Continuing professional development for the early years workforce in England since 2015: a synthesis of survey data highlighting commonalities, discrepancies and gaps

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is an essential aspect of Early Years (EY) workforce planning. In understanding how CPD is currently provided, we depend largely on surveys carried out by separate sector organisations with little synthesis of the data. In this paper, we scrutinise findings relating to CPD from nine surveys of EY managers and practitioners carried out by three well-established sector organisations since 2015. We highlight commonalities, discrepancies and gaps in the data. On the basis of this analysis, we highlight the need for further investigation around what constitutes CPD in the EY sector, what are perceived to be ‘quality’ experiences, CPD accreditation and the leadership and management of CPD in settings. We recommend gathering more detailed and accurate data about CPD through practitioner logs completed as and when CPD is undertaken, as opposed to retrospective surveys

Analytical study of coherence in seeded modulation instability

We derive analytical expressions for the coherence in the onset of modulation instability, in excellent agreement with thorough numerical simulations. As usual, we start by a linear perturbation analysis, where broadband noise is added to a continuous wave (CW) pump; then, we investigate the effect of adding a deterministic seed to the CW pump, a case of singular interest as it is commonly encountered in parametric amplification schemes. Results for the dependence of coherence on parameters such as fiber type, pump power, propagated distance, seed signal-to-noise ratio are presented. Finally, we show the importance of including higher-order linear and nonlinear dispersion when dealing with generation in longer wavelength regions (mid IR). We believe these results to be of relevance when applied to the analysis of the coherence properties of supercontinua generated from CW pumps.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure