“you don’t realise how it how it makes you feel till ya talk about it ya know like right now”: A psychosocial exploration of the emotional experience of the key person role in nursery settings in the Private, Voluntary and Independent (PVI) sector

This exploratory research has drawn upon a psychoanalytically informed methodology to explore the experiences of three key people who work in nurseries in the Private, Voluntary and Independent (PVI) sector within one Local Authority in the UK. The PVI sector has been subject to additional systemic pressures compared to Maintained Nursery Settings (MNS), which have greater access to funding, training and qualified teachers. Through opportunistic sampling, the participants who volunteered were specifically from private non-profit nursery settings and were working with preschool aged children. Hollway and Jefferson’s (2013) Free Association Narrative Inquiry (FANI) and Joffe and Elsey’s (2014) Grid Elaboration Method (GEM) were utilised to elicit participant narratives that were informed by emotion rather than logic across two interviews. This research is founded on a psychosocial epistemology and ontology and therefore draws upon the understanding of defended intersubjectivity (Ivey, 2022) to inform the analysis of the data through the countertransference responses in the interview interactions. The data was analysed using a Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) through semantic coding (conscious emotive data) and latent coding (exploring unconscious defence mechanisms) across the data set. Four overarching themes were identified: emotional labour, knowing to seek certainty, working within a network of relationships around the child and promoting school readiness. This research further highlights the influence of both individual and social defences in conceptualising the key person role. It is hoped that this research will extend the literature base for educational psychology practice in the early years to enable the profession to provide the most efficient services to children, families and early years practitioners in PVI nurseries.