associates the use of dummies, soothers or pacifiers, with illness, dental malformation, impaired speech and language, and working-class mothering. This article suggests this negative perspective has filtered, via experts and the media, into public narratives of ‘good’ mothering. Interviews with 20 disadvantaged mothers demonstrate the complex negotiations undertaken to integrate dummy use into their personal ‘good-mothering’ narratives. Representing their hitherto ignored voices in the dummy debate allows a consideration of the context of, and influences on, dummy use. The article argues that rather than a symbol of inadequate working-class mothering, dummy use is a complex, highly negotiated, situated mothering practice.

In this article, interviews with eight managers and questionnaires from 75 practitioners are analysed to explore their perceptions of the role of pacifiers (or dummies) within the nursery. Managers and practitioners source their knowledge from the media, family/friends, and short professional speech and language courses; however, their perceptions of pacifiers derive from mainly contested research that has filtered into the public domain. This creates tensions between perceived parental rights to offer a child a pacifier, current UK guidelines and participants' own, often ambivalent, views. The article engages with Foucauldian concepts to explore how authoritative knowledge filters into everyday practice and to deconstruct relations of power within the early years setting.