Like these worrying research findings.
The national evaluation of the Early Education Pilot for Two Year Old Children [PDF] concludes that “ provision quality for disadvantaged young children has not improved significantly since the NNI data was collected in 2004/5.”
In case we forget, this during a period of incredible investment in the early years. For example, over half a billion pounds was made available to local authorities between 2006-2011 to fund two programmes to increase graduate leadership in private and voluntary early years settings, according to the final report from the DFE on the Graduate Leader Fund [PDF].
Meanwhile, my exploration of Ofsted's new Data View tool shows that, in the context of overall improvement, the gap between Early Years inspection outcomes in the most-deprived areas of England and the least deprived remains significant:
[View the table full-size]
Of course, numerous health warnings apply to statistics and quality measures. All the same, it's a worrying "double whammy" - children growing up in poor neighbourhoods are more likely to experience poorer early education and childcare.
The BBC reports today that "Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's special adviser on education, says a long-term characteristic of the UK's education system has been social division - with a polarisation between the results of rich and poor pupils." It seems that the polarisation starts very early.
And it seems about to get worse as the government pushes forward with the changes to ratios creating a two tier system where those that can afford the best get the best start and those can't - don't.
ReplyDeleteSo very cross - whatever happened to Every Child Matters?
I think you're right that things are more likely to get worse than better. Perhaps the second question is - why didn't we do better in the last decade? Or are we expecting change to happen too fast? One of my suggestions is something like a "pupil premium" for children attending nursery in poorer areas. Liz Truss's proposal to stop Local Authority monitoring, which often links to quality improvement projects, isn't going to help, either....
ReplyDeleteThankyou so much for your posts. I find them so refreshing to read, and I take courage from your belief in us early years teachers to assert what we know is right for young children and resist the constant 'schoolification' those of us working in primaries are subjected to.
ReplyDeleteThanks; heartening to get comments like yours.
ReplyDeleteJulian