5 things to reflect on in the EYFS

In this post, I’m going to be discussing five aspects of early years practice which can be controversial. These are sometimes thought of as conflicts, in something like the following ways:

• Play-based vs formal learning
• Reducing workload and paperwork vs defending observation-based assessment
• Child-led experiences vs a practitioner-designed curriculum with set outcomes
• Sequencing the learning of skills vs letting children do things when they want to or are ready
• Meeting children’s emotional needs first vs helping children’s emotional and cognitive development to grow together

1. We need to have a pedagogical repertoire 

The current evidence suggests that we need a ‘hybrid’ approach to working with young children in the EYFS. This involves getting the learning and care environment right for the children, to enable them to play, make choices, and develop. Sometimes it means standing back and letting children develop their own play and activities. Sometimes it means stepping in to help them solve problems or to extend their learning with new ideas and vocabulary. Sometimes it means adults following the child’s lead, and sometimes it means adults directly teaching a child something they need to learn. 

For most of the time, the best practice is in the middle. The following graphic from Learning, Playing and Interacting (DFE, 2009) illustrates this

What’s best for children in the early years changes as they grow older. For babies and toddlers, the adult role is mostly to respond to the child’s play and interests with warmth and genuineness. This remains true throughout the phase, but for older children there should be an increased focus on ensuring that they are introduced to a broad range of experience, and learn knowledge, skills and vocabulary beyond their areas of initial interest. Phonics teaching needs to be carefully sequenced, delivered in an engaging way, and fast-paced. Children need to become fluent in their knowledge of letters and the sounds they make, with quick and automatic recall. That requires plenty of practice. 

Ofsted’s definition of teaching in the early years is useful:

Teaching should not be taken to imply a ‘top down’ or formal way of working. It is a broad term that covers the many different ways in which adults help young children learn. It includes: their interactions with children during planned and child-initiated play and activities, communicating and modelling language, showing, explaining, demonstrating, exploring ideas, encouraging, questioning, recalling, providing a narrative for what they are doing, facilitating and setting challenges. It takes account of the equipment that adults provide and the attention given to the physical environment, as well as the structure and routines of the day that establish expectations. 

Ofsted, 2019, p. 80

You could think of that range of styles as being a practitioner’s repertoire. Like an actor plays many parts, an early years practitioner uses many different approaches to helping children to learn. 

We select from our repertoire by using our professional judgement. We need to make those decisions by thinking clearly: which approach will help the child or children to further their development or learn something new? 

If we are focussing on the learning environment, how are we providing for new challenges so that the child who has accomplished something on Tuesday can practise it again for a few days and then try something even more challenging the next week? 

If we are listening and talking with children, how are we extending their thinking (e.g. shared, sustained thinking) and/or their vocabulary (introducing new words in a natural and engaging way during a conversation). 

2. We need to have an appropriate assessment ‘toolbox’ 

We’ve got used to ‘tracking children’s development’ as the reason for our observing and assessing children. 

That has created an unsustainable workload. It has generated huge practitioner stress. It has taken practitioners away from children. Sadly, the important job of using keen observation to get to know each child has turned into a deadening chore, ‘doing observations’. 

It is much more important to focus assessment on what children can do, what they know, and how they are developing as learners. 

Quality is much more important than quality: if we can see exactly what a child can and cannot do, then we can support their further learning. Just replicating lines from Development Matters does not help us with this. 

Here is a good example from Celebrating Children’s Learning. A practitioner notices that a child is ‘making links’ (part of the Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning). The observations are careful and precise. You can see how the child’s knowledge of numbers underpins their creative and critical thinking: 

On the other hand, here is an example of a less useful observation. Notice the lack of precision: the observation merely repeats a sentence from Development Matters and tells us little:

‘Justin demonstrates friendly behaviour, initiates conversations and forms good relationships with peers and familiar adults.’

Thinking about the core purpose of assessment: you could use the first observation to help the child to build on their learning by exploring other examples of ‘two more’. The second observation does not help you to consolidate or extend the child’s learning. 

Once again, you may Ofsted’s wording useful:

Integral to teaching is how practitioners assess what children know, understand and can do, as well as taking account of their interests and dispositions to learn (characteristics of effective learning), and how practitioners use this information to plan children’s next steps in learning and to monitor their progress.

Ofsted, 2019, p. 80

3. Progress can be defined as being able to do more, and knowing more 

Part of ‘tracking’ children in the EYFS is measuring their progress by monitoring how they move from one band to the next in Development Matters. That was never the intention of that document. 

Although the commission for assessment without levels did not specifically discuss assessment in the EYFS, I think its findings are relevant the early years:

Too often levels became viewed as thresholds and teaching became focused on getting pupils across the next threshold instead of ensuring they were secure in the knowledge and understanding defined in the programmes of study. In reality, the difference between pupils on either side of a boundary might have been very slight, while the difference between pupils within the same level might have been very different. 

Progress became synonymous with moving on to the next level, but progress can involve developing deeper or wider understanding, not just moving on to work of greater difficulty. Sometimes progress is simply about consolidation. 

Levels also used a ‘best fit’ model, which meant that a pupil could have serious gaps in their knowledge and understanding, but still be placed within the level. 

Department for Education, 2015, p. 12

For example, children can be assessed as moving from one band to the next in their understanding of number, without having the secure and deep understanding they need. Practitioners feel that they ought to ‘move children on’ so they start teaching children to count bigger numbers. Instead, it might be better to continue the focus on numbers up to 5, with many repeated opportunities to explore the part-whole relationships (2 and 3; 4 and 1 etc). This approach helps to deepen children’s understanding of the ‘fiveness of five’. Real problems, like always having to put 3 plates back on the shelf in the home corner and park 5 bikes in the parking spaces, can give children lots of opportunities to practise and repeat counting. They might say things like ‘there is still one missing’ or ‘we’ve parked four of the bikes now’.  This builds deeper and wider understanding of number over time, without the rush always to cover new content. 

Similarly, as children first tackle and then become more confident at pedalling trikes, they lay down the ‘muscle memories’ they need to steer and pedal at the same time without really needing to think about it. As a result, practitioners can introduce new challenges, like having to negotiate tricky obstacles. Here is an example from Celebrating Children’s Learning

Other examples of knowing more and doing more include:

• Being able to take part in longer conversations
• Using new vocabulary e.g. the names of birds, flowers or minibeasts seen and talked about during a Forest School session
• Knowing the language to use when talking about shapes and their properties e.g. corner or triangle; being able to pick out and talk about shapes and their properties in the environment, in picture books etc 
• Knowing the words and actions of a finger rhyme; knowing the words of a song; knowing when a piece of music will get louder, or quieter and responding to that when playing along with it; knowing the steps of a dance routine (pop music) or a traditional dance (e.g. country dancing)

4. The steps you take you are learning to do something can look different to your final accomplishment

Footballers don’t train by playing a 90-minute football match every day. Marathon runners don’t run 26 miles regularly. Instead, their training helps them to improve on specific aspects of their performance. One day they might work to develop their stamina. The next day they might work on their speed or dexterity etc. They bring it all together when they are playing in the big match or completing their special run. 

These smaller units of practice or training can be called ‘components’. To do something difficult, a young child has to bring together lots of components successfully, in a co-ordinated way. They can’t think about each individual step: if they did, they would overload their working memory. 

If you have learnt to drive, you will know that at first every little task seems to require all of your concentration – clutch pedal, gear, mirror, signal, gas pedal and so on. But after a while, these steps become automatic. Soon, you do not find it difficult to check for oncoming traffic in your mirrors and pull out all at the same time.

When children can automatically combine a series of different steps in order to achieve an end goal, that can be called a ‘schema’. Babies, for example, have a grasping schema: they reach out, pull their fingers tight around the object, and then pull their arm and hand back. In order to use scissors, here are some of the things you need: 

• To have the fine motor skills to get fingers and thumbs into the holes;  
• To co-ordinate your movements so that the blades open and shut; 
• To co-ordinate all of that with holding the paper, or Sellotape, at the right angle and in the right place. 

You need schemas of grasping and manipulating and you need to be able to co-ordinate them. It’s a lot to think about at the same time. Anyone who spends much time with little children know how overwhelming or even impossible the task can feel to them. 

So you would be wise not to give scissors to a child who isn’t yet able to manipulate and grasp things. To help them with those components, you would probably encourage lots of manipulation and grasping through Treasure Basket and Heuristic Play, sand and water play, going outdoors picking flowers and picking up small stones, playing with blocks and Duplo etc.  

Even when children have securely developed those schemas, and practised applying them to the task of cutting with scissors, there is more for them to learn and improve. For example, you learn from experience about the angle which the blades must approach the material you want to cut. You need to do a lot of cutting before you get a ‘feel’ for that. 

So, children have first of all to be shown and given a lot of help in order to use scissors. But then, once they have mastered the first steps, they need to practise over and over again until they get the whole performance right. Sometimes when I see a small child struggling to use scissors, I am amazed that anyone ever gets it right. Yet when I cut paper with scissors, I hardly give it any attention. 

To become good at using scissors, you have to practise over and over again. This is sometimes called ‘overlearning’. You can’t call a child skilled at using scissors just because they can cut paper. They need to keep practising, even though in one way they have already mastered all the skills. 

You could look at handwriting in the same way. It’s tricky to write even a single letter correctly: you need to co-ordinate a range of motor and visual-motor skills. Lots of children – as many as 30%,– will experience difficulties. So adults need to keep a very close eye on what children are doing, and correct them when they go wrong (the Education Endowment Foundation, p.15).

 Bad habits, like holding the pencil with the wrong grip, are very hard to unlearn. But it’s only when children can write with a fluent, comfortable script automatically, that they will be able to concentrate on what they want to say, rather than labouring painfully with the formation of each letter and then forgetting the word or the sentence they intended to write. 

That’s why children in the early years need a very wide range of activities and experiences, some of which don’t look anything like ‘learning to write’, if they are going to become good writers later in their schooling. Here’s how the City of York Early Years team have explained that in a graphic:

5. It’s important to help children develop their self-regulation and executive function in the early years

The early years is an incredible time of learning. We never learn as much, as fast, again in our lives. As Usha Goswami has argued (2015), children think similarly to adults, but they have less experience to draw on. When life at home and in early years setting gives children lots of varied experiences, they don’t just come to know more; they also become more powerful learners. 

Here are two aspects of becoming a more powerful learner. 

Firstly, once you know some things, it is easier to learn more. Once a child knows about a dinosaurs, for example, and knows some of their names, they can quite quickly learn a lot more. They learn to name and recognise more if an adult helps them whilst they are playing with model dinosaurs, or reads engaging books about dinosaurs to them, or guides them to an online video about the Jurassic era. 

Secondly, positive experiences of relationships and learning environments in the early years help children to become more powerful learners. Here’s some of that story. 

Small babies are very dependent on their main carers to help them regulate their emotions. When a small baby is hungry, it can feel catastrophic to the baby. They might cry and experience distress. It is important that the adult acknowledges that distress, but does not feel it for themselves. The adult can help by soothing the baby, being reassuring, and feeding the baby. Repeated, positive experiences of these kinds mean that, in time, the baby can start to self-regulate. Instead of feeling distress or crying piteously, an older baby might gesture towards the fridge to indicate hunger, or might crawl towards their highchair. 

As toddlers begin to develop their independence, they might want everything straight away and to do everything themselves. That can lead to tantrums, snatching, pushing and hitting. The repeated experience of adults setting limits in a firm but calm manner is how adults regulate toddlers. In time, the toddler generally knows that they will get their turn in the end, so they might wait a little, or they might say ‘me do it’. They are now starting to self-regulate. 

Emotional self-regulation develops together with cognitive self-regulation. Cognitive self-regulation helps you to set yourself a goal, and work towards that goal through taking different steps. If you wanted an apple on the table, you could scream, cry and yell – in which case you are not showing much self-regulation. Or you could suppress the great feelings of desire you have for the apple whilst you drag a stool over, climb onto the stool, balance, reach over the table, and finally get the apple. That requires a lot of self-regulation. 

Similarly, some children in the early years with poorly developed self-regulation might go into an area where there is Duplo, and just grab everything they want. Others might have a plan in their head to build a house. They might start with a base, then gradually get the bricks they need, the windows, the doors etc. 

Some young children who are struggling to regulate their feelings will want an adult to help with that regulation: they may want a cuddle, or a bit of attention and help. Other children might find that working on an activity helps them to self-regulate emotionally. Consider the child who finds the start of the nursery day hard. They immediately want to play with the trains and train tracks. That helps them to feel calm. They would not be helped at all by a key person who wanted to urge a cuddle onto them.  

The two aspects of self-regulation develop side-by-side: it’s not simply a case of having to develop emotional self-regulation first, so you can then develop cognitive self-regulation next. 

So, how can we help children to develop self-regulation. 

It is principally pretend play which helps this important development. When you play in the home corner, you can’t have everything you want immediately. You might want to be the mum, but perhaps the only role available is being the baby. If you want to join in, you have to be able to regulate your desires. In turn, ‘being the baby’ is a limited role. You might want to put on the Superman cape, but you can’t if you want to stay in the game. Solo pretend play is the same. If you are going to use a broom to ‘ride the horse’, you must regulate your movements to be horse-like. 

Many young children struggle with developing their self-regulation. This might lead them to avoid pretend play. The trouble is, the more they avoid it, the less they develop their self-regulation. If you are not careful, they end up falling further and further behind the others. No-one plays with them. So they fill their time with low-level play that does not involve pretending. They need adults to help them learn how to pretend and play. 

An important part of self-regulation is called ‘Executive Function’. This is all about the child’s ability to concentrate and persevere. You can see strong Executive Function skills when a child keeps on making their model bus, even though there are lots of other interesting things and distracting noises around the room. The child knows what to attend to – their idea of the bus – and what to ignore. 

As children come towards the end of the EYFS, both the play they choose, and the learning that adults guide, help them to develop their Executive Function. Through high-quality phonics teaching, for example, children will get better at discriminating between different sounds, and matching sounds to letters. They know that they must listen to the sound the practitioner is making, rather than using up all their attention on fiddling with the Velcro fasteners on their shoes. 

The comments from the Harvard Center for the Developing Child are helpful:

‘Interventions that include an explicit focus on executive function skills do not need to be implemented separately from those focused on instruction in early literacy and math abilities. Indeed, the complex interactions that occur among executive functioning, social competence, and academic skills in preschool classrooms underscore the likely value of blending interventions designed to strengthen working memory, inhibition, and attention control with curricula focused on early literacy and math skills’.

Concluding thoughts

I’ve written this blog because I think it’s important to reflect on and then propose changes to some of the ways of working in the early years. This isn’t the same as wanting to fire the first shots of an all-out war. The early years sector is at its best when we’re listening to each other as we debate, challenge and disagree. I hope you’ve found these ideas interesting and I’d welcome your comments and views.