Young children and racial justice

I feel considerable sympathy for Janet Lane, whose important new book Young children and racial justice has been ferociously attacked by the Mail on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph.

A discussion in the book about young children’s reactions to difference has been taken completely out of context to suggest that if a three year old says “yuk” in response to a spicy snack, he will be reprimanded for racism and reported to the local authority. This debate has quickly moved on from spicy bhajis to an over-heated discussion on the web resulting in the books’ publishers, the National Children’s Bureau, receiving more than fifty abusive letters and emails.

The book seems to have provoked a fear that the thought police are after our babies and toddlers, with the Sunday Telegraph claiming the book argues that “even babies cannot be ignored in the drive to root out prejudice”. This is a line of argument which treats all of us who work in the early years as if we are absolutely stupid and helpless. Janet Lane’s book is exciting, provocative and argumentative. Herman Ouseley, former executive chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, finds it “challenging, sometimes arguably contestable, always interesting”. It engages with its readers as people with minds of their own. It does not claim to be an instruction manual for staff to follow. Nor does it advocate what the Mail on Sunday calls the “regulation of private speech and thought”. But it does, powerfully, claim that children continue to suffer in British society because of racist attitudes, and that everyone who works with children needs to reflect on this and consider what needs to be done about it. The implication in the media that people who work with young children are simply putty in the hands of Ms Lane does a disservice to both her, and to us.

Having said that, I think we ought to notice times when problems which belong to the adult world are introduced to children who lack both the level of development to understand them or the agency to deal with them. The serious issues around racism are connected to housing, policing, international trade policy and employment practices. By focussing on interactions between young children we can mislead ourselves into thinking we are doing something of use, whilst missing the main point. I am reminded of the teachers who drive to work everyday and then deliver hair-raising lessons to children about the dangers of pollution and global warming, or nursery staff who are shocked by the child who stamps on a couple of ants and then go home and casually kill a thousand with a can of spray. We shouldn’t be surprised that children have exactly the same difficulties with differences between people, with cruelty and selfishness, that we all have; and as adults we need to take responsibility for making the world fairer, and bringing children up in that spirit. We need to make sure that we do not dump our own difficulties and moral uncertainties on the nursery.

Whatever happened to neighbourhood nurseries?

Does anyone still remember the Neighbourhood Nurseries scheme? The idea was that the government would encourage nurseries to be set up in poor neighbourhoods, with a (substantial) three-year grant. At the end of the three years, the grant would end and the nursery would sustain its existence through fees from parents.

I had to work with this scheme, but never understood the assumption behind it: that poor neighbourhoods would sustain nurseries solely through fees being paid by parents. I could not find any precedent, anywhere in the world, for childcare and nursery facilities in poor areas without a direct grant from the state or charitable source. Back in 2003, I wrote that "cashflow projections are slapped on to neighbourhood nurseries like the emperor’s new clothes - everyone knows that they are a fiction, but nobody is telling" (you can read that piece here).

In the same year, I had the chance to do a short presentation in front of the then Minister for Children and Families, Margaret Hodge. I thought I had a pretty clever ending, and going off-Powerpoint I read from Lorna Sage's memoir, Bad Blood. Sage remembers that, to her mother, vegetables were “dangerous and difficult to subdue. They had to be cooked all morning, particularly green ones like sprouts, which got very salty and stuck to the pan as their water boiled away, and came out in a yellow mush. Potatoes got the same treatment and her ritual Sunday lunchtime cry, as she lifted the saucepan lid – ‘They’ve gone to nothing!’ – became a family joke … But no, there was a grey sludge left at the bottom of the pan (we never needed to mash our potatoes) which had after all to be spooned resignedly on to our plates.”

I suggested that the Neighbourhood Nurseries might go the way of Ms Sage Snr's potatoes. It was clever-clever, and in any case when I had looked across the front row of the audience after Slide 1, I had discovered that the minister had gone.

This week, Nursery World wonders whether neighbourhood nurseries were "doomed from the start by their very nature", reporting that Wakefield, Bournemouth and other councils are wondering where they will find the money from to keep theirs open. Many others have gone under already. Business plans projected 91% occupancy: it turned out to be nearer 30%. Those plans would have lasted about five minutes in Dragon's Den.

It is easy, obvious, to say that the whole idea was poorly thought-out and never looked likely to work. The money could have been much better-used, too. Lots of nursery schools have closed in the last five years, despite being recognised as the best form of early childhood education (by Ofsted and others). Just a small portion of the neighbourhood nurseries money would have kept them all open.

And how about the cost in terms of effort, and the unhappiness amongst local councillors, nursery practitioners, parents and others when they discovered it was all for nothing? Parents in poor communities have experienced yet another here-today, done-tomorrow scheme that hardly even got going.

Early Years Foundation Stage: more to debate

I think there is at least some good news in the announcement that the government is reconsidering two aspects of the new EYFS.

I think that it is pretty clear that some of the Early Learning Goals are over-ambitious (to be nice). They show a lack of knowledge about child development. In passing, it is also worth noting that these ELGs are not new, they have been part of the Foundation Stage for a number of years now.

It isn't likely that children, by the end of their reception year, will all be writing sentences and using punctuation correctly. Because of the school-starting age in England (the year in which a child is five years old) some of those children will have only just had their fifth birthday. Some of them won't even be five until the summer holidays.

Many children will be developing and learning perfectly well, without yet writing and punctuating. In most of the rest of Europe this would not be noticed, because their formal education would not yet have started. So the fact that year after year, a substantial proportion of English children do not meet these goals, should not be much of a surprise. Scrap them. Both. Let young children have a proper early education of movement, music, poetry, and creativity.

As far as planning to exempt some early years settings from meeting the requirements of the EYFS - I am much less sure. My take on this, is that it has come about following intensive lobbying from private schools and private nursery providers. Many of these providers are perfectly fine, and some are absolutely excellent. But others want to continue to take big government subsidies - from the Working Tax Credit, and from the nursery education grant - without doing anything about the poor experiences they offer young children. I've visited one too many private nurseries in damp London basements where children get the occasional sniff of stagnant air in a playground that feels like it's at the bottom of a well. Where staff work incredibly long shifts, with few breaks, and tend to leave after just a few months.

The Steiner and Montessori associations have worked out how they can live with the EYFS. So why the special exemptions for others?

Before I finish - why does the Telegraph continue to refer to the curriculum for the Reception Year in primary schools as the nappy curriculum? Not long ago, the children of Telegraph-reading parents would be off to boarding school aged seven. Are they keeping their children in nappies now to five?