This independent research project aims to analyse children’s emotional well-being and COVID-19 critically; the purpose is to gain an understanding of how the pandemic has affected children’s emotional well-being. In contrast to this, how practitioners could play a key role in supporting children with emotional well-being difficulties, including if their level of qualifications could affect the way the child is supported, and the quality of services provided. The objective of the investigation is to have a greater understanding of resilience and evaluate if this could also be a primary factor when supporting children’s emotional well-being.
The chosen method of data collection is a questionnaire using qualitative and quantitative methodology. The data was collected from a nursery and practitioners on the undergraduate early years degree, which gave interesting results due to participants being from different settings. This review's main findings suggested an increase in referrals made after the pandemic, and the importance of resilience was highlighted within the findings. The conclusion of this study emphasises the importance of the quality of services within the early years sector and highlights the role of the practitioner, concluding towards the notion that early years practitioners of a certain level should be able to carry early intervention ahead of time and reduce the strain on outside services to increase the opportunity to minimise further risk to children’s emotional well-being.