RON GODFREY meets a Pocklington woman who today launches a campaign to ensure children get the best possible training during their early years

SO THIS was what all that to-ing and fro-ing between Pocklington and Downing Street was all about for Rosie Pressland, dynamic owner and principal of the award-winning and highly-praised Montessori School at Pocklington.

All that hobnobbing with Tony and Cherie Blair and impassioned pleas for grants has finally paid off for the overall winner of last year's Evening Press Business Awards... in the shape of a giant pair of pink and yellow-bobbled slippers.

Today she launched the Internet College for Early Years Education - I-C-Eye for short - at the National Railway Museum in York.

With its giant slippers symbol, this Internet-based series of courses is designed, with Rosie's usual ferocious single-mindedness, to trigger nothing short of a revolution in standards of nursery school teaching.

For inspirational Rosie, the former globetrotting dancer and teacher whose school last year earned a perfect report from education watchdog Ofsted, that revolution through her own virtual university can't come quickly enough.

She is appalled that more than 60 per cent of the 215,000 people employed in childcare in Britain do not have the relevant training, generally through no fault of their own.

This is galling for the woman whose rapidly-expanding 216-place school in Bielby Lane achieves for six-year-olds the reading standards of ten-and-a-half year olds; which through "label-everything" learning teaches them maths, French and occasionally Spanish; which has its own new skate park and a four-year waiting list of parents wanting to send their children there.

In her clipped, Glaswegian accent Rosie rages: "It is nothing short of a scandal that there should be such low standards nationally. Children's massive potential is being utterly ignored. For too long young girls who failed their exams would become nursery teachers on the twee basis that 'they may not be good academically but they're wonderful with children.'

"Their hearts may be in the right place but it takes more than good maternal instincts to power children into adulthood with a passion for learning. It takes the finest training."

On the same day Rosie was celebrating winning the Evening Press Business Award categories last December - as Small Business Of The Year, Progress Through People and Business Personality Of The Year, she had received a £277,000 cheque towards today's £700,000 launch.

It came from ELLEN, the Electronic Lifelong Learning Network, as part of a Yorkshire allocation of £9.3 million worth of European funding for innovative IT training initiatives.

I-C-Eye, though initially planned by Rosie as an Internet programme to train teachers of toddlers and tinies in Yorkshire, has now developed as a ready-made solution towards Labour's strategy target of generating an extra 100,000 well qualified, new early years teachers by the year 2003.

It will need them because 1.3 million more children will have entered the early years education sector by then.

No gasps, then, that she was invited by Tony and Cherie to their little No. 10 soiree last March. And no surprises either that I-C-Eye is now also in line for a £1.5 million grant from the Department of Education's initiative project fund.

While others are puzzled at the slow uptake of Government training programmes, Rosie is not. She knows that traditionally - and logically -- childminders take on the job during the years in which their own children are little.

But training simply did not fit into a busy mum's day. "They start at 7am and finish exhausted at 7pm, after doing the housework, making the tea, bathing their own children and putting them to bed.

"Potential childminders are often very capable women, many are former professionals who see it as a way of continuing to work as a mother. But how to fit in the training? Especially when colleges are, perhaps, miles away."

Her eureka! solution, devised, aptly, as she lolled in a bath - "away from the telephones" - was to ensure that if they could not go to the training, then it should come to them. In their own homes: 'slipper territory'. And it should be simple and exciting.

Now, with the ELLEN funding and the backing of ADAPT, the European regional funding body, there is an extra element. The course is absolutely free.

With a team of IT professionals whose remit was to make text-driven courses come alive, she set to work.

The result was the slipper theme and the creation of a sweet-faced character called Lizzie, who had been through the interactive course, done well, and is now prepared to guide rookies every step of the way.

The course was tried out experimentally on a group of childminders and tweaked to accommodate them until they hailed it an outright success.

Rosie says: "One big problem was how to get people who had never been near a computer to have access to PCs. So we negotiated for everyone who takes our course to have access to refurbished computers for just £200 from an organisation called Refurbit which receives European cash to encourage the use of PCs for educational purposes."

Even before I-C-Eye has proved itself, ADAPT has announced that it is forking out another £100,000 on a Montessori assistant's course as well as a management course for early learners' employers.

And CASH, the early learning training standards organisation, has booked a playworkers' course as well as a continuous professional development course for those already in the field.

"We're on our way," says Rosie.

And clearly she won't stop until every child in Britain is given what they deserve - the best there is.

She will get there even if she has to creep up on it in pink and yellow-bobbled slippers.

Updated: 10:52 Wednesday, May 30, 2001