Which part of the English school system is graded by Ofsted as being the most successful? And which sector is being closed down at the fastest rate?
Strangely enough the answer to both questions is the same: Maintained Nursery Schools. Half have been graded as being outstanding by Ofsted since the new inspection framework was introduced. A tenth of them have been closed down since 1997.
A depressing story of muddle, of good intentions gone wrong, has led us here. Back in 1997, Britain had its first ever government with a strong commitment to developing services for children under five and their families. At that time, the nursery school sector was in a pretty bad way. Buildings were falling down. When it rained, great rows of buckets would be lined up to catch at least the majority of the water pouring through roofs. Even the most minor repair, like a small strip of linoleum in the toilets, would require several months of correspondence with the local authority before it could happen. I remember a depressing shuffle to the Houses of Parliament to protest against the introduction of nursery vouchers in the last days of the Conservative government. Hardly anyone seemed to care. As a nursery teacher, I felt as punctured as the roof of my classroom.
The New Labour government promised to do it all so much better. Lots of money was allocated to the early years. But the government was not clear what it wanted. Was it more childcare, so that more women could go out and work? Or more early childhood education, to benefit those children growing up in the most disadvantaged areas?
The question was never really answered. Instead, all sorts of experimental lines of policy were developed. A small number of nursery schools were plucked from their previous obscurity and termed "Early Excellence Centres". They were supposed to answer both questions at once, by showing how early education could best be combined with childcare. The rest of the nursery schools were promised that there was a "presumption against closure". But the figures speak for themselves: in the decade before 1997, 14 nursery schools were closed. The decade after, 87 were shut. The "presumption against closure" was nothing more than rhetoric. Saying is not the same as doing.
The "Early Excellence" experiment was still going strong when two new policy fads were introduced to early education. The government developed “neighbourhood nurseries” in poor communities with inadequate funding limited to just three years. At the start, the nurseries were planned to have only half the staff qualified (and this half at the minimal level of NVQ2) and the after three years they were supposed to sustain themselves with just the fees paid by families living in some of the poorest parts of England. At the same time as the Early Excellence Centres were supposed to be exploring whether nursery education and childcare would benefit children if there was a strong emphasis on quality (highly trained staff, including specialist nursery teachers and nursery nurses). As a result of these simultaneous initiatives, the Early Excellence Centres started to look too expensive, compared to the Neighbourhood Nurseries. At around the same time, the Neighbourhood Nurseries started to run out of money once their three years of funding was up, and were not able to show evidence that they had provided much benefit to the children who attended.
The second policy fad, also around the same time, was Sure Start. This is still the biggest of various attempts to develop policy and practice around the new ideas of "localism". Local communities were given very large sums of money to develop pretty much any approach to services for young children and their families. In some cases good practice evolved; in the rest, huge amounts of money were squandered. A local authority early years officer I know was visited by some of the Young Turks from the Sure Start Unit who told him that his authority needed more "blue sky thinking". It was time to dispense with the old solutions - having a single local plan, for example, made by locally elected councillors. Instead, they suggested an array of local boards, some supported by the health authority, some by education, some by social services and others by the voluntary sector. It was assumed that this type of diversity would lead to success.
Whilst these various cultural revolutions in the early years played themselves out, the nursery schools were seen as both rather expensive, and also rather old fashioned. Sure Start Programmes inevitably disliked them. Whatever the reason - culture clashes, competition for resources, elitism - it is pointless to try to blame this person, or that Sure Start local board, or those schools, for the chaos which resulted. National policy was a mess.
Finally, taking stock of the failure of Sure Start local programmes and the Neighbourhood Nursery Initiative, the government at last put together a single, coherent plan for the future: the Children’s Centre programme. The idea was to provide all the different services – nursery education with childcare, family support, community development and health services – from a single, integrated organization. My own view is that this is still a sensible and coherent policy. But it is, sadly, haunted by aspects of past policy. The desire to do things too quickly is unabated, so instead of piloting a few Children’s Centres and evaluating them, the government has developed thousands in just a few years. Quality still hardly features in the thinking: Children’s Centres are, for example, encouraged to consider “contracting out” the childcare element. The best value bid for the contract, may not lead to the best provision for the children. There have been disasters, to be sure. But beyond these, the cost of the nursery schools – who provide the best early education and care – rules many of them out of the programme. They get sidelined. Then they get closed down.
The latest blow for the nursery schools has been the order issued to local authorities that they must be "brokers" for "childcare" rather than commissioning it themselves. Whilst there seem to be many different ways of reading this part of the Act, it is hardly encouraging local authorities to maintain and support their nursery schools and other early years centres. It promotes, instead, the notion that the local authority should set up the necessary systems for private and voluntary groups to run nurseries, and withdraw to monitor what happens.
Which takes me back to Ofsted. We know that nursery schools provide the best environment for the care, development and learning of young children. 49% of them are judged to be outstanding - compared to 13% of primary and secondary schools. It is an enviable record. Other research, most notably the government-sponsored EPPE project, shows the same thing. Nursery schools are proven to help young children growing up in disadvantaged circumstances to "narrow the gap" on their more advantaged peers. In other words, they start compulsory education with as good a chance as anyone else of doing well at school.
Whilst this policy shambles continues, nursery schools are being closed down all over the country. Once they are gone - they're gone. And with them goes one of the best chances we have of helping disadvantaged young children and their families.
References:
I obtained statistics on the numbers of nursery schools from 1963 to the present date through a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
Nursery School numbers from 1963 to 1997
Nursery School numbers from 1998 to 2007
For a recent summary of the effectiveness of nursery schools and teacher involvement in nursery educations, see Nurseries Need Teachers by the Daycare Trust.
Sunday, 18 November 2007
This week's news: Conservatives plan for all children to read by six
Just as I was thinking about not bothering with a review of the news, my indolence was shaken by the announcement by Michael Gove about the new Tory plan for all children to be reading by the age of six.
A quick point before I really get going: please can we stop making the achievements, happiness, size or any other feature of children aged just six years old the zone for political warfare? Isn't this something that would be better off as a parent-school dialogue, and professional discussion?
As that proposition has yet to be accepted I would like to submit some thoughts.
I'm not quite sure that Michael Gove is, yet, sufficiently knowledgeable about the English state school system (which he neither experienced as a child, nor has worked in as an adult). When he says that he wants something done "by age six" he needs to define his terms a little tighter.
Does he really mean by age six - so that this will be a rolling test of reading ability administered on or near the child's birthday?
Or - as seems to be implied - does he mean by the end of Year One in primary schooling?
Either plan is silly, because if anyone cares to look into international studies of reading ability, they will soon come across countries like Finland, where formal schooling starts at seven...and where literacy is extremely high. Or New Zealand...Sweden...and a whole host of other places where the notion that all children could have started formal education and become readers aged six would be received with astonishment.
Specifically the plan is daft if Michael Gove means aged six because winter born children will have only just left Reception aged six. So they will have had one year of infant schooling, not two. If all these children aged six are expected to be readers then that will rip up any idea of there being a phase of early years education which extends into the Reception Year. Michael Gove will have brought forward formal education by yet another year in England.
The plan is equally daft if Michael Gove means by the end of Year One - because some children are not even yet six by the end of Year One (if they have a July or August birthday) and there is no logic in the idea that these five year olds should all be reading.
I was about to say - think again
But the "again" would be a mistake.
A quick point before I really get going: please can we stop making the achievements, happiness, size or any other feature of children aged just six years old the zone for political warfare? Isn't this something that would be better off as a parent-school dialogue, and professional discussion?
As that proposition has yet to be accepted I would like to submit some thoughts.
I'm not quite sure that Michael Gove is, yet, sufficiently knowledgeable about the English state school system (which he neither experienced as a child, nor has worked in as an adult). When he says that he wants something done "by age six" he needs to define his terms a little tighter.
Does he really mean by age six - so that this will be a rolling test of reading ability administered on or near the child's birthday?
Or - as seems to be implied - does he mean by the end of Year One in primary schooling?
Either plan is silly, because if anyone cares to look into international studies of reading ability, they will soon come across countries like Finland, where formal schooling starts at seven...and where literacy is extremely high. Or New Zealand...Sweden...and a whole host of other places where the notion that all children could have started formal education and become readers aged six would be received with astonishment.
Specifically the plan is daft if Michael Gove means aged six because winter born children will have only just left Reception aged six. So they will have had one year of infant schooling, not two. If all these children aged six are expected to be readers then that will rip up any idea of there being a phase of early years education which extends into the Reception Year. Michael Gove will have brought forward formal education by yet another year in England.
The plan is equally daft if Michael Gove means by the end of Year One - because some children are not even yet six by the end of Year One (if they have a July or August birthday) and there is no logic in the idea that these five year olds should all be reading.
I was about to say - think again
But the "again" would be a mistake.
Monday, 12 November 2007
Key Stage One: put it out of its misery!
When the new Early Years Foundation Stage becomes statutory next September, it will cover a much longer age range than its predecessor – all the way from birth to five years old. As the number of Children’s Centres based in primary schools rises, the numbers of children spending three or more years in the Foundation Stage will grow. This will leave Key Stage One, just two years in duration, as the briefest and least important part of a child’s education prior to secondary schooling. It will be time to put this stunted Key Stage out of its misery and create a proper, birth-to-seven phase in education.
As a nursery school headteacher, I have been watching the gradual destruction of traditional infant school education with sadness. A decade ago, there was the battle for Reception: did it belong to the Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, or to the Foundation Stage? In most schools, Reception was won by literacy and numeracy hours. Parents came back into nursery schools to say how difficult their children were finding it in “big school” and how much they wished they could come back and play in nursery.
More recently, Reception has started to return to the early years fold in many schools. Play is making a comeback, and children are allowed once more to spend time learning outdoors as well as in. All the same, most Reception classes are much, much more formal now than they were when I first started teaching twenty years ago. And the children are younger, too.
So if the new EYFS succeeds in reclaiming more of Reception for the early years – where will this leave the two years of Key Stage One? Some primary school headteachers would probably feel that if Reception is lost to what they see as “proper learning”, then even more will have to be crammed into Key Stage One to make sure that results hold up. In the case of my own daughter: she was hardly through the door of her Year One classroom before she was identified as being “at risk of underachieving in literacy”. She was bundled into a small group for intensive learning of letters and sounds every morning. The benefits were miniscule: hours and hours of drilling in letters and their sounds resulted in practically nothing learnt over the year. At home we felt that she would learn to read a little later. She did.
In its current form, Key Stage One presents other awkward problems. A summer-born child is expected, aged just five years old, to benefit from a relatively formal Key Stage One curriculum, whilst a winter-born child of the same age has a less formal, play-based curriculum in the Foundation Stage. What sense does this make? Of course, there are always going to be cut-offs in any school system: but we need to remember that for children at this age, a year makes up one-fifth of their life. It counts for a very great deal. Whilst good teachers have always adapted what they do to meet the needs of the actual children in their classes, there are inevitably limits. School policies quite rightly give Foundation Stage classes more favourable staffing and more resources to support children’s play. Staff in Year One classes can only attempt to minimise the impact of these structural differences through their practice. It would be better if the system helped them out, rather than holding them back.
But these problems at Key Stage One present us with the opportunity to argue for change. For many years now, there has been encouragement to look to Europe, in order to rethink our approach to the education of young children. Formal schooling starts later in practically every European country, most notably Sweden, Finland and Denmark. The outcome is not just that their children are rated much happier than ours by UNICEF. Their children are also better readers, better at maths, better learners all round in practically every measurable way.
Creating a single phase of early education for children up to the age of seven would be good for continuity. It could also enhance children’s learning. Children would make a better start Key Stage Two if they had experienced a broad curriculum which emphasised the crucial dispositions for successful learning: concentration, perseverance through difficulty, collaboration, and, not least, enjoyment.
If you are waiting for the “buts”, here they are. Firstly, this proposal could not possibly work without much better dialogue between professionals working in the early years and the rest of the education system. There is a growing tendency for staff in Nursery Schools and Children’s Centres to desire a kind of independent kingdom of the early years, safe from nasty school-learning. Understandable though this is, it needs to come to an end.
Secondly, Nursery Schools and Children’s Centres need to come to terms with the failure of child-centred education from the 1960s through to the 1990s, rather than giving it refuge in the early years. The discussions we need to have in the early years have hardly begun. How many of us can provide a good answer to this simple question: what exactly is the adult’s role in introducing new concepts, skills and ideas to children in early years settings? It’s not a discussion that I would find it easy to have with a parent.
I am not arguing for a revolution in practice. From my experience of observing children in early years settings, the worst places for children to be are undoubtedly those where they are processed through a menu of activities, one after the other. Settings where the children are bumped abruptly from “free play” to “the work table” are no better. Play inevitably suffers and becomes “letting off steam”.
But I am arguing that we need to start talking about what kind of direct and systematic teaching children need, and when. Education is not a supermarket, with rows of experiences and activities for children to browse and select from, as the mood takes them. A full swing back to an jnfant school curriculum based solely on exploration and play would just fail children again.
In Europe there is a wide understanding, amongst both professionals and parents, of what a systematic approach to the first seven years of education and care looks like: introducing children to sounds and rhythm, developing their aural discrimination, encouraging collaborative enterprises, problem-solving and conversation, and developing physical skills through exciting activities like woodwork. As children get older, this systematic approach leads on to carefully planned and often whole-class teaching. We should experiment more, and think about the sort of planning and structures that would show the links between earlier and later teaching in the child’s first seven years. The walls between Key Stage One and the Early Years Foundation Stage need holing, undermining and knocking down.
I was once with a group of Swedish teachers as they went into a Reception class in a London school. From the look on their faces, you might have thought they had been taken back to Victorian times to see children working in a shoe polish factory. There really is little to be said in favour of what was in front of us: one group of four and five year olds being drilled on sounds, and a second gathering of pained-looking infants who seemed to be practically crushing the pencils in their hands as they carved through the paper in their workbooks. Practically all of those children would have learned to read and write much faster, and with much more enjoyment, a year later.
It could happen. But it needs us to take part in free professional debate, and discussion with parents, so that we can develop a coherent understanding of child development and learning and the role of teaching for the whole of the first seven years.
As a nursery school headteacher, I have been watching the gradual destruction of traditional infant school education with sadness. A decade ago, there was the battle for Reception: did it belong to the Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, or to the Foundation Stage? In most schools, Reception was won by literacy and numeracy hours. Parents came back into nursery schools to say how difficult their children were finding it in “big school” and how much they wished they could come back and play in nursery.
More recently, Reception has started to return to the early years fold in many schools. Play is making a comeback, and children are allowed once more to spend time learning outdoors as well as in. All the same, most Reception classes are much, much more formal now than they were when I first started teaching twenty years ago. And the children are younger, too.
So if the new EYFS succeeds in reclaiming more of Reception for the early years – where will this leave the two years of Key Stage One? Some primary school headteachers would probably feel that if Reception is lost to what they see as “proper learning”, then even more will have to be crammed into Key Stage One to make sure that results hold up. In the case of my own daughter: she was hardly through the door of her Year One classroom before she was identified as being “at risk of underachieving in literacy”. She was bundled into a small group for intensive learning of letters and sounds every morning. The benefits were miniscule: hours and hours of drilling in letters and their sounds resulted in practically nothing learnt over the year. At home we felt that she would learn to read a little later. She did.
In its current form, Key Stage One presents other awkward problems. A summer-born child is expected, aged just five years old, to benefit from a relatively formal Key Stage One curriculum, whilst a winter-born child of the same age has a less formal, play-based curriculum in the Foundation Stage. What sense does this make? Of course, there are always going to be cut-offs in any school system: but we need to remember that for children at this age, a year makes up one-fifth of their life. It counts for a very great deal. Whilst good teachers have always adapted what they do to meet the needs of the actual children in their classes, there are inevitably limits. School policies quite rightly give Foundation Stage classes more favourable staffing and more resources to support children’s play. Staff in Year One classes can only attempt to minimise the impact of these structural differences through their practice. It would be better if the system helped them out, rather than holding them back.
But these problems at Key Stage One present us with the opportunity to argue for change. For many years now, there has been encouragement to look to Europe, in order to rethink our approach to the education of young children. Formal schooling starts later in practically every European country, most notably Sweden, Finland and Denmark. The outcome is not just that their children are rated much happier than ours by UNICEF. Their children are also better readers, better at maths, better learners all round in practically every measurable way.
Creating a single phase of early education for children up to the age of seven would be good for continuity. It could also enhance children’s learning. Children would make a better start Key Stage Two if they had experienced a broad curriculum which emphasised the crucial dispositions for successful learning: concentration, perseverance through difficulty, collaboration, and, not least, enjoyment.
If you are waiting for the “buts”, here they are. Firstly, this proposal could not possibly work without much better dialogue between professionals working in the early years and the rest of the education system. There is a growing tendency for staff in Nursery Schools and Children’s Centres to desire a kind of independent kingdom of the early years, safe from nasty school-learning. Understandable though this is, it needs to come to an end.
Secondly, Nursery Schools and Children’s Centres need to come to terms with the failure of child-centred education from the 1960s through to the 1990s, rather than giving it refuge in the early years. The discussions we need to have in the early years have hardly begun. How many of us can provide a good answer to this simple question: what exactly is the adult’s role in introducing new concepts, skills and ideas to children in early years settings? It’s not a discussion that I would find it easy to have with a parent.
I am not arguing for a revolution in practice. From my experience of observing children in early years settings, the worst places for children to be are undoubtedly those where they are processed through a menu of activities, one after the other. Settings where the children are bumped abruptly from “free play” to “the work table” are no better. Play inevitably suffers and becomes “letting off steam”.
But I am arguing that we need to start talking about what kind of direct and systematic teaching children need, and when. Education is not a supermarket, with rows of experiences and activities for children to browse and select from, as the mood takes them. A full swing back to an jnfant school curriculum based solely on exploration and play would just fail children again.
In Europe there is a wide understanding, amongst both professionals and parents, of what a systematic approach to the first seven years of education and care looks like: introducing children to sounds and rhythm, developing their aural discrimination, encouraging collaborative enterprises, problem-solving and conversation, and developing physical skills through exciting activities like woodwork. As children get older, this systematic approach leads on to carefully planned and often whole-class teaching. We should experiment more, and think about the sort of planning and structures that would show the links between earlier and later teaching in the child’s first seven years. The walls between Key Stage One and the Early Years Foundation Stage need holing, undermining and knocking down.
I was once with a group of Swedish teachers as they went into a Reception class in a London school. From the look on their faces, you might have thought they had been taken back to Victorian times to see children working in a shoe polish factory. There really is little to be said in favour of what was in front of us: one group of four and five year olds being drilled on sounds, and a second gathering of pained-looking infants who seemed to be practically crushing the pencils in their hands as they carved through the paper in their workbooks. Practically all of those children would have learned to read and write much faster, and with much more enjoyment, a year later.
It could happen. But it needs us to take part in free professional debate, and discussion with parents, so that we can develop a coherent understanding of child development and learning and the role of teaching for the whole of the first seven years.
Monday, 5 November 2007
Early childhood education and care: some of this week's news
UK government continues to allow parental smacking
Lots of disappointment: after the promised review of the law on smacking, the government has decided not to make it illegal. The main reason for this appears to be that parents themselves did not want a ban.
Setting out his reasoning, Kevin Brennan, the current Children's Minister, said in a written statement to Parliament that "a majority of parents say that smacking should not be banned outright".
Before getting onto the question of whether or not this is the right decision, it strikes me as strange that the government makes it decision based mainly on polling evidence from the group of people who would be most affected. It's always difficult to find direct analogies, but isn't this rather like the government basing its decisions on whether to implement toll roads on a poll of motorists?
Whatever happened to making decisions by considering the public good? There is not attempt to do this at all here: the views of parents are considered but no-one else's. Paediatricians, teachers, social workers, the Children's Rights Commissioner, children themselves...all interested parties to this decision, surely?
So, the argument is made in the most foolish way possible.
I am against smacking, hitting or physically hurting children as a form of discipline. Nonetheless I think that the government has made the right decision, though for the wrong reasons.
I don't think that governments should intrude this far into the family. When governments get unnecessarily in between the child and the parent, everyone - ultimately the whole of society - will suffer. We need to trust parents: and because, increasingly, we don't, we are suffering from a collective crisis of confidence in the parenting role.
I thought that Jonathan Porritt put it well on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions when he was asked what message the government had given to parents and children by failing to ban smacking?
He replied:
I suppose the message they've given is that they would expect parents to take the principle responsibility for the way in which they bring up their children without being dictated or directed as to how to do that by government. And I think they've chosen to put the moral responsibility on the parents rather than make the moral responsibility vested in government and dealt with therefore by legislation or by sanction or whatever else it might be.
You can read the whole transcript here.
Lots of disappointment: after the promised review of the law on smacking, the government has decided not to make it illegal. The main reason for this appears to be that parents themselves did not want a ban.
Setting out his reasoning, Kevin Brennan, the current Children's Minister, said in a written statement to Parliament that "a majority of parents say that smacking should not be banned outright".
Before getting onto the question of whether or not this is the right decision, it strikes me as strange that the government makes it decision based mainly on polling evidence from the group of people who would be most affected. It's always difficult to find direct analogies, but isn't this rather like the government basing its decisions on whether to implement toll roads on a poll of motorists?
Whatever happened to making decisions by considering the public good? There is not attempt to do this at all here: the views of parents are considered but no-one else's. Paediatricians, teachers, social workers, the Children's Rights Commissioner, children themselves...all interested parties to this decision, surely?
So, the argument is made in the most foolish way possible.
I am against smacking, hitting or physically hurting children as a form of discipline. Nonetheless I think that the government has made the right decision, though for the wrong reasons.
I don't think that governments should intrude this far into the family. When governments get unnecessarily in between the child and the parent, everyone - ultimately the whole of society - will suffer. We need to trust parents: and because, increasingly, we don't, we are suffering from a collective crisis of confidence in the parenting role.
I thought that Jonathan Porritt put it well on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions when he was asked what message the government had given to parents and children by failing to ban smacking?
He replied:
I suppose the message they've given is that they would expect parents to take the principle responsibility for the way in which they bring up their children without being dictated or directed as to how to do that by government. And I think they've chosen to put the moral responsibility on the parents rather than make the moral responsibility vested in government and dealt with therefore by legislation or by sanction or whatever else it might be.
You can read the whole transcript here.
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