Inside the secret garden

EYFS review: Lord Ouseley and Jane Lane "shocked and disappointed" by lack of emphasis on racial equality

2012-01-21T17:42:00.001Z

In a powerfully-written submission to the Tickell Review, Lord Ouseley (former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality) and Jane Lane (advocate worker for racial equality in the early years) express their strong concerns about the proposed new framework. They argue firstly that there should be stronger requirements to monitor incidents of racial discrimination, and secondly that with the loss of all the materials that were included the original framework, practitioners will lack guidance on how to promote racial equality and take on discrimination. (You can read their response as a Google Document, or see the full text pasted at the end of this post.)

The original EYFS, for all its flaws, did include some very useful guidance around issues like racial equality - so one wonders where practitioners will turn now. The whole issue is always in danger of going quiet. Yet, as they argue, the recent conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence raised many troubling questions, not least how deep are the roots of attitudes like their violent hatred of black people and other ethnic minorities. Why don't early years settings and schools do more to challenge and change such attitudes in children and young people? Probably because staff feel worried about getting something wrong, and lacking overall in confidence and guidance. So it would seem that the best way forward would be to add more training and time to talk to the guidance that already exists on paper. Instead of which, the proposal is to take away the minimal amount of guidance that was in the EYFS pack - and perhaps send, albeit unintentionally, the message that this is no longer a priority. Reading their response to the consultation is like taking a fortifying draft that knocks out that complacency.

RESPONSE TO THE DfE CONSULTATION ON ITS RESPONSE TO THE CLARE TICKELL REVIEW OF THE EARLY YEARS FOUNDATION STAGE.

January 2012.

Comments by Lord Herman Ouseley and Jane Lane*

(As before, our comments only concern issues of racial equality)

Summary

We are shocked and disappointed that the specific points (among other important points) that we raised in our submission and comments to the DfE in September 2011 have not been addressed.

We wrote :

We believe that it is vital :

to extend the equality aspects of the EYFS statutory framework by requiring effective ethnic monitoring mechanisms to identify any potential discrimination and

to provide effective practice guidance on racial equality issues to accompany the Framework.

This is in order to ensure that all children are treated equally, wherever they are educated and cared for in their early years and are prepared and provided with positive and constructive opportunities to learn to accept one another as equal and valued members of our society.

In the light of :
the many examples of racial inequality and discrimination in our society and
research evidence over 50 years of the early age that children learn their attitudes to differences between people,
our pertinent recommendations should be seen as positive and helpful ways of identifying and removing any racial discrimination, and beginning the process of preventing any negative attitude formation at the beginning of children’s lives.

Discussion

Earlier this month the high profile case of the convictions for the murder of Stephen Lawrence drew much media attention. This included questions as to how, why, where and when the appalling racially prejudiced attitudes and behaviour of the two defendants had arisen in the first place.

But such attitudes leading to violence are only one aspect of the racism and the institutional racism in our society, as defined in the Macpherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. Our specific concern is in the way racism is perpetuated in subtle, deeply entrenched and largely unconscious ways and that it is not yet seriously recognised for the insidious danger that it is - the way in which racially prejudiced attitudes may be learnt and imbibed so unconsciously. The Macpherson Report defined this sort of racism, in its definition of institutional racism, as ‘unwitting’ and ‘thoughtless’. It is this particular form of racism that the EYFS needs to address and which the latest DfE/EYFS document singularly fails to do.

As we identified in our last two submission papers (September 2011 and September 2010), evidence over 50 years shows that the early years of children’s lives, long before they attend formal schooling, are the time when their attitudes to those who are different from themselves begin to develop. Evidence also shows that, unless young children are provided with positive opportunities and experiences to learn to respect such differences and value one another equally, then they may, in our society, learn to be racially prejudiced. Such prejudice may in some instances develop into racial discrimination, hatred and violence as they grow older. Young children are like sponges in absorbing the values, attitudes, judgements and stereotypes of all that is around them. Attitudes are learnt and perpetuated from generation to generation, often unconsciously and unrecognised.

So the Lawrence case is a wake-up call for those of us who work with and care for young children. We need to consider how best we can take action to provide them with regular and constructive opportunities to learn positive attitudes and behaviour to differences between people and to unlearn any negative attitudes and behaviour that they may have already learnt.

It is of great credit to those writing the original Early Years Foundation Stage that the importance of raising these issues with young children was raised and identified in the Guidance. It is this vital aspect of the EYFS that is no longer a part of the new EYFS and therefore no longer available to policy makers, trainers and practitioners.

In addition, since our 2011 submission the implications of the 2010 Equality Act have become more apparent. One local authority, Essex, has stated that, with regards to advice, support and training for the Early Years sector in equality issues, their line is to focus very much on the requirements of the Equality Act directly, particularly as the Equality Duty applies to any organisation that is carrying out a ‘public function’. The delivery of the free early education entitlement is viewed as a public function on behalf of a local authority. This is important in recognising the critical involvement and responsibility of all early years settings receiving the entitlement, whether statutory, private, voluntary or independent, to comply with the Equality Duty. It should not be seen as onerous or a burden but as a way of breaking down barriers to every child having an equal chance in life.

A PLEA TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE AND THE DfE TO RE-CONSIDER THE PREVIOUS DECISIONS AND TO :

1) ISSUE GUIDANCE TO ACCOMPANY THE EYFS FRAMEWORK

We urge the Secretary of State and the DfE to reconsider their decision not to issue Guidance to accompany the EYFS and, in the light of our continuing comments and the questions asked after the conviction of Stephen Lawrence’s murderers, to recognise the responsibility of government to provide support to enable all children to grow up with positive opportunities to learn to respect and value one another and any differences between them. Practical Guidance, as originally devised to accompany the Framework, should be crucially supportive of this objective.

2) REQUIRE ETHNIC MONITORING MECHANISMS TO IDENTIFY ANY DISCRIMINATION

We urge the Secretary of State and the DfE, in order to comply with their duties under the Equality Act, to require local authorities to devise effective ethnic monitoring mechanisms, including the collection of relevant ethnic data, to identify any racial discrimination in the way early years settings are organised and their services delivered.

NB. We would be happy to offer support and advice to the DfE in furtherance of our recommendations.

*
HERMAN OUSELEY
Member of the House of Lords
Chair of PRESET (PRESET Education Trust)
Former Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality
email : ouseleyh@parliament.uk

JANE LANE

Advocate worker for racial equality in the early years
Associate, National Children’s Bureau
77 Baker Street, Reading RG1 7XY

email : jane@janelane.plus.com

telephone/fax : 0118 959 7834

Author of Young children and racial justice – taking action for racial equality in the early years – understanding the past, thinking about the present, planning for the future (2008). National Children’s Bureau.

The autistic boy who made a friend and the men who stare at goats

2012-01-15T23:02:00.003Z

In the week before Christmas, children from different schools in Tower Hamlets came to sing in the Town Hall. They sang beautifully, and it was altogether a moving experience.

Sometimes, children can seem hidden away from the general public, kept apart in their nurseries and schools. Equally, staff in office blocks can feel trapped behind phones and screens, and miss any sense of connectedness or belonging.

When the singing ended, a member of the audience asked me if I remembered her – and, unusually for me, I did. Her child had attended the nursery where I worked many years ago as the special needs co-ordinator. He had struck me as having an unusual way of talking and relating to the other children, and the more I observed and spoke to his parents, the more we began to realise that he might have special needs.

The services worked together very well, and he was diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder shortly afterwards. During his final year in nursery we worked very hard on supporting his play and friendships.

There was some controversy amongst the professionals about this – some of the team felt that we should concentrate more on his basic communication and early life skills. But his mum, many years later, remembered with great fondness the “special books” about his play, his love of the outdoors, and his early friendship with another boy. It had been just the start he needed, she said.

Earlier that week, I had been helping my daughter with her science homework about solids, liquids and gases. I was honestly amazed by how much of what we think of as a solid material is actually “space”. Richard Dawkins explains it really well in The Magic of Reality: How we know what's really true, by means of the story of Major General Albert Stubblebine III and his courageous attempt to walk through a wall, first told in Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Dawkins writes that "you can't help feeling for General Stubblebine. He knew that the wall, and his own body, were made of atoms so spaced out that they were like footballs 15 kilometres apart. Surely, if both the wall and his own body were mostly empty space, he should be able to walk through the wall, slotting his atoms between the wall's atoms? Why couldn't he"

Because when we think of something as solid, what we really mean is that the bonds binding everything together are incredibly strong.

And watching the children as they made their way out of Tower Hamlets Town Hall, and remembering that little autistic boy playing in nursery more than a decade ago, I thought about how the bonds that hold us together can make us really strong in the early years, even when the gaps seem huge.

A version of this article was first published in Nursery World

P.S - to find out what happened to Stubblebine, have a look at this short clip from the film:

Parents and professionals can help children separately - or they can work together to the greater benefit of the children

2012-01-06T08:48:00.000Z

Developing a respectful and effective partnership with the parents of young children is crucial to work in the early years. But I wonder: is this more talked about, than actually done?

There is lots of pretty strong evidence to show that one of the biggest factors in children's early development and learning is the stimulation, care and conversation they receive at home - but how do we act on that research in a spirit of partnership with parents, and avoid promoting a kind of "ideal parent" model which is so off-putting to so many people (and rightly so)?

In 1990, Chris Athey wrote that "parents and professionals can help children separately, or they can work together to the greater benefit of the children." I don't think anyone has put it any better than that.

This post consists of the notes I made before writing my keynote for the Learning Trust's 2012 Conference about parent partnerships, summarising some of the recent research. This includes:

what EPPE says about parents and the home
notes from the research project "Warning: group ahead"
Todd Risely's research about early communication at home
the experiences of the parents of children involved in the pilot "Two Year Old Project"

I hope that these notes will be helpful to any early years practitioners and others who want to keep thinking, experimenting and developing practice in this important area.

Reference: Extending Thought in Young Children: A Parent-Teacher Partnership

The EPPE Project (paper: "Effects of the Home Learning Environment and Preschool Center Experience upon Literacy and Numeracy Development in Early Primary School" opens as a PDF)

Home Learning Environment ("HLE") has the biggest single effect on children's progress, larger than social/economic status (SES), quality of early years education, or any other single factor. Though HLE is associated with SES, the research shows that there are low SES households with good or better HLE and those children make good progress in their learning.
HLE was measured through a semi-structured interview with parents (not an actual visit to homes).
The interview asked about 14 activities: playing with friends at home, playing with friends elsewhere, visiting relatives or friends, shopping with parent, watching TV, eating meals with the family, going to the library, playing with letters/numbers, painting or drawing, being read to, learning activities with the alphabet, numbers/shapes, and songs/poems/nursery rhymes, as well as having a regular bedtime.
The seven social/routine activities (play with friends at home, and elsewhere, visiting relatives/ friends, shopping, TV, eating meals with family, regular bedtime) were not significant for under- or over-achievement in literacy and numeracy at age 5.
Conversely, the seven activities providing clear learning opportunities (frequency read to, going to the library, playing with numbers, painting and drawing, being taught letters, being taught numbers, songs/poems/rhymes) had significant positive effects.
The effects of the home environment and parenting upon children’s development may partly be due to the teaching and learning of specific skills (e.g., letter-sound relationships). However, the multiplicity of learning opportunities included in the HLE suggests that the effects may be related to more generalized and motivational aspects of child development (e.g., learning to learn).
However, it is clear that parenting is influenced by poverty. For instance, NICHD ECCRN (2005) reported that families in chronic poverty have less stimulating home environments but that the home environment improves as families move out of poverty. Also, families exposed to transient poverty appear to manage to maintain adequate home stimulation despite restricted resources. Wachs and Camli (1991) noted that crowding, the number of people coming and going in the home, and noise level, may have adverse effects on parenting and child development via a reduction in maternal involvement, verbal stimulation, and maternal responsivity.

Warning - group ahead (research based on a small but carefully chosen sample of Bristol parents about their experiences of groups like Children's Centre Stay and Play/ Play and Learn sessions, both in Children's Centres and those run by voluntary/community groups)

Services should be geographically accessible, conveniently timed, culturally sympathetic, locally-linked and not patronising or stigmatising to parents (Ramey and Ramey 1998).

MacLeod and Nelson (2000) concluded that programmes to promote family wellness and prevent child maltreatment should: start early (preferably during pregnancy), be flexible and responsive to parents' needs, and be strengths-based rather than deficit-based, focusing on empowering parents, rather than being expert-driven.

A summary of factors which are important to parents, according to a review of the research:

Awareness that the group exists (Bertram and others 2002, Coe and others 2008)

Inclusion and stigma - perception that it is suitable for that particular parent and child, including men (Ghate and others 2000b, NESS 2007), working parents and some black and minority ethnic groups (NESS 2007), and younger parents (Barlow and others 2004). Also parents needed to fell the service was not stigmatising (Anning and Ball 2007, Avis and others 2007, Carpenter and others 2005, Lang and Senior 2004, NESS 2007, Sheppard and others 2008, Smith 1999)

Practical accessibility that time, cost, location and language spoken were acceptable (Anning and Ball 2007, Avis and others 2007, NESS 2007).

Relevance – that parents thought the service would be useful to themselves and their child (Penn and Gough 2002, Barlow and others 2004)

Social and psychological factors – parents‟ lack of confidence could stop them attending a group (Avis and others 2007, Bertram and others 2002, Lang and Senior 2004, NESS 2007, Tunstill and Allnock 20070), as could their lack of trust in other members (Barlow and others 2004), or feeling marginalised by a clique of hard-core members (Sheppard and others 2008)

Organisational factors – the child‟s eligibility, availability of places, and relationships of parent/child with staff (Avis and others 2007, Barlow and others 2004, Dopson and others 2003, NESS 2007). Projects that empowered parents were more acceptable to them (Carpenter and others 2005).

Childcare – The availability of workers to look after their children was an attraction (NESS 2007), and some parents wanted to ensure their children would be safe (Avis and others 2007).

Timeliness – Parents wanted the group to be available when they were ready for it (Barlow and others 2004).

Personal contact/outreach much more effective than flyers, information boards, etc: "Nearly twice as many (80%) groups that parents were told about by people, were attended, compared to those they learned about from a letter, poster, leaflet or newsletter (43%)."

better-off mothers were more likely to attend groups.

how a mother found out about the early years group affected how often she went. Personal sources (friend, relative, health visitor) prompted much higher attendance than printed sources (poster, leaflet, newsletter or letter). Again, this echoes the importance of personal relationships in group attendance.

Many parents said they were put off by finding groups unfriendly; cliquey; made up of people from a different social class to them. Parents who are already vulnerable (e.g. living in poverty, mental health difficulties, multiple caring roles etc) are also the most likely to be put off by a single negative experience in a group:

"The level of discomfort could be considerably higher. Two mothers with much in common (large families, low self-esteem, experience of past abuse, living on state benefits, poor mental and physical health, overweight), both felt scorned by others in a group. One complained of being looked at as if she were a “piece of dirt‟ while waiting in the corridor before the group started; she could not bring herself to cross the threshold and never tried another group (Mother 29:412). In 10 years of raising young children, the other mother had attended a group just once, where “dirty looks‟ from the other mothers put her off all groups: “It was terrible. I walked in and they all gave you dirty looks. Looked at I like you was down and out.” (Mother 28:440: attended once, worst group)

It would seem that few resources (educational, financial, mental health) balanced against high needs (large family, many problems) and an accumulation of abuse, stress and trauma can severely dent a mother‟s confidence, whereas warm encouragement, pleasant group experiences and appropriate help from workers can increase it."

Learning Points for those Running Early Years Groups

"Agencies or individuals running groups should remember that printed publicity alone is unlikely to prompt regular attendance. Word-of-mouth is far more effective, from known and trusted people such as health visitors, but particularly from friends and relatives.

The importance of peer factors, particularly the problems of mothers not knowing anyone at a group, groups being cliquey (these two often overlapped), and the need for parents to feel comfortable with the social class of other members, must be recognised.

To combat cliquiness, skilled facilitators are needed and "welcomers‟ can help newcomers to integrate. Designing some groups to be short-term (six or eight sessions) allows less chance for a clique to form.

These measures were employed by Sure Start in the study area and, possibly as a result, fewer parents complained about Sure Start groups being cliquey compared to other types. Of 42 Sure Start groups that parents considered, only two (5%) were described as "cliquey‟, compared to 13 of the 55 (24%) other types of group.

An even bigger factor stopping mothers going to groups was not knowing anyone there (who they liked). The local Sure Start project tackled this by employing Family Link Workers to support parents struggling with difficult circumstances, one of whose tasks was to accompany them to groups the first few times. However, this did not always work. Some mothers struggling with the worst problems seemed to need one-to-one help in their own homes and may never have been able to attend groups. The psychological danger was just too great. The National Evaluation of Sure Start team called such parents “conditional users‟ (Garbers and others 2006, Tunstill and others 2005).

Although they can be very helpful for many parents, early years groups are not a panacea. Indeed, a sizeable minority of mothers in this sample (eight of 30 – 27%) did not need early years groups at all and were doing fine without them."

Research on communication at home in early childhood (by the American researcher Todd Risley)

Todd Risley and Betty Hart found that by the age of three, some American children would already have heard over 33 million words said to them by their parents. Others would have heard only 10 million.

Some would have heard over 500 thousand positive statements in response to their actions from their parents. Others would have heard fewer than 60 thousand.

The number of times a young child expresses her or himself at home ranges from 600 times an hour to less than 200 times.

The most effective strategy working with parents was to build up their confidence to talk more. Teaching particular tips on how to talk with children was no effective. “Focusing on parenting style misdirects our efforts. We don't have to try to get parents to learn how to talk differently to their children. We just have to help them practise talking more.”

Early Learning for Two Year Olds - parents' experiences and views

Outreach was found to be generally effective - parents did not find the forms too difficult and could get the help they needed.
Main reasons for parents to take up the place - overall 79% wanted the opportunity for their child to mix with others; 46% wanted their child to have the opportunity to learn new things and develop. But - amongst Asian families a different pattern - 69% for child to mix, 64% to learn new things. An interesting difference, I think.
Overall most parents were happy with the scheme, and 53% said they had no worries at all. Worries focussed on - the child being unhappy; the parent missing the child (41%).
Overall most parents valued the place at the end of the year for the opportunities it had given their child to learn and develop; but looking at the most disadvantaged group, they valued the place for the respite/parenting support it offered them.
Where a parent was unhappy with the scheme and withdrew their child it was mainly because the child was unhappy or the nursery was not seen as of sufficient quality. Many of those parents who were unhappy with the scheme said they had no one to talk to about their concerns.
Where parents needed help and support during the year, most were satisfied with the help they received but parents of children with SEN/disabilities much less likely to be happy. 23% said they would have liked more support (compared to 12% of all others); 24% had concerns which were not resolved (compared to 13% of all others).
Overall parents were very positive about the staff, especially valuing their approachability, care and concern for the child as an individual, and their ability to manage difficult behaviour. Where parents were not positive it tended to be for the opposite reasons (staff not approachable, not caring enough, etc).
20% of parents said they wished they had received more feedback about their child's development and progress. Overall, there was a close match of parents not getting feedback, and parents not being happy for other reasons. This matches interestingly to the finding in the C4EO report Grasping the Nettle that the most effective settings were characterised by " an ongoing weekly or monthly (rather than termly or annual) communication with parents".
Overall the scheme was found to be popular amongst parents, accessible, and parents were largely positive about it benefiting their children's social development, language and learning. However the research into children's outcomes found that overall there were no benefits to the scheme (though there were modest benefits for those children who attended the good quality settings). You could argue this puts a stark case for the fact that a service is popular with parents is not the same as it leading to improved outcomes for children...

The Learning Trust (Hackney) Early Years Conference 2012

2012-01-03T23:25:00.001Z

This is the PowerPoint for my keynote to the Learning Trust's 2012 Early Years Conference; if you would prefer to view it larger and download it, you can do that here.

Some of the links that people asked for during the day and which I promised to put up:

The Still Face Experiment - Dr Edward Tronick
Twins "talking" without using words

You can also read the notes I wrote to put this all together and access some of the research first-hand here. Thanks to everyone who listened, came to talk, and made me feel welcome in Hackney on a pretty grey and cold day. If you've got any further thoughts, ideas, or want to disagree, then feel free to post a comment or email me.

Who wouldn't smile at seeing a cow grazing in the east end of London? In praise of Eric Street Community Garden

2011-12-03T14:53:00.001Z

This makes me smile, when I walk past on the way from Mile End station in Tower Hamlets...

..but on a more serious note, the spaces around estates are often neglected, unloved, and pretty inaccessible. But the playful design of the "recipe tree" and the grazing cow seem to have made this feel more like a space people want to spend time in, play in, talk to each other in.

In Sowing the seeds: reconnecting London's children with nature [PDF], Tim Gill writes about the project:

Aims to give children and families a doorstep play space with a taste of nature
Landscaped green space with modest use of equipment and growing beds
Created in 2010 at a capital cost of £20k
Project-managed by East End Homes, funded through corporate sponsorship
Developed in two months through a collaboration with residents
Play Association Tower Hamlets runs supervised play sessions to build up familiarity and use.

So I'd say the project is a worthy runner up in the Gardening against the Odds competition and it's hard not to be impressed by Kerrygold's decision to provide a little bit of funding to create a little bit of pleasure in east London.

Why make babies and toddlers take part in group activities at nursery?

2011-11-23T01:42:00.001Z

Why should babies and toddlers in nursery and in Children's Centre Stay and Play groups be expected to take part in circle or group times?

There was an interesting debate about this amongst a group of nursery managers and trainers I was with recently. The starting point of the controversy wasthe American-designed Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS), whichawards a low score in part of the “Progamme Structure” scale if children underthree years old are obliged to take part in a group activity. The implicationof the scale is that it is better practice to allow toddlers to come and gofreely, depending on their interest.

I agree with ITERS. Toddlers and babies canvery much enjoy action songs, rhymes and books in small groups, and these canall contribute to their sense of being part of a group, and to their languagedevelopment. But I do not feel that it is necessary to oblige them to join in.

Often, in a toddler room, if a member ofstaff starts to sing, children will naturally be drawn over and will enjoytaking part. Other children will gain a lot from watching from the edges. Eventhose who carry on with their play will probably be aware of the group timeand, sooner or later, will start to take an interest.

But would such young children gain anythinguseful from being told off if they did not pay attention and take part? Thereis an argument that they need to be prepared for these sorts of activities,which will become more common as they become older. I do not find thatconvincing. If they have a negative experience in a group, might they end upbeing put off group activities in the future?

In a way, it is even worse when staff bringimmobile babies into group times, sat on their laps. The babies have no way ofexpressing any sort of choice at a time like this. At least toddlers can showwhat they think, by moving themselves away. Babies can cry, I suppose - but then they risk being thought of as tired, teething, or hungry, anything rather than fed up of circle time.

It may seem strange to think about theimportance of such young children being able to make choices. But to me, it iseven stranger to expect very young children to conform to unnecessary routinesin a nursery day. Babies and toddlers do not, in general, enjoy being in largegroups or following instructions. I think it is much better to go with them asthey are. Why force them into another way of being? In this respect, ITERSmakes a very important point.

A version of the piece was first published in Nursery World

"Steve Jobs has coded part of my baby's operating system"

2011-11-19T20:06:00.001Z

I like this 90 second clip on YouTube of a baby playing about with an iPad and failing to find much fun in boring old glossy magazines.

This shows one aspect of how babies think and learn very nicely. Babies use a lot of trial and error, and a kind of statistical analysis. If something works one time with one sort of thing, they will test it out on other things to find out if it is generalisable. So - first it seems that shiny A4 shaped things with pictures on them all allow you to move the pictures around if you swipe with your fingers. But further testing proves this to be untrue.

So the baby doesn't actually know about magazines and iPads. But she is not a blank slate: she has great systems for testing out hypotheses and working out the boundaries of concepts. From this sort of testing out, comes the ability to categorise. iPads, and things that are not iPads, for example.

There is another interesting example of how the brain actively constructs in the new Oliver Sacks book, The Mind's Eye. Except here Sacks is writing about how we don't just "see" the world, but we construct an idea of the world from the data our eyes give us, along with other brain activities.

Sacks has recently developed a scotoma, or blind spot. But he finds that often his brain will "fill in" the gaps of what he cannot actually see. Sacks writes: "if I stood two feet from a brick wall, my scotoma would turn brick red in color, but with no detail. If I stood twenty feet away, it would be perfectly respectable-looking brickwork. Whether the brickwork was exactly the same as the original I could not be sure, but it was good enough to form a plausible simulacrum of the "missing" wall ... I started to think of my visual cortex not just as a rigid duplicating device, but as an averaging device, capable of sampling what was presented to it and making a statistically plausible (if not photographically accurate) representation of it."

Although I enjoy the idea on the YouTube video that the baby thinks the magazine is a broken iPad, I would interpret it differently. I think the baby tries to assimilate all those shiny A4 sized things with pictures to a single concept. But she cannot assimilate them all. Some fit - but others don't. So she must change the structure of her thinking and create two concepts: shiny, A4 things that are iPads, and shiny A4 things that are not.

It is hard work, having to accommodate your thinking to the unexpected. As adults, we know the frustration - in your own car, you pull the knob to turn the headlights on, but then you hire a car on holiday and you are pulling and cursing only to find that this time you have to twist the same-looking knob.
So it is no wonder the baby gets cross. In fact, crossness and temper can often be signs that young children are struggling with something hard in their thinking, and maybe about to make a breakthrough - not simply being bad company and awkward.

All respect to Steve Jobs, but the iPad has come, and it will go - but the baby's "operating system" is powerful enough to keep dealing with an ever-changing world.

For a useful, brief discussion of the meanings of assimilation and accommodation see Piaget and Cognitive Development

With thanks to Gill and Marion for putting me onto this.

What experiences do nursery nurses say they think are worthwhile for children in the Early Years Foundation Stage?

2011-11-08T17:33:00.001Z

This post gives the abstract and link to my Institution-Focussed Study, submitted towards my doctorate in education from the Institute of Education.

Abstract

This paper is about a project in a small nursery school to explore how a group of nursery nurses talked about the experiences which they thought were worthwhile for the children. With a practical focus of seeking to improve the quality of the nursery education, the project enabled the nursery nurses to have time to talk about and develop their own theories, rather than being trained in “best practice”. The participants then learnt how to use a research tool, the Target Child Observation, in order to look more closely at the children’s experiences, and on the basis of this closer looking they then came back together to talk about what they had found. The paper explores how these conditions enabled the nursery nurses to develop their ideas, and how changes resulted. A high degree of control was given to the participants: they alone were responsible for collecting and reporting on all of the data about the children.

The paper argues that the nursery nurses were able to use these opportunities for reflection and study to explore and critically re-examine their ideas and their practices. For three of the four participants, this led to observable changes in the ways that they talked about the children and their learning, The high degree of control given to the participants meant that they did not appear to feel exposed in a way that was unsettling to them, and that critical reflection did not damage relationships. It is argued that, as a result, the research was ethical in the widest sense by providing benefit to those who took part and to the children.

Read the full study [PDF]

Black and white areas in nurseries - why have them?

2011-11-05T18:10:00.001Z

Nothing could be more welcome than the current high level of interest in how babies are cared for in nurseries. There are numerous “baby room projects” going on across the country, most notably the research project which is being led by Canterbury Christ Church University, and the training project led by Northamptonshire Council. Early Education’s new “Baby Room Special Interest Group” [PDF] has generated huge interest, too. It feels much better than how things were a few years ago, when I was advised that a not terribly good nursery practitioner working with three and four year olds “would probably be okay for the baby room”.

Much of the new interest in babies is prompted by the popularization of findings from both the study of observable child development, and from neuroscience. Not long ago, we did not think much of babies’ perceptual abilities and ability to think. The great nineteenth century psychologist William James argued that “the baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” It is now much more common to focus on the amazing sophistication of the baby’s senses and brain, with Alison Gopnik famously describing babies as “the best learning machines in the universe.”

This type of scientific way of talking about babies has done a lot to dispel the myth that a day in a baby room would be about as interesting as a day watching raindrops slide down a window. But it has its downsides, too. Parents can often be bamboozled – now that babies have become amazing learning machines, there is an assumed requirement to stimulate their learning and development all the time. The machine needs its fuel. The other day I was close to a popular park in North London when I saw a poster titled Genius Babies, listing information about babies’ brains, their synapses and trillions of connections and so on.

This is all very well, until you get further into the text and realise it is actually a sales pitch for a type of class for babies, offering various special activities (at a charge). Your amazement at the power of the “learning machine” is, therefore, turned into an anxiety that you are not doing enough and, therefore, a proportion of those trillions of neural connections might never happen if you do not take action and join a class.

Of course, many ordinary experiences will support a baby’s brain development just as well as any “genius baby” class, at no special cost. I feel the same way about caring for babies in nurseries – giving them attention, warm relationships, and interesting materials to play with inside and out is what we should be aiming at. So Treasure Basket and Heuristic Play, in the context of a caring environment organized around the key person approach, and a good range of other play materials, including natural materials like sand and water, inside and outdoors, will do very well for the babies.

On the other hand, I am very sceptical of some of the newer developments in the care of babies, especially the rise of black and white areas, and displays. I suppose the first thing I should declare is that I simply do not like them. I find them too stark and overstimulating. If I were immobile, I would hate to be put in an area of black and white toys or posters, with no way out.

Just like sellers of the “genius baby” classes, the proponents of the black and white trend cite scientific research and evidence. For example, the handbook which goes with the Northamptonshire Baby Room Project states the following:

“The first year of life is a critical period for development and learning. During this time, babies have difficulty distinguishing between different tones and shades. During their first few months of life, they see mostly in shades of grey. High contrasting colours, particularly black and white are a simple and effective way to stimulate babies’ vision. Black and white images in distinct regular patterns provide the highest possible contrast to the eye and gain babies’ attention. This helps develop neural connections in the baby’s brain. Babies are attracted to bold geometrical designs and these images can hold their interest and help them to focus. Spaces rich in high quality displays are necessary to promote visual development.”

In general, the Northamptonshire Baby Room Project has had a very positive impact on practice. For example, in the area where I work as an early years adviser, it has helped many practitioners to reflect on and develop the quality of their practice, But in this specific respect I would argue that the Project may have been taken in by some popular “myths” about babies’ visual abilities that have been propagated, mainly, by the toy industry. For example, careful scientific research does not support the view that babies see mostly in shades of grey in the first few months of life, or that they “need” to be exposed to large high-contrast (black-and-white) patterns to “promote visual development”. Professor Russell D. Hamer of the University of São Paulo and Affiliate Scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in California, with many years of experience studying infant vision, summarises the current understanding as follows: “Infants have been shown to have color vision at least as early as 2 to 8 weeks post natal (Allen, Banks and Norcia, 1993), and the likelihood is that they have color vision at birth.” While their color vision certainly seems to be developing over the first months and years, it is by no means absent in young infants.

Nor is there evidence to support the claim that during the first year of life, babies have difficulty in distinguishing between a wide range of shades of grey. For example, research by Norcia, Tyler and Hamer in 1990 showed that babies’ brains at nine weeks of age can respond to contrasts as low as 0.5%, only 2 times less sensitive than adults who were tested with the exact same patterns. A contrast of 0.5% is extremely subtle indeed, having 200 times less contrast than black and white (100%-contrast) patterns. This high sensitivity to contrast occurs, initially, for patterns that are relatively large – like the size of your fingers at arms length. But infants are by no means unable to see finer patterns if they have higher contrast.

If the science does not really stack up, then what about the practice? The handbook suggests that black and white patterns are an important resource because they gain babies’ attention and therefore develop neural connections in the baby’s brain. This claim is specious. While it is known that deprivation of pattern information arriving at the retina and brain (as can happen if a baby is born with a congenital cataract) can lead to a profound loss of acuity (detail vision) and contrast sensitivity, there is no evidence that the use of high-contrast large black-and-white patterns promote or accelerate development of neural connections in the visual centers of the brain. Thus the practice of emphasis on creating a high-contrast black-and-white environment is questionable.

I would argue that this approach to early years practice is misguided, and can mislead practitioners and parents alike. It is true that large high-contrast patterns do gain babies’ attention (they certainly gain mine); but is this type of attention-grabbing practice good for babies? As the research shows that babies are able to see a broad repertoire of patterns, contrasts and colors, surely it would be preferable to allow babies to direct their own attention during exploratory play in a normal environment rich with a range of stimuli. ”

Despite the science, marketing literature and even books for parents continue to claim that large black and white patterns are required to “develop neural connections”. One must be mindful that these sorts of statements can be very powerful. They can make practitioners feel that unless they take the suggested actions, the baby’s brain development will not be as good as it might have been. This puts people under a lot of pressure to bring in new practice.

Tina Bruce, Professor of Early Childhood Studies at Roehampton University, urges practitioners to take a different approach: “Quality practice refers to research and engages in dialogue with other practitioners about how it may or may not have application. It works best when it is building on the way parents spend time with their babies, so that parents are empowered and made confident. This avoids the problem of introducing innovations which are really pieces of fashion. Working with babies should never be based on passing fashions, but instead should embed tried and tested good practice, supported and informed by research and theory which helps practitioners to be reflective, and to adjust their practice in conversations with parents and grandparents accordingly.”

There are a few additional points to bear in mind here. First, there is an important difference between stimulating babies’ perceptual development – hearing and vision, for example – and their cognitive and social development. No particular techniques or pieces of equipment are needed to stimulate babies’ perceptual development. Evolution has seen to that. On the other hand, babies do need affection, language, and play opportunities in order to develop cognitively and socially. Those developments do not “just happen” – so in nursery, it is important that there is the right blend of care, stimulation and rest. In this respect, the Northamptonshire Baby Room Project has had a very positive influence on practice. It is also important to note that some babies with disabilities and special educational needs might require special forms of visual stimulation. They may benefit from more large, high contrast patterns in the environment than would normally be needed in the environment.

So what should practitioners do to help babies’ visual development? Dr Hamer points out that “a whole range of studies show that young infants have enough acuity, contrast sensitivity, color vision and focusing ability for me to say that the most sensible visual environment to create for them is a very natural one with the full range of colors, saturations, contrasts, pattern sizes, movement and even aesthetic and socially relevant ‘stimuli’ - artwork, faces, animals.” In other words – you do not need to do anything much at all. Give babies an environment which has a normal range of natural colours, contrasts, motion and their vision, attention and everything else will develop perfectly well in an atmosphere of care, cuddles, attention and affection.

A shorter version of this piece was first published in Nursery World

I would like to thank Professor Russell D. Hamer for his help with the science underpinning this article. However, any errors are my own responsibility.

References:

Does chromatic sensitivity develop more slowly than luminance sensitivity?
Allen D, Banks MS, Norcia AM.
Vision Res. 1993 Dec;33(17):2553-62.

Development of contrast sensitivity in the human infant.
Norcia AM, Tyler CW, Hamer RD.
Vision Res. 1990;30(10):1475-86.

Building dens - at Coombes Primary School and in East London

2011-10-29T14:55:00.003Z

Tim Gill recently put me onto this video about den-building at The Coombes CE Primary School, which I really like.

(Though I am not convinced by the argument, which I think Steiner first proposed, that children's play somehow harks back to earlier stages of human development; having said that, the commitment to this sort of play in Steiner-Waldorf schools is admirable).

Walking through Epping Forest this week, crossing back and forth between north-east London and Essex, has been a joy. The autumn sun has been so beautiful - and there have been dens everywhere. Here are three I liked:

How about being genuine when we talk with young children?

2011-10-23T18:33:00.000Z

Sometimes it seems as if the language spoken in nurseries isevolving in its own unique way, distinct from the ways that other people speak.

Take a recent example, which I keep hearing. Practitionerskeep asking young children to do “good looking, good sitting and goodlistening.” There is not any other field of life where people do “goodlistening” – I think generally people are described as listening well, orlistening carefully. It is the same with “good sitting”. I think peoplegenerally sit still, or they fidget and generally move about. It is rare to becomplimented on how well you sit. At least “good looking” sounds like theEnglish the rest of the world speaks, though it should be used with some carebeyond the nursery gate.

image: www.twinkl.co.uk

Does it matter that children are being talked to in oddways? Perhaps not. Children are pretty resilient, and this is probably mostlywashing over them. I doubt nursery children go home and compliment familymembers for “good looking” at the television, or “good sitting” on the sofa.

But in another way, I think it does matter. I would arguethat one of the most important things any of us can do, when working with youngchildren, is establish a relationship based on being genuine andstraightforward. In order to do this, we need to be aware of the times when weare in danger of treating children in an institutional rather than a genuineway.

Many years ago, the writer and trainer Elinor Goldschmied – who helped todevelop the key person approach – illustrated this by treating staff ontraining sessions to “nursery lunches”.Adults found themselves waiting at empty tables for quite some time, with noobvious prospect of food; then they had food plonked on their plates, wanted ornot, and were prevented from taking anything else until they had finishedeverything on their plate. Her message was beautifully clear: think carefullyabout the way you do things in an institution. If you do not like to be treatedthis way at lunch, then why should small children like it any better?

Being genuine also means using ordinary language, notinstitutional language with children. Why not ask the children to listencarefully rather than telling them to “do good listening”? I am sure it willfeel much nicer.

First published in Nursery World.

Tracy Seed comments on this piece in her blog: It's just not good enough

The new UK physical activity guidelines - why they matter, and why we need a 20:20 vision

2011-10-06T20:37:00.002Z

Earlier in the month, I listened to LenAlmond talking about the new UK Physical Activity Guidelines for the EarlyYears. You would be forgiven for wondering what these guidelines are all about,because they were hardly noticed by the media when they were launched earlierin the summer.

They make a clear argument: “there is emerging evidence that sedentary behaviour inthe early years is associated with overweight and obesity as well as lowercognitive development.” Additionally, patterns for screen time (TV, computergames etc) and being sedentary seem to be pretty stable over time. In otherwords, less active toddlers are likely to continue that way through theirchildhood and beyond, to the detriment of their health and their learning.

If all children inthe early years could be highly active for just an additional 40 minutes a day,their health would improve greatly. That means just an extra 20 minutes in nursery, and an extra 20 minutes at home – spread across the day – for children who are walkingunaided (there are separate guidelines for babies). That sounds like a smallenough change. A "twenty-twenty" vision.

But just providingbetter opportunities for highly physically-active play will not be enough.

WhenI was headteacher at Kate Greenaway Nursery School, we took part in a researchproject led by the National Children’s Bureau [PDF] which tracked the actual levelsof activity amongst the children. I was confident that with our lovely garden,bikes, climbing equipment, indoor development movement play area and more, thechildren would be observed to be highly active. In fact, quite a few werehardly moving at all.

I am not proposingperiods of compulsory movement for young children. But in their absence, howcan we be sure that they are active enough?

The NCB researchersfound that children are much more active when adults are active too. Whenadults “supervise” outside, children move less. So, in principle, more adultmovement outside, and more time dedicated to approaches which involve adultparticipation, like Developmental Movement Play from Jabadao, will increasechildren’s activity levels. In addition, by getting parents involved,encouraging family trips to the park, walking, swimming and playing outside, wecan make it much more the norm for every young child to be much more active.

We may not achieve100% success – but without moving to compulsion, we could do a great deal moreto encourage children to be more active.

First published in Nursery World

Read on: comments on this on the Nicktomjoe blog

Do we need to stimulate babies quite so much?

2011-10-03T21:55:00.002Z

Increasingly, parents seem to be given the message that special stimulation is needed to help babies develop. As if babies have not, over a long period of human evolution, been optimised to develop well in ordinary conditions.

Nursery baby rooms are commonly equipped with black and white zones, to stimulate babies' vision - as if their vision would not be perfectly well stimulated by a nice range of natural colours. In fact, placing immobile babies in these zebra-striped zones seems a pretty unpleasant act to me - I would hate to be stuck there. And I wonder if it gives a damaging impression to parents. Thanks to the experts, your baby's vision will be stimulated in this black and white zone (imagine if your baby had been left at home where you did not know any better than to place your baby amongst normal colours?).

Just the other day, I saw this outside a church when I was walking in Stoke Newington (North East London):

There is nothing actually wrong with this poster. Babies' brains are incredibly active and it is roughly true that they do form 1000 trillion connections by the end of the third year - an astounding thought. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with being humbled by what babies and toddlers do.

The problem comes from the implication that if you are not doing lots of very special things with your baby, then these developments won't happen and you may even end up with a non-genius baby. It is highly unlikely that any of those "simple enjoyable games" at "Genius Babies" make any impact, positive or negative, on the incredible activity and development of a baby's brains.

There are many good reasons to get parents with babies together. Principally, I would say, because it can be a lonely time for a parent and there is a lot to be said for good company, making friends, and finding out that yours is not the only baby that hardly sleeps, is fussy with food, or cries a lot.

Do groups like "Genius Babies" help parents feel more or less confident? I worry that the implication that you need to follow a pseudo-scientific programme to help your baby's brain develop builds anxiety and makes it harder to be a parent.

In any case, do we really want genius babies? Wouldn't reasonably content, well-loved babies be OK?

Equipment for the EYFS: balancing child-led and adult-initiated learning

2011-10-02T09:09:00.001Z

One of the trickiest dilemmas inthe early years is how to balance adult-chosen planning and resourcing withopportunities for children to follow their individual interests.

This balance issomething which can easily get knocked off centre, in my experience of workingwith nurseries and playgroups. Some practitioners try to ensure that all theirplanning is led by the interests of individual children, usually by having a ‘targetchild of the week’ type of system.

This means that planning tends toshift focus radically from one week to the next, in keeping with the rota offocus children. Yet for those children, one week is rarely enough for them towiden their experiences and develop their skills much. It is also verydifficult to build up a good range of resources to deepen children’s interests,with such a short timescale. As a result, the materials to support the childrenmay be insufficient to generate real enthusiasm.

A topic- or theme-led approach allowsstaff to collect resources over longer periods of time, but has its owndrawbacks. Usually, if you look closely you will find that many of the childrenwill either have no idea of what the topic is, or have little interest in it.They will want to play with the things they like, with their friends, whetherthe topic is supposed to be ‘transport’ or ‘houses’.

I recently worked with a staffteam as they dug a collection of materials out of the cupboard for the ‘peoplewho help us’ topic. When we looked at them together, we wondered whether any ofthe children would really see the overarching connection of the topic. Yet notlong ago, one of the children had been in the family car when it had brokendown, and then been fixed by the AA.

The drama of this event ‑ the arrival ofthe van and the range of tools and electronic equipment ‑ all made quite animpact on his imagination. He talked about the event and drew some pictures;but if the nursery had had a collection of mechanic-related resources at hand, thiscould have prompted some wonderfully rich play.

This is why I think that earlyyear practitioners might want to think about maintaining and developingcollections of resources for special play opportunities, in addition to developingthe core set of materials that are available for the children to accessthemselves.

Children’s interests do not existin some kind of vacuum, to be observed by practitioners. An important role ofearly years education is to widen their experiences, to introduce them to newand stimulating things. So, whilst I am a strong advocate for free-flow play,we have to be very careful in our management of time and resources to ensurethat children experience a broad curriculum that promotes their development.

If a child has a language delay,for example, they might choose to spend much of the day playing verypurposefully with materials that do not involve any talking. This may pass thetime very well for both child and adult alike, but the child’s prime needs willhave been neglected. As learning becomes increasingly language-based later inschool, the child will struggle – and may even be seen as a child who did verywell in the early years but was ‘let down’ by the teachers in Key Stage One andbeyond. We need to think carefully not only about the range of resources, buthow each area of resourcing helps a child’s learning across the wholecurriculum.

As well as thinking carefullyabout children’s interests and free-flow play, I think that practitionersshould also consider whether the same resources should be available throughoutthe year. I would argue not. If lots of new children are starting in September,then it is a good idea to limit the number of resources that the children canaccess.

Few children will be used tomanaging an environment with a hundred or more different types of resources. Itprobably makes more sense to have a high-quality but restricted range ofequipment at first, along the lines of Kate Greenaway Nursery School’s ‘CoreExperiences’.

The time spent teaching thechildren how to manage these resources will increase their autonomy and make thingsrun more smoothly throughout the year – young children quickly learn how to mixpaints, clean out paint pots, brushes and glue pots, and how to put everythingaway where it belongs.

The resources which are offered tothe children should be carefully structured to promote their learning. Forexample, three different sized dolls, each with their own specific cot, nappiesand baby-grows will provide many opportunities for exploring size and matching;a random pile of dolls in a crate with a load of different clothes will not.

The same approach can be takenwith other sets of resources. For a child interested in cars and vans, thestandard set of early years equipment must seem terribly dull – either acollection of identical plastic cars, or a heap of battered cars, different in scaleand size.

A nursery in Tower Hamlets which Ivisited recently was much more inspiring – there was a small set of well-chosencars to play with, all the same size, and all the right shape to use with thegarage set and other equipment. Instead of a roadway mat, the children usedblocks to make roads, bridges and flyovers. But best of all was the resourcingfor those children with a developing interest.

The nursery had a carefullylooked-after set of scale models of contemporary cars and vans, with the rightlogos and model numbers on them. In some cases, they had brochures orprint-offs from the internet to go with them. A small group of children wereabsolutely delighted when a nursery nurse took these out and they spent a longtime engaged in both play and discussion about brands and models.

Other special collections can workjust as well, and putting these collections together gives scope to staff to becreative, responsible, and take pride. Recently, I watched a child new to aTower Hamlets nursery play for over an hour with a collection of beautifulstones and pebbles, some shiny, some rough, large and small, colourful andplain. Collections of natural materials like this have endless fascination tochildren and can provide starting points for wider investigations into thenatural world.

Images from Lighting the Fire by Community Playthings

Many years ago, the OxfordPre-School Project identified the particular value of adults grading equipmentlike construction kits, and keeping some back for the right time. The child whois really competent building with Duplo is likely be thrilled when an adultsets up a new and more challenging construction experience – perhaps Lego, or Meccano– especially for him or her.

Books, songs, rhymes and poems shouldalso be carefully selected and structured, and resources collected to go withthem. The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) has produced a usefulguide to developing a ‘Core Book’ collection. A small collection ofhigh-quality picture books, along the lines recommended, will certainly be muchbetter than a large number of books of variable quality.

Planning across the year shouldaim to familiarise the children deeply with all of the core books. This willmean that every week, there will be a planned read-aloud programme, consistingof a book the children love and are familiar with; a book they are getting toknow; and a new book to introduce.

Each core book should have a rangeof resources – a story sack, magnet board play and dressing-up clothes, forexample. A similar approach can be taken with poems and songs. Across the wholecollection, you will want to ensure that songs cover a range of pitches andtempos and books represent different cultures, and show boys and girls engagedin a wide range of roles and play activities.

Non-fiction books are alsoimportant, and can extend other resources well –for example, books aboutchurches, mosques and other places of worship can inspire children’s blockplay.

Finally, storage and organisationare hugely important. Where children can easily see what is in boxes and trays(either through labelling, or the use of transparent boxes), they can managethe environment much better as they play and when it comes to tidying-up time. Iften paint brushes are available, all splayed and jammed into a plastic pot,then children can only choose to do painting which involves big movements andmarks.

On the other hand, if brushes aregraded and displayed from the smallest to the largest, and the bristles arelooked after, then a child can make a choice about which brush suits herpurpose. Everything should be presented beautifully, with care, in a way whichencourages children to make informed choices and look after the equipment.

Thank you for permission to use the photos: Community Plaything - Early Years furniture

FURTHER READING AND REFERENCES

Tina Bruce, Early Childhood Education

Kathy Sylva, CarolynRoy and Marjorie Painter Childwatching at playgroup and nursery school

Centre for Literacy inPrimary Education (CLPE) The Core Book List

Kate Greenaway NurserySchool and Children’s Centre Core Experiences for the Early Years Foundation Stage
Lighting the Fire

This article was first published in Nursery World

In praise of sympathy

2011-09-24T15:51:00.002Z

Oneof the many ideals in the care of young children is that adults should be ableto “empathise” with children. I have often wondered about empathy, because itcan suggest, to me at least, that the emotions of one person must be quitedistinct and boundaried from those of another. To empathise, in this sense,would mean making an imaginative jump from one’s own emotional state and intothe emotional state of another. I would prefer another way of thinking aboutthis, that there is a kind of push and pull in all human feelings and it isnever clear where one person’s ends, and another’s begins.

The systems offeeling, in this view, are dynamic and the boundaries between one person andthe next exist, but permit a lot of flow both ways. This is part of how Iunderstand Winnicott’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as the baby” –how can one say exactly where a nursing infant ends and the mother begins? AsJohn Donne wrote, “no man is an island” – and I do find it quite fascinatingthat this is so often misquoted as “man is an island”, even to the extent thatPhilip Larkin mis-remembered Donne as writing that “every man is an island,entire of himself.”

SoI was fascinated to hear Colwyn Trevarthen talking about empathy andsympathy at Early Education last week.

Sympathy is, as it sounds, originally anAncient Greek term which roughly translates as “fellow-feeling”. Thereis no necessary assumption of pity or sorrow in this – one might be sympatheticwith a joyous friend, and the French have the lovely term “sympa” to mean niceor friendly as in “il est très sympa” - “he is a really nice person”, not “he issomeone who feels a lot of pity.” Sympathy, in a non-English sense, implies a sharing of emotion, anattunement between people. (In passing, I wonder what it is about the English - that we have narrowed this to an attunement to sorrow and suffering?)

Empathy,another Ancient Greek word, is translated as “physical affection, passion,partiality” and, according to a reliable-looking entry in Wikipedia “wasadapted by Hermann Lotze and Robert Vischer to create the Germanword Einfühlung ("feeling into"), which was translated by Edward B.Titchener into the English term empathy.”

This notion of “feeling into” isunderstood positively in English, yet interestingly in Modern Greek it hastaken on a distinctly negative connotation. My Greek friend Maria explains that“the word 'empatheia' in Greek (pronounced EMPATHIA) means feeling envy andhatred towards something, wishing the worst for them.”

Drifts in meaning are interesting, but I had better not to speculate on how the sameword in Greek shifted from meaning physical affection in ancient times, to envyand hatred today. I daresay that there is quite a lot of empathy being felt in Greece today.

Another interestingmeaning-shift is the word “silly”, which in early medieval times ("sely") meant innocent and pitiable, but which Chaucer manipulated to mean pitiful and ignorant in the Miller's Tale. What an interesting meaning-shift - from the innocent, to the ignorant, to the silly.

But,coming back to sympathy and empathy, there is clearly no point trying to alterthe meanings of these words in modern English. But might it beinteresting to think more about theidea of companionable fellow-feeling, and less about the mythical putting of oneself into the emotional state of a separate other, when it comes to the care of young children?

Are the first three years of a child's life "critical"?

2011-09-14T20:15:00.000Z

Earlier in the week, Radio 4 broadcast an interesting discussion between Dr Stuart Derbyshire, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Birmingham University and Dr Samantha Callan, Chair of the Early Years Commission (from the government's favourite think tank, the Centre for Social Justice) about whether the first three years of a child's life are "critical".

Dr Derbyshire, if I can sum up his views rather crudely, thinks that there is too much loose talk about the perils of the first three years - most parents love and care for their children very much and could do with a little less state interference and exhortation. Rightly, he points out that a certain amount of scare-mongering goes on. For example, the much reproduced photo on the front cover of the Allen Report, showing the differences between the brains of an understimulated child and a normally developing child takes a very extreme case for understimulation, along the lines of a child subjected to extreme neglect in a Romanian orphanage.

This worst-case thinking is not helpful, I agree.

But I am not sure that merely taking the opposite approach and being completely laissez-faire is such a great idea either. In speaking on this topic, Dr Derbyshire is playing in the away strip- his speciality as a psychologist is "functional pain", not child development or early years education. His argument could practically be summed up as "everything will be okay" - but many of us know it will not, because we have worked with families struggling to care for and stimulate their children, because we have cared for and educated young children who have not had a particularly good start to their lives.

Personally, I prefer the term "sensitive phase" to "critical phase". Birth to three matters - but so does the rest of childhood, and the rest of life too. Bowlby's claim that the experiences of early infancy determined later life was proved to be too partial and too simplistic by Michael Rutter and others, who showed that all but the most damaging early experiences can be overcome by later nurture and love. I imagine that the excessive claims of the "critical phase" movement will be found to be similarly overstated.

And shouldn't academics like Dr Derbyshire pause longer and think harder before making strong claims about matters outside of their expertise?

Listen again to the debate on the BBC iPlayer here (for a limited period of time).

The key person in reception classes and small nursery settings

2011-09-05T22:41:00.001Z

A few people have asked me for a copy of this guidance on the Key Person Approach [PDF], which I co-wrote. It isn't easy to find things that were once on the National Strategies website and are now archived and pretty much un-searchable, even using Google.

If you are interested in to read more, you might be interested in the chapter which Peter Elfer and I wrote in Early Childhood: A Guide for Students.

And the second edition of Key Persons in the Early Years: Building Relationships for Quality Provision in Early Years Settings and Primary Schools is just out and well worth a read.

Child-initiated learning in the EYFS - just a fashion?

2011-08-30T22:57:00.002Z

Recently, someone I respect a good dealsaid in a small meeting how much she had appreciated the rule that 80% of theassessments for the EYFS Profile had to be child-initiated learning, and only20% adult-initiated.

She felt that the so-called“80:20 rule”gave early years practitioners an opportunity to argue for play and child-ledlearning – in local authority meetings, when speaking to primary school headteachers,and so on.

And I bet this was, indeed, the case. Lotsof primary school headteachers and others who did not see much of a role forplay or children making choices suddenly found themselves in an unexpected position. Their schools’ EYFSoutcomes would be judged, for the most part, on those very aspects of the earlyyears curriculum they understood the least. It is not an exaggeration to say that in some cases, this ledto a complete turn around in school policy. Suddenly headteachers were hot onplay – and going round schools checking that there was enough of it.

So surely this was a good thing?

No - for two reasons.

Firstly, I think that the “80:20 rule”distorted our understanding of good early years practice. The Qualificationsand Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) produced some excellent video footageof child-initiated learning - which is still available and well worth diggingout, by the way, before their website is shut down.

But none of these videos featuredadults teaching, or starting play off which children continued, ordemonstrating a skill. All of these are important parts of good practice in theearly years, but they were neglected. As a result, practitioners who attendedtraining based around the QCDA’s materials were given a distorted impression ofwhat they should be doing in the EYFS.

But even more regrettable, in my opinion,is that schools changed practice in reception classes because they felt theyhad to. Some of them were never really convinced – they just did what theythought would please Ofsted or their local authority early years team.

It was a good thing to bring more play-based learning into reception, butthis should not have been done through commands from Whitehall or the Town Hall.

When practice evolves in classrooms andsettings, through trialing and professional dialogue, then confidence grows andquality develops. Otherwise professional practice becomes nothing more than apiece of string blowing about in the winds of the latest whims and fashions.

A version of this piece was first published in Nursery World

The London Riots, the early years and community development

2011-08-24T21:38:00.002Z

During a peaceful, if wet, holiday in the Lake District it was hard to imagine the violence and destruction of neighbourhoods near where I live in north-east London, and over in Tottenham close to where I learnt so much about early education and care at Woodlands Park Nursery Centre.I'm not sure about Graham Allen's argument that the riots support the need for early intervention. That just seems too behaviourist to me - you input early childhood services, and you output calm teenagers and young adults.It is probably too early to come up with explanations or policies, anyway. Why was there hardly any disorder in Tower Hamlets, for example, compared to other parts of east London; why were Scotland and Wales not affected? I can't believe it's got much to do with early childhood services.Let's argue for them in their own right, and not use social disorder like a gun to the head of society, to get what we want for young children and their families. My very good friend Zena Brabazon, who does so much for community development in Tottenham, blogged:

My watch was being repaired at Paradise Gems on Tottenham High Road. It was a gift from people I worked with for many years in Haringey Council. It melted in the fire when this business was destroyed.

Together, our team built a nationally recognised out-of-school and holiday childcare service used by hundreds of families across the borough. Combined with the early years provision, many dedicated and creative staff worked really hard to give local children a head start and enable their parents to work.

After that, I and my watch moved on, to work in regeneration. Working with a new team, we brought millions of pounds to Tottenham High Road - applying for every grant and funding stream we could think of. The results - in the refurbished buildings and new shopfronts - were there for all to see and enjoy.

We not only restored buildings and their facades. We worked with other agencies and private owners to create decent homes above the shops. And we encouraged traders to combine their own money with the public grants for new shop fronts. Over the years we did this the High Road really improved. Along with new streetlights and paving, each improvement increased - we hoped - the civic pride of the area.

Following the riot it feels that it'll take years to repair the damage done to Tottenham this weekend. Those who burned buildings, made people homeless, smashed windows, destroyed businesses and jobs did not act or speak for "the community". Thousands of people in Tottenham make efforts everyday to improve and build a real community, Over the years we've all tried to repair the damage suffered by residents. Like my watch, that melted last night and now we have to start again.

See photos and read more from Zena and her partner Alan Stanton.

Turn on, tune in, drop out of your child's life

2011-07-29T21:06:00.004Z

“Please use your liberty to promote ours,” wrote theBurmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi over a decade ago, urging people totake a stand against companies doing business with Burma’s military dictatorship.

Part of what is great about the courageous Aung SanSuu Kyi is that she makes us ponder not only the injustice of daily life inBurma, but other injustices that are closer at hand.

Many of us living in England are enjoying numerousfreedoms which are at the direct or indirect expense of young children. Theliberation that is brought by mobiles, smart phones and music players is paidfor, in part, by the babies and toddlers who are being pushed around thepavements, parks and shops by parents and other adults whose ears are pluggedwith white earphones or covered by big retro headphones. These children,strapped into place, stuck in a forward-facing position, have no hope ofgaining anyone’s attention. The children must live in a state of isolationwhilst the adults enjoy the connectedness of their mobile and social networkingon the go, or the pleasures of their music.

Likewise, there is a type of freedom for adults thatcomes from being able to wander round a big supermarket or store, touching andholding things that feel beautiful, or smell good to eat, or are packaged andbranded in ways that have been made exciting through advertising. But how closeto impossible it must feel to a small child, to be able to reach and touch, butnot to have. How can we expect children to be enticed and delighted by advertsshown between their programmes, but to leave the shops empty-handed, withoutthose longed-for branded products? No wonder so many toddlers and youngchildren lose control of themselves whilst out shopping, descending into furyor hopeless crying.

For every adult who enjoys the ability to get into acar and travel freely, there may be a child who spends so much time strappedinto a car seat that she loses the liberty that comes from being able to crawl,walk and run.

Welike to think that we care deeply about the children, our future, but in somany respects our freedoms are being paid for through the restriction of theirs.How often do we use our liberty to defend and promote the basic rights of thechild?

First published in Nursery World

Everton Nursery School and Family Centre: Tuning into Children's Play

2011-06-24T18:38:00.006Z

If you get the chance to visit Everton Nursery School and Family Centre - I'd recommend that you go. I thoroughly enjoyed the tour of the nursery school and the centre; thanks to Lesley Curtis and everyone on the Everton team for being so hospitable and specifically to Andrea Vaughan and Jamie Wilson for sharing some very exciting practice around Treasure Basket and Heuristic Play (inside and out). You can download the PowerPoint for my keynote for the Tuning into Children's Play conference. Thanks, Gerry, for your post about what I said.

Here are the links to the video clips I used, and other references:

Alison Gopnik
Stephen Pinker's book How the Mind Works
Siren Films, The Wonder Year
The Still Face Experiment
Siren Films, Life At Two
Peter Fonaghy's book Attachment theory and psychoanalysis
Todd Risley's research on children's communication at home in the early years
Leon Feinstein's research on the development of children from different social and economic backhrounds, Very Early Evidence
Ken Robinson's RSA lecture, Changing Education Paradigms (including the section on divergent thinking)

Lincolnshire County Council Early Years Conference: Celebrating Together - Talking, Listening, Taking Part

2011-06-17T16:10:00.006Z

I spoke about children's communication for the conference keynote and then about emotional dimensions of communication in the workshop, including discussion of the new guidance from the Tower Hamlets Early Years Team: Creating emotionally supportive environments to develop children’s language and communication.

You can view the PowerPoint below, or download it.

You can also pick up on the points I talked about, agree, disagree or get a debate going by posting a comment below. Thanks to everyone for your friendliness and engagement, it was a really good day.

We're not putting enough emphasis on speaking and listening in the early years

2011-06-16T20:57:00.001Z

All year, the National Communication Champion, Jean Gross, has been making a passionate case for those children with less-developed communication. We know that they often struggle academically, emotionally and socially in school. These difficulties affect all children, but boys especially. Being able to communicate really matters.

One way to visualise boys’ development in communication at the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage is through an imaginary parade. If the boys were divided according to their development in communication, and if development was made equivalent to height, and if they all marched by for an hour – what would we see?

The parade begins with some boys who are very tall indeed. For about the first 20 minutes, a stream of boys goes past ranging in height from about 159 centimetres to 141 centimetres. These five year olds would look tall in a year six class – the average eleven year old boy in England is 148cm tall. These are the boys who score 8 or 9 in the EYFS Profile for their communication.

During the next half hour or so, the boys who go past range in height from 106cm to 123 cm, with boys of the average height for their age (115cm) in the middle. These are the boys with a score of 6 or 7 in the Profile – the average (mean) score for a boy’s communication being 6.5 points.

The last ten minutes of the parade might catch your eye. First come the boys who measure between 70 and 90 centimetres, below the first centile of the World Health Organisation’s height chart for boys. They are followed, for the last five minutes, by the last group of boys measuring just 34 to 54 centimetres (about the same as the range in length of new-born babies, according to the WHO, with the smallest ones off the scale). The last two groups represent the boys scoring four to five points, and two to three points, respectively.

What does this parade tell us? Well, there is no reason why the distribution of boys’ heights should be the same as their language development, and maybe we get too carried away by measuring everything. But, allowing for these health warnings, it is striking to see how large a gap opens up by the time boys start Key Stage One.

I'm afraid I think this means we're not putting enough emphasis on speaking and listening in the early years.

First published in Nursery World

I got the idea of visualising statistics by means of a parade from Will Hutton's book The State We're In.

Misunderstandings and falsehoods abound when it comes to the "nappy curriculum"

2011-05-07T19:00:00.008Z

It is just as well that you're here and you don't have to rely on the rest of the media to inform you about the Early Years Foundation Stage. Following their guidance would be like relying on Jill Murphy’s picture book Whatever Next! to get you to the moon with a couple of cardboard boxes.

When I had a Google News Alert streaming the latest news stories on the Tickell Review of the EYFS onto this blog; some of those stories were most interesting. The first problem that seems to have faced the media is how to make sense of the numbers. To be fair, this is hardly surprising. Dame Tickell herself, usually admirably direct and clear, came up with the following baffling claim: “there is clear and unambiguous evidence that outcomes for young children are improving. Notwithstanding this, less than half of children (44%) are still not considered to have reached a good level of development by the end of the year in which they turn 5.” I had to read that a fair number of times to untangle all those nots.

This led the Daily Telegraph to state “44 per cent of pupils in England currently start compulsory education without the basic social, communication and language skills needed to make a success of school.” That makes it sound as if nearly half of all children are seriously unprepared for the move into Key Stage One. But in fact, the 44 per cent figure refers to the proportion of children who have not achieved 78 points in the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile and at least 6 points in all the scales associated with the Personal, Social and Emotional and Communication, Language and Literacy areas of learning. That measure is a pretty high level of development; many of those 44 per cent of children are developing and learning perfectly well. But you wouldn’t think so from the Telegraph’s further comment, that “almost four-in-10 boys and a fifth of girls are unable to hold a pencil or write legible letters by the age of five, while almost half of all children struggle to concentrate or pay attention.” The actual statistic is that 44% of boys do not score six points of more in the Writing scale of the EYFS. Does that mean the same as not being able to hold a pencil? Of course not.

The education editor at England’s biggest-selling evening paper, the Express and Star, is more impressed with early years practice: “I have seen some fantastic and really inspiring practice in several early years’ settings recently, but to make a real difference we have to ensure that is followed through until children are five and six and think about preparing our environment and our pedagogy rather than the children.” This is a fair point – but it isn’t clear that the writer realizes that the EYFS covers children up to the end of the Reception Year.

Much less impressive are the strange comments in the Economist, which told its readers that the EYFS sets out “69 skills that nursery staff and childminders must impart to their charges before they toddle off to school.” Those "69 skills" are in fact the Early Learning Goals in the EYFS (actually a mix of skills, attitudes and knowledge). Who else, other than the Economist, pictures those children, rising 6 year olds about to start Infant Schooling, as toddling off to school? Readers are also informed that “Ofsted was given power to inspect not only nurseries but even childminders, who typically care for a baby and a couple of toddlers in their own homes. The national curriculum was extended to cover three-year-olds, and Ofsted judged harshly those who failed to take a register twice a day (even though it would be immediately obvious if one of three children were missing).” Exactly how the National Curriculum was extended to three year olds is not explained (do they mean the EYFS, which covers all children from birth to six years old?). Does anyone know a childminder who was rebuked by Ofsted for failing to take a register twice a day?

I could go on, and a quick search online will uncover many more misunderstandings and falsehoods about the so-called “nappy curriculum”. How can the general public make a sensible judgment about the quality of early years education and care, which is funded by significant amounts of their money, when there is so much misinformation about?

A shorter version of the piece was first published in Nursery World

The Tickell Review of the EYFS is not the final word

2011-05-07T18:53:00.002Z

If first reactions to something new are, indeed, the most telling then I think that two of the initial responses to the Tickell Report are worth emphasizing. First, the sector gave the Review a swift and positive response. There is practically no criticism of the Review to be found - only the smallest quibbles. Second, there is a profound gap between how the EYFS is understood by the early years sector, and how the media sees it. This is most easily summed up by noting that even the quality press – The Times Educational Supplement, The Guardian and The Telegraph, for example - all headlined their reports by describing the EYFS as the “nappy curriculum”. They implied that the EYFS is a largely inappropriate curriculum for babies and toddlers. But the sector told Dame Tickell, amongst the unprecedented 3,300 submissions to her Review, that we generally like the EYFS and think it has made practice for young children more, not less, developmentally appropriate.

The EYFS was implemented in September 2008 and the Report states that “two years on, there is much to be proud of.” There is also a lot to be pleased about in the Report. The main principles of the EYFS are upheld, and overall the EYFS is judged to have improved the quality of early education and care in England. This is important, because it implies that we should continue to evolve practice, and not throw out everything we have been working on for the last few years. There has been so much change in recent years, so much work put in, often in the hardest of circumstances, through heroic feats of unpaid overtime. This is not the time to start all over again.

I think that there are many important messages to be strongly welcomed. A number of agencies, including local authority advisory teams, Ofsted and the National Strategies, have together created a climate of excessive paperwork and monitoring. The Report turns back this creeping culture by clearly stating that practitioners should be spending time with children, not writing up pages of plans, notes, or reports. Few will dislike the proposal that there should be no requirement to risk assess every trip to the shop or park, and I suspect that few will mourn those culled EYFS Profile Scale Points and Early Learning Goals, either.

The Report is clear about young children’s need for emotionally warm care, in safe and secure environments. However, there are no clear proposals about how this is to be managed. Perhaps this implies that the key person approach should remain as a requirement in the EYFS. But the comparative lack of focus on how exactly care for children should be organized strikes me as an omission. The key person approach puts its main emphasis on thinking about how the child is experiencing and managing the demands of being in group care. This is an important counterbalance to the language of attainment and outcomes which tends to dominate discussion at the moment.

The Report’s strong support for a better-qualified and more professional workforce has been widely welcomed – rightly so. Yet it is interesting that the report so often chooses general terms: there are lots of references to practitioners and settings, for example, whilst terms like nursery nurse and teacher are rarely used. Whilst this makes the Report inclusive, it can also mask important issues. Research, most notably the EPPE Project, has consistently found that maintained nursery schools, and Children’s Centres based around nursery schools, provide the highest quality early education and care. Yet the importance of preserving the dwindling number of nursery schools is not stated. Kathy Sylva, Professor of Educational Psychology at Oxford University and one of the directors of the EPPE Project, recently noted that “there is a direct relationship between observed quality in early childhood settings and the presence of qualified teachers on the staff.” The Report does not fully grasp this nettle: if we want better quality, then research indicates we need to have more specialist early years teachers, and we need to keep our existing nursery schools and the Children’s Centres based around them.

There has been considerable discussion of the proposal to move away from the current EYFS structure of six equal areas of learning and development. The Report proposes three prime areas which are the foundations for children’s ability to learn and develop healthily: personal, social and emotional development; communication and language; and physical development. I suspect, however, that this will not bring about radical change - early childhood education has prioritised these areas for a long time. One might wonder whether this strengthened commitment to physical development sits well with the lack of requirement for all settings, or even all new settings, to have an outdoor area. The Report also calls for research into the question of how children learning English as an additional language should be helped to develop English in the EYFS. I have not been able to locate any existing research on this question; the main findings from international research focus on the importance of children developing fluency and vocabulary in their first language, and point to the longer term benefits of bilingualism (which are acknowledged in the Report).

On observation and assessment, the Report includes a great deal of good sense, bluntly stated. Although the EYFS does not require shelf-loads of paperwork to be kept, all too often this is exactly what happens. The volumes of detailed observations and assessments, which some practitioners are keeping, might be useful if we were writing biographies of the children in our care; but we are not. The only useful assessments are those that lead to actions – that put something in place for a child, or help to pinpoint a problem. The Report briskly dismisses well intentioned but unhelpful notions, like the “rule” that 80% of assessments should be of child-initiated activity. I think we need to take this discussion further. Have we developed an unbalanced approach to planning and curriculum design which is excessively led by observations of individual children and their interests? If so, this risks undermining a more holistic approach to thinking about what sort of experiences and equipment groups of children will benefit from encountering. It makes it difficult to plan for progress in the early years. When we have seen a child playing with cars, and plan more experiences for him with wheeled toys, then the risk is that we fail to widen his horizons. We notice his interests, but fail to think about offering a broad early education.

Similarly, we need to give more thought to the role of play in children’s early learning. I do not find the Report consistently helpful in this respect. The recommendation that “playing and exploring, active learning, and creating and thinking critically, are highlighted in the EYFS as three characteristics of effective teaching and learning” raises many questions for me. I am not sure what the distinctions between “exploring” and “active learning” are, for example. Where play is thought of hand-in-hand with teaching, I think the report is alluding to the types of “playful teaching” outlined in the Early Years Learning and Development Literature Review [PDF]. The Literature Review advocates “playful teaching” in contrast to whole-class phonics teaching in the EYFS, stating that “the best approach to phonics appears to be informal activities in a play context … What matters is the skill of the practitioner to do this in a playful way, and his/her use of professional judgment as to when it is appropriate. Thus, phonics instruction may be appropriate in the Foundation Stage for some, but not all, children.”

So the research supports “playful teaching” in some specific contexts. Research does not support a general blurring of teaching and playing. Earlier in April this year, Tina Bruce wrote in Nursery World that “play transforms first-hand, direct sensory experiences and physical movement into rich symbolic experiences”. I think the Report gives little emphasis to this sort of play, which is chosen and led by children.

Finally, it is worth considering that in September this year, many Reception classes will include very young four year olds because of the new single point of entry. The Report makes a sensible recommendation that we need to look again at ratios in Reception, to ensure that children have enough support. It is easy to forget that, as Kathy Sylva recently stated, “international experts are surprised that we have such young children doing academic learning”. One of those experts, Lilian Katz (Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois), has argued that whilst the EYFS is “a major step in the right direction”, “available research suggests that the benefits of the formal academic instruction for four- and five-year-olds seem to be promising when tested early, but considerably less so in the long term. Indeed, there are some indications that the long-term negative effects of premature academic instruction are more noticeable for boys than for girls.” If we do not think carefully about this now, then we might find ourselves, and our children, paying for our thoughtlessness in the future.

I think that the Tickell Report is to be welcomed. It is a careful piece of work which should stimulate a great deal of further thought and professional dialogue. By this, I mean both informal exploration – talking with colleagues, looking more closely at our work and how it helps or hinders children – and formal research, training and development. The Report opens a new phase in a professional conversation, and we should engage with it accordingly rather than seeing it as the final word for now.

A shorter version of this piece was first published in Nursery World

Tickell Review of the EYFS: key words

2011-04-17T14:34:00.009Z

What are the main messages of the Tickell Review? One way of answering that question is by creating a Word Cloud, which is what I've done below using Worlde. The words used most in the Review are given greater prominence in the graphic (I left out the proposals for Development Matters, the new Profile, and the bibliography; all the other text is included).

What does it tell us about the review? My thoughts are: it's interesting to have learning and development so prominently, but no sight of teaching. When it comes to specific words to describe people or places, they are not in evidence: school, nursery, teacher and nursery nurse are not visible. Broader terms are preferred: practitioner and setting, for example. There is little sign of key person, emotional or social (I'm thinking of social and emotional development); but needs and support are both there to see. Health, language and parents are all pretty large - key areas of focus? And I wonder if the prominence of local and specific nod to the current political climate?

Or maybe something quite different stands out to you?

You can see the graphic full-size here.

The Tickell Review of the EYFS: some first thoughts

2011-04-09T08:37:00.002Z

I was outdoors in a primary school recently, and commented on a mature cherry tree in full blossom. The teacher replied, “I don’t think we ever really notice it”, and we spent a little while thinking of ways to get the children to look more closely at the tree – maybe having some small cuttings in vases, using magnifying glasses, and so on. The school is quite close to a thunderous road leading to the London docklands and Canary Wharf, yet there are also many small green spaces, canals and some beautiful mature trees which can go un-noticed by children and the adults around them.

It was a great project after the Second World War, replacing the dirty and gloomy houses and schools of the East End with light, glassy buildings built around garden courtyards, often planted with lovely trees. As with many great projects, it is easier now to see the failures, than to appreciate the successes. Patches of dog-roamed, dirty grass in the middle of blocks of flats no longer look nice: practically everyone prefers the newly-prettified Victorian terraces.

I wonder if it is the same with the Early Years Foundation Stage. It was a grand plan, changing early years practice across ever sector in England, backed up with a lorryload of booklets, folders and projects. It is easy now to find fault with those bureaucratic excesses, and forget how practice has indeed been changed for the better.

The fact that so much of the EYFS is just part of the scenery now, as un-noticed as that cherry tree, is really a sign of its successes. Nobody seriously questions EYFS headlines like the importance of outdoor play, the vital role practitioners play in supporting children’s emotional development, or the importance of engaging parents.

The EYFS helped to make the early years workforce more professional, by emphasising the critical importance of early childhood, and by raising the status of our work. Yet strangely enough, it has also deprofessionalised us with its excessive detail and focus on compliance. With less guidance and fewer Early Learning Goals, there is a legitimate worry that the EYFS might now become too narrow. We need to keep an eye on that: but I think we should be more optimistic. Now is the time to put more energy into creative and inspiring approaches to the early years, and more trust in the professional judgement of practitioners.

First published in Nursery World

Thinking again about two early education pioneers - Margaret Mcmillan and Robert Owen

2011-04-04T23:48:00.012Z

This post is based on the notes that went with my PowerPoint at the Parents as Partners in Early Learning (PPEL) dissemination workshop on March 25th, and pays tribute to the work of Jill Jeyes and the PPEL team in Tower Hamlets.

It is very fitting that we are paying tribute to Parents as Partners in Early Learning (PPEL Tower Hamlets) here in Early Education. Early Education was once the Nursery School Association, and the nursery schools in their early days were certainly understood as places for families and for community development, not just somewhere for children.

So often we find ourselves, so to speak, standing on the shoulders of giants, as we are here in the Margaret Mcmillan Room, next door to the Robert Owen Room. No one can deny them their great contribution to nursery education and the development of humane ways to help young children in their daily lives.

But there are also, perhaps, times to reflect that we have made progress in important ways, that we have better ways of doing things and thinking about things now than we did in the past. And I think this is the case, when we look at how we think about working with parents.

Margaret Mcmillan wrote that “the real object of our work is “Nurture” – the organic and natural education which should precede all primary teaching and without which the work of the schools is largely lost. Many children from crowded homes today receive no nurture at all … They arrive in the elementary schools at the age of five suffering from the results of rickets, bronchial catarrh and other ailments, and their brain-growth is hindered by the evil of their first years.”

This was such an important and bold statement: that there should be something unique about the education of young children. Many of us today remain inspired by that ideal of striving towards an organic and natural education, synchronous with the child’s developing mind and body. As a Children’s Centre head last year, I was working with a family where two children had rickets. Rickets in 2010: her words still feel relevant as we look at the poor health of many young children in places like Tower Hamlets and Islington.

But it is also important to see that Mcmillan was imagining nursery education as a form of rescue for children, and she hardly minces her words here, from the “evil of their first years” of family life.

Likewise Robert Owen: the great philanthropist and idealist, who built schools as well as factories, also worried about the “evil” that might be done to children: “it must be evident to those who have been in the practice of observing children with attention, that much of good or evil is taught to or acquired by a child at a very early period of its life; that much of temper or disposition is correctly or incorrectly formed before he attains his second year; and that many durable impressions are made at the termination of the first 12 or even 6 months of his existence”. Owen believed that, in essence, children were entirely formed by the impressions of those around them in their first years: ““the character of man is without a single exception, always formed for him”.

None of us can hope to approach the greatness of Owen or Mcmillan. But we do know a little better now. Maybe even a lot better. We know that children are not entirely formed by the influences of their parents and family, important though these are; children also have their own temperament, their own emotional tune which may or may not fall easily in with those around them, may be developed and enjoyed, or drowned out, distorted or spoiled.

Yet, very much in the spirit of Owen, we find Graham Allen and Iain Duncan Smith writing that “human infants arrive ready to be programmed by adults.” They continue: "0-3 age range is the vital period when the right social and emotional inputs must be made to build the human foundations of a healthy, functioning society. The key agents to provide those inputs for 0-3 year-old children are parents."

Smith and Allen mean to emphasise the importance of the early years, and rightly so; yet in doing so, they present an image of the child as a sort of computer, with parents providing “inputs”, a rather joyless metaphor I would say, and an approach that forgets the child’s own unique spirit. I suspect that for Allen and Smith, rather like Owen, the importance of the early years is mostly instrumental - for the cultivation of good citizens and workers. We can attend to what they are writing about: inputs, agents, and foundations. But we should also notice what they do not write about: love and affection, for example.

Mcmillan’s desire to rescue children from the evil of their upbringing has its echo today, too, with Simon Heffer in the Telegraph recently stating that “we must face up to the chronic inability of many people to bring up their children properly”. Heffer says that we should “blame bad parents, not poverty” - as if it no longer anything to do with government, or all of us, that problems arise when 57% of children in boroughs like Tower Hamlets are living in poverty. We are seeing a sort of privatisation of disadvantage. And in this respect, who could put things better than Margaret Mcmillan with her tremendous turn of phrase: “just as people looked on at the torture two hundred years ago and less, without any great indignation, so in the 1890s people saw the misery of poor children without perturbation.” Sadly, the affectations of the 1890s are, in this respect, fashionable once more.

Poverty affects children throughout their years of schooling. Feinstein’s research in 2003 shows how children with good levels of development aged 22 months, from poorer (low SES) families, are quickly overtaken by children with much poorer levels of development at 22 months from richer (high SES) families.

But, as Stephen Ball recently pointed out, one implication of these findings has barely been discussed. The period from birth to 22 months in a child’s life is, most would agree, the period when parental influence is at its highest. So when we look at the relative decline of those children from poorer families from the age of 22 months onwards, we are seeing that something goes wrong when others start to play an ever greater role - playgroups, drop-ins, nursery classes and primary schooling. This is not the simple “blame bad parents” story that commentators like Simon Heffer tell.

In writing all this, I do not mean to deny the existence of poor or inadequate parenting. But I do mean to argue that things are not simple. Children’s development is shaped by the interplay of their organic health and temperament, with the quality of love, care and stimulation offered by their parents and other important adults, and the socio-economic state of their family, and the quality of their early and primary education. Things seem to go best for poorer children when their parents’ involvement is at its highest level; once schools and other institutions get involved, things seem to get steadily worse.

The importance of PPEL lies in its recognition that parents should be understood as partners, not problems. If we can reach out a hand to parents in a friendly way, and understand how difficult it can be to bring children up in often poor, overcrowded circumstances, then we can achieve a great deal. We can see beyond Mcmillan’s desire to rescue children from the evil of their families, and Owen’s desire to “form” children like factory products; we know better, and we should be able to do better.

Child care and early years education: the ideas of Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein and Anna Freud

2011-03-20T21:36:00.001Z

A historical survey of the development, and contestation, of the key person approach

This is an extract from a piece of research which I undertook a couple of years back. It is an attempt to describe how the key person approach developed through the ideas of Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, and the significant contribution made by later practitioners and writers.

From the 1920s onwards, psychoanalytic thinking began to influence theory and practice in English nursery childcare, an attention to children’s emotional development which would eventually inform the development of the key person system. Susan Isaacs’s Malting House School (open from 1924-1929) for children aged from 2 upwards provided the context for the development of some of the key ideas in the Kleinian school of psychoanalysis (Mitchell, 1986). Isaacs provided the children with an environment in which there were more opportunities for free play and fewer prohibitions, to enable “an all-round lessening of the degree of inhibition of children’s impulses" (Isaacs, quoted in Drummond: 2000). In this context, aspects of the child’s anxiety could be expressed symbolically, and this symbolisation was seen to support the child’s ego-development and the "greater dramatic vividness of … social and imaginative and intellectual life as a whole" (Isaacs, quoted in Drummond: 2000).

This development did not just depend on the conditions of free play, however; in the Isaacs/Klein model, the infant needs a consistently available adult figure. In a 1945 paper written for the Home Office, Isaacs (1945: 212) despairs of the impersonal “rigid routine and emotionally barren life in an institution” and proposes that instead each child “should feel himself to be the member of a small family group” (Isaacs, 1945: 225) in care settings.

Similarly, Anna Freud arranged for each child in her wartime Hampstead Nursery to have a constant “maternal figure” (1974: XIX), contending that “repeated experience proves the importance of the introduction of this substitute mother relationship into the life of the residential nursery. A child who forms this kind of relationship to a grown up not only becomes amenable to educational influence in a very welcome manner, but shows more vivid and varied facial expressions, develops individual qualities, and unfolds his whole personality in a surprising way” (Freud, 1974: 590).

Anna Freud (1974: XIX) proposes a model for the child’s development in which there is what she terms an “intimate interchange of affection” between the child and the “maternal figure”. Both Isaacs and Anna Freud emphasize this inner life of the child, the social, imaginative and creative life, which is developed only in the conditions of interchange: in other words it depends both on the child’s inner development, and the conditions and relationships provided by the adult. However, for Anna Freud the process is one of successive disengagement from relationships as the infant becomes more independent, a process which she does not significantly elaborate or theorise (Elliot, 2002: 27). Isaacs and Klein place significantly more emphasis on the inner psychic structure and functioning of the infant. They see the infant as splitting the world into good and bad, and feeling persecuted or even destroyed by the bad. Hence Isaacs (1945: 218) argues that if a child is in an institution where there is inadequate care, “this does not mean to him the mere absence of the good he requires, a merely neutral place; it means the actual presence of positive evil.”

Whilst for Anna Freud, the assigned carer enables a process of ego development, for Klein and Isaacs, the assigned carer creates a relationship through which a drama of love and hate, care and persecution, may be played out with the desired development of the infant taking up what Klein calls the “depressive position”, in which “the ego becomes able to take in the whole person, to see that good and bad can exist in the same person” (Mitchell, 1986: 20). Space does not allow for a full discussion of these ideas; for this paper there is one particularly salient point. For Anna Freud, the care offered by the adult to the child is absolutely real: real kindness, feeding, cleaning, and loving interaction, creating a climate in which the child can develop independence and an independent personality. For Klein and Isaacs, there is more of a dynamic relationship between the real world of physical needs and care, and the child’s inner world, which Klein calls “phantasy”. Juliet Mitchell (1986: 23) summarises that “phantasy emanates from within and imagines what is without, it offers an unconscious commentary on instinctual life and links feelings to objects and creates a new amalgam: the world of imagination”.

In the 1970s, a seminal piece of action research study was carried out in a London day nursery by Alastair Bain and Lynne Barnet, published in 1980 as The design of a day care system in a nursery setting for children under five. This is a very detailed study of relationships in a nursery setting, from a mainly Kleinian theoretical perspective. Bain and Barnet (1980:122) argue that allocating a carer for each child is not in itself adequate because of what they term “discontinuity of care provided by a single caretaker” (underlining in the original). They argue that the child who identifies with the nursery nurse’s discontinuous care can experience no more “than a momentary sense of self in relationship to the world” (Bain and Barnett, 1980: 123). The discontinuous care from the nursery nurse relates dynamically to the child’s own inner fragmentation: the phantasy’s hypothesis of existence being fragmented and persecuting is reinforced by experience. The children therefore experience discontinuous care as something more like persecution than simple neglect. In response to this serious problem, Bain and Barnett (1980: 72-73) propose a “care assignment system” which they describe in the following terms: “each child was predominantly cared for during the day by his nurse whom he could turn to for love, attention and help, at meal times, in play, when he needed comfort and affection, being changed, being helped on the lavatory, and washing”.

A more accessible and systematic elaboration of this idea was subsequently provided in Elinor Goldschmied and Sonia Jackson’s book People Under Three (1994); this outlines practical steps for implementing and managing an assigned care system, which they term the “key person” approach (1994: 35-51). However, Goldschmied and Jackson (1994) emphasize physical proximity and care, in contrast to Bain and Barnett (1980) and Hopkins (1988), all based at the Tavistock Centre, who follow in the Kleinian tradition of emphasizing psychic care and the inner development of the child’s personality, intelligence, playfulness and imagination. For Hopkins (1988: 99), it is essential that the nursery nurse offers “personal and playful interaction”, whereas Jackson and Goldschmied (1994: 8) consider play as a category which is linked to adult interaction, but discrete. They comment that “play is only one element in child development; much more crucial is adult concern and attention”.

A contested approach to the care of young children

The whole project of care assignment or key person work has been consistently, and robustly, challenged over the last three decades by a significant group of researchers, most based at the Institute of Education. Jack and Barbara Tizard’s report on residential nurseries notes that "no attempt was made in any of the nurseries we visited to reduce the number of adults handling each child by assigning the care of particular children within the group to particular members of staff” (Tizard, J and Tizard, B, 1971: 158-159). They conclude by agreeing with the matrons they spoke to, that “close relationships should not be allowed to develop, because these were potentially damaging to the children and created difficulties for the staff.” (Tizard, J and Tizard, B, 1971: 159-160).

Helen Penn (1997: 134) shares the Tizards’ conclusion that the key person system could not work in practice; and she extends the critique by claiming that the key person system is really about “the surveillance and monitoring of individual children” (Penn, 1997: 52). Moss (2006), building on Penn’s (1997) research, locates the key person approach in a wider “maternalist regime” which, he argues, “remains dominant in many countries, still productive of ‘attachment pedagogy’ and the worker understood as substitute mother and sustaining highly gendered workforces" (Moss, 2006: 37).

These conclusions are, I would argue, contestable. The term “attachment pedagogy” was coined by Singer (1998), as part of a wider consideration of how seemingly “normal” ideas are actually the products of specific social and political conditions. Singer (1998: 68) argues that “attachment theory offers a culturally specific model for regulating emotions and behaviour and internalizing moral concepts…such a model can justly be called a pedagogy”. Rejecting what she argues is the privileging of the close, dyadic adult:child relationship, Singer (1998: 78) proposes that there are other ways to understand how children respond to group care, noting that “many children adapt themselves in a few days and are happy to explore the new environment; but for some children this process of adaptation can last several weeks and, in exceptional cases, more than five months. Nevertheless, they all manage to feel comfortable after a while.” With a similar focus on this process of adaptation, Penn (1997: 68) describes how the staff in an Italian nursery treat “a boy who is very weepy. On and off all day, tears silently roll down his cheeks, and he stands apathetically doing nothing." She notes that the nursery staff understand and sympathise with his distress, and decide that the best idea is to "be realistic about what they can offer him. They feel that they have to help him come to terms with his misery."

Both Penn and Singer reject “attachment pedagogy” and “key working”; their views and observational data are incorporated into the arguments of Dahlberg, Moss and Pence (1999: 37) who further argue that close observation and attention to children acts as “a technology of normalization determining how children should be”; Dahlberg, Moss and Pence (2007: 38-42) extend this further with a wider critique of the modernist project to categorise, and therefore in a sense construct, the child in the discourse of developmental psychology. They propose instead an attempt to put ethics before truth and see each interaction with the child as an encounter with the Other.

Yet it is arguable that in this rejection of the normalising discourses of psychology, there is an implicit acceptance of a normalising practice in nursery care. Singer (1998) proposes that the child will adapt – eventually. This is somewhat at variance with Lévinas’s concept of an ethical encounter in which the demands and the suffering of “the Other” take primacy, in which, as Derrida (1978: 110) writes, “the face does not signify”. It is notable that for Penn the crying face does signify – weepiness and apathy. But it is not allowed to demand. It is best ignored.

If there is more discontinuity than is readily apparent in the narrative of argument that Dahlberg et al (2007) advance, then there are also sometimes surprising similarities in the research on key person care from very different standpoints. Penn (1997) identifies the significant gap between the supposed theory and the actual operation of key person work in the English nurseries, commenting that, despite good ratios, it "did not work in practice" (Penn, 1997: 88). Penn (1997: 103) observes that “physical affection was rare” and that the nursery nurse she is watching "is not deliberately unkind but … does not appear in any way to be engaged". In this respect, her observations and conclusions are strikingly similar to those of Bain and Barnett (1980) and Elfer and Dearnley (2007), and reminiscent of the powerful opening sentence of Juliet Hopkins’s study (1988: 99): “the gap between ideals and practice in child care is often inexplicably wide”.

Where Dahlberg et al (2007: 52) propose that the child should be understood as a “co-constructor of knowledge, identity and culture” rather than a “’poor’ child, weak and passive, incapable and under-developed, dependent and isolated”, there is an unexplored possible link to the work of Melanie Klein and Susan Isaacs, who, as discussed above, view the child in dynamic relationships with the external world, and who emphasize play and creativity. Isaacs’s pedagogical approach brought together a very rich environment together with an open-ness on the part of staff to respond to children’s interests, leading Mary-Jane Drummond (2000) to claim that the children could be “more active, more curious, more creative, more exploratory, and more inventive than they could have been in any ordinary school.”

As discussed above, there has been considerable empirical research into the experience of children in nursery childcare, as well as considerable theoretical elaboration; and whilst the innovative adoption of post-modern perspectives on early childhood education and care by Dahlberg et al (2007) has been portmanteau-ed with a rejection of the key person approach, there are other, possible readings in which the key person system could be re-imagined rather than rejected. However, the construction of the role and identity of the nursery nurse in the key person system and nursery childcare remains comparatively unexplored, though there are some exceptions. Stathan and Mooney (2006: 89) argue against the notion of the adult providing intimacy, cosiness and “false closeness” in the nursery. Moss (2006: 34) claims that “the early childhood worker as substitute mother produces an image that is both gendered and assumes that little or no education is necessary to undertake the work, which is understood as requiring qualities and competencies that are either innate to women (‘maternal instinct’) or else are acquired through women’s practice of domestic labour (‘housework skills’).” From an alternative perspective, promoting the development of intimate relationships between nursery nurses and their key children, Manning-Morton’s (2006: 50) training programme for nursery nurses is intended to remedy the “historical deficit view of … early years practitioners” and promote instead a new “ professional identity of a critically reflexive, theoretical boundary crosser”.

Read more posts about Susan Isaacs:
A chance encounter: Susan Isaacs and Jean Piaget
Susan Isaacs: a life freeing the minds of children

Isn’t good early education about the development of the whole child?

2011-03-03T22:11:00.001Z

Emotional development and communication have been first among equals in the early years curriculum for many years. So I have not been too surprised to find that every time I am in a group discussing the future of Children’s Centres, or the EYFS, there is always a suggestion that these two areas should be prioritised.

It is easy to agree with that; but agreeing the practical steps to take is trickier. I start by being sceptical of attempts at the direct teaching of specific skills. We know, from many years of research, that children’s brains are magnificently fit for the purpose of learning language. Immersed in a sea of words and meanings, nearly all children will become communicators and listeners – the exception being the small proportion of children with a specific speech and language difficulty, who need specialist help.

But the problem is that not all children find themselves immersed in that sea: some are hardly even paddling at the shore. In the 1990s, the researchers Todd Risley and Betty Hart found that by the age of three, some American children would already have heard over 33 million words said to them by their parents, whilst others would have heard only 10 million. Some would have heard over 500 thousand positive statements in response to their actions from their parents, whilst others would have heard fewer than 60 thousand.

Risley and Hart found that the best way to help parents is surprisingly simple: encourage untalkative parents to talk more. There is no need to coach them in any particular style of interaction, or teach any particular communication skills. Similarly, the Every Child a Talker (ECaT) programme does not promote the direct teaching of communication skills; instead it shows how communication-friendly environments and practitioners can make a real difference.

I would advocate the same approach to supporting children’s emotional development. In early childhood, the emotions develop through relationships and the experience of living in a community - a nursery or a classroom. Children are supported when they are respected, helped, treated with sensitivity when things get difficult, and are expected to make every effort to live those same values themselves. Trying to teach “emotional skills”, with sheets of smiley and sad faces, or discussions in a circle, does not work in my experience. Isn’t good early education about the development of the whole child, and not just the practice of skills?

First published in Nursery World

Notes

For a brief introduction to Risley and Hart's work, see The Everyday Experience of American Babies: Discoveries and Implications

With great thanks to Judith Stevens of the National Strategies for keeping me regularly supplied with information and ideas about early communication. Many of us will miss Judith's friendly and knowledgeable support after March 31st, and recognise all that she has done to help improve the lives of many young children in England.

Early intervention is important, but don't neglect education for its own sake

2011-02-03T19:03:00.002Z

The continued prominence of the early years in political discussion is reason for some optimism; it must be better to be discussed, than to be forgotten.

Ever since the famous finding from the American Perry Pre-School Project, that a dollar spent on high quality early education saved sixteen dollars of future expenditure on welfare and other costs to society, both educational researchers and politicians have been fascinated by the potential long-term effects of what happens in children’s early years.

Here in England, the EPPE Project’s findings have made a very strong case for the continued benefits to children right the way through their primary and into their secondary school education. Building on these findings, Graham Allen MP, in his recent report on Early Intervention, argues that “we should exploit the potential for massive savings in public expenditure through an Early Intervention approach”. The report also argues for the concept of calling the birth to five phase of childhood the “foundation years”, whose “prime objective should be to produce high levels of ‘school readiness’”.

In a very similar vein, Frank Field MP’s recent report to the coalition government argues that “investing in children and families before school would also enable the Government to put taxpayers’ investment in primary and secondary education to much better effect.”

These are all potent arguments, well supported by research from around the world. But I wonder if they might give the impression that early childhood is a time for social engineering, and that the early years are just like any kind of financial investment from which a good return is wanted.

As with any other type of education, early childhood education must principally be about what the children need now for the development of their senses, the cultivation of their creativity, and the growth of their learning.

Graham Allen and Frank Field have both produced reports of substance and value, with an appropriate emphasis on the need for a well-qualified and professional workforce to work with young children and their families. As members of that workforce, I think our professional obligations are to the children as individual people being cared for and educated. Education is important for itself, for the joy of learning, and anyone who has chosen to be an educator from a sense of vocation knows that any other benefits, however significant, are of secondary importance.

First published in Nursery World.

Creativity and Play in the early years - Tower Hamlets Childminders' Conference, January 2011

2011-01-29T22:55:00.003Z

This is the Powerpoint that went with my keynote to the Tower Hamlets Childminders. The full size version is available here. The Ken Robinson animation from the RSA, which includes an interesting section about children's divergent thinking, is on YouTube.

To sing, or not to sing

2011-01-09T18:12:00.003Z

Last time I wrote that I can’t sing for toffee, I was politely rebuked by one or two people who quite rightly say that everyone should feel confident about taking part in musical activities.

So, for some other reason I was sitting quietly in a circle, smiling and doing some Makaton signs whilst a group of children was singing with an enthusiastic and tuneful family support worker in a Children’s Centre. I found myself wondering what sense the children were making from the songs.

In the middle of The Wheels on the Bus it struck me that practically none of the children will ever hear someone being asked for a ticket on a London bus, now that practically everyone uses electronic Oyster cards to touch in. Then the children were taken even further back in history as they sang about someone called a conductor telling passengers to “move along please”.

Then there was Miss Polly had a Dolly, during which the children made a strange twirling movement with their fingers as they sang about calling the doctor. I would be surprised if more than one in a million children in England has ever seen anyone use an old rotary telephone dial, and almost as surprised if any of their parents to call a doctor out for such a minor illness. During Twinkle twinkle chocolate bar, the children mimed starting a car up by pulling out the choke – something that even my twenty-year-old piece of motoring history does not have.

But I wonder if this matters much. Perhaps nursery rhymes are just charming collections of historical words, ideas and actions. How many children know about bobbins and how to wind them up, or have grandfather clocks at home, have ever heard of curds or whey, or know about looking after (and losing) sheep?

I also wonder why there are practically no nursery rhymes about contemporary everyday life – none I know which refer to mobile phones, television, using computers, or a more up to date celebrity than the grand old Duke of York. The most recent of the songs children commonly sing feel like they are about a couple of decades old, or more –little spacemen singing, smoky cars with chokes and so on. Or perhaps there is a whole new school of new rhymes that I do not know about?

The session ended with children having a chance to choose the song they wanted. A little girl chose Twinke Twinkle Little Star - the original version, not a jokey one – and the adults sang along with her and did the Makaton signs. Unfortunately it is common for nearly everyone in early years to put fingers and thumbs together in a diamond shape that is, I was told recently by an amused deaf parent, rather close to the sign for vagina in both British and American sign language.

So, altogether now… “Up above the world so high, Like a ..."

Researching early childhood pedagogy from the 1970s to the present

2010-12-04T12:17:00.018Z

This post is a selection from my current work towards my doctorate in education. It is a discussion of four influential research projects over the last four decades in England which focus on early childhood education. I think all four are impressive pieces of work which have, for that reason, been highly influential. But it also seems to me that a kind of top-slicing occurs, where people try and isolate a particular practice or approach and make claims for it, without really thinking about the whole research project, or where the project sits historically - what informs each project, and what each project in turn informs.

The four projects discussed are: the Oxford Pre-School Project (1970s); the Froebel Educational Institute Project (schema theory - 1980s); The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project (1997 to the present) and the EXE Project (Effective Early Learning, EEL - 1990s to the present). As usual, I am very interested by debates, discussions, disagreements and clarifications, so please use the comment box on the blog or get in touch by email to support the free circulation of ideas, opinions and information.

The Oxford Pre-School Project

The Oxford Project, directed by Jerome Bruner, aimed to examine nursery education as it was found in Oxford and to encourage a spirit of critical enquiry amongst practitioners. Bruner (1980, page 204) states that “it was not our intent to sell alternative views about nursery education, but to bring them into discussion as and when our research pointed us that way ... perhaps our hidden agenda was to raise consciousness among practitioners.” In a similar vein, three of the researchers on the project, Sylva, Roy and Painter (1980, page 2), argue that “we view our findings as the basis for further research - not the formal kind we report here but the informal methods practitioners use in evaluating what they currently do and in planning what to do next.” Whilst this account of discussion, awareness raising and informal research is polite and optimistic in its tone, a different impression is given by another group of researchers, Wood, McMahon and Cranstoun (1980, page 15) who document the “extended, frank and sometimes argumentative relationship between three practitioners (two nursery teachers and a playgroup supervisor) and a psychologist.”

The project makes a strong claim for originality in its insistence on trying to study what actually happens minute-by-minute in nurseries and playgroups, as opposed to oulines of programmes which “tell us much about the ‘official’ programme on offer but not much about what the children actually did while participating in it” (Sylva et al, 1980, page 8). A new research tool was developed for naturalistic observation of children at play, named the Target Child Observation (TCO), which was designed to privilege the data on children’s concentration, their capacity to sustain bouts of play and activity, and the impact of adult involvement in their play (1980, page 37). So Sylva et al (1980, page 8) are straightforward in stating the limits of their intention to record “what the children actually did”: they accept that the design of the tool and its coding means that their observation incorporates a “process of selecting and interpreting” (1980, page 37) and that it “sharpened their sights” (1980, page 44) for particular data.

Wood et al (1980) go even further in accepting the perspectival nature of their data, having designed a model in which the data was both captured and selected by the participants, not the researchers. So not only were staff responsible for the tape-recording of conversations, they were also responsible for choosing which sections of the recording would be made available for analysis and discussion with the research team. They somewhat ruefully comment that (1980, page 17) “taking this step clearly meant we had relinquished a good deal of control over the data”; the data could not be considered representative, but it could be used to explore the understanding of the participants, and it could be used to explore the question of whether participating in the project led to any changes in understanding over time.

This makes the Oxford Pre-School Project an intriguing combination of open approaches to data collection and methodology, combined with strong implicit assumptions about what is important. Those assumptions are largely drawn from the preceding theoretical expositions undertaken by Bruner and Wood, and in this sense the Project serves the purpose of seeking data to confirm those theories. Bruner (1980, pages 202-203) summarizes the focus of research as being about “concentration, a child's capacity to deploy his attention usefully, flexibly, without excessive distractibility”.

But there are tensions to be found between the different projects and researchers. Some decades later, Kathy Sylva’s website at Oxford University is much more emphatic than Bruner was, claiming that the Project “broke new ground by questioning an unbridled ‘free play' ideology.” Bruner praises dispassion and rationality, proposing that research can allow for a “more reasoned” approach to the question of nursery education (1980, page 76), and that “change comes by the perspective one gains in observing one's own behaviour after the fact and freed of its pressures. The shift from participant to spectator may not inevitably assure fresh perspective, but it surely helps” (1980, page 80). On the other hand, Wood et al (1980) note that passion, engagement and disputation of meaning are central to their project and its findings, recording that an important training day with the teachers and other participants “did not go very well” and noting that the analysis they proposed for some of the data left a teacher “resenting the submersion of “her” children's activities into a general picture - one which lost the deeper structure of her efforts, her intentions and reasons” (Wood et al, 1980, pages 16-17).

The Froebel Educational Institute Project (schemas)
This project was directed by Chris Athey and sought, amongst other aims, to “to search for commonalities and continuities or ‘cognitive constants’ in [children’s] spontaneous behaviour and thought” (Athey, C 1990, page 49). The project directly confronts a number of the assumptions which underpin the Oxford Pre-School Project. Athey was interested in the play and behaviour which children freely chose, and in exploring the role of the children’s own choices in their cognitive development. This is an approach which Bruner (1980, page 202) questions through the Oxford Pre-School Project, referring to it as the “‘development idea” - that children must be allowed to develop in congruence with their own needs and modes of thought.” (1980, page 202). Athey’s project was, in part at least, an attempt to lay claim once more for the “development idea”, conceptualized in a way which balanced the child’s free choice, with a high degree of adult interaction with the child, and a high degree of subsequent planning arising from careful observation of the child’s choices. Athey is, to this extent, in sympathy with a tradition in English nursery education which is summarized by Lesley Webb (1974, page 64) who, drawing on the heritage of Susan Isaacs and others, states that “exploratory behaviour of itself does not tend to the development of concepts”.

Whereas Sylva (1980, page 139) proposes that there should be a “’punctuating’ of the free regime with required educational tasks”, Athey’s aim is to develop a better theoretical understanding of children’s spontaneously developed cognitive structures in order to develop a type of teaching which “facilitates and ‘fleshes-out’ spontaneous and natural concepts with worthwhile curriculum content” (Athey, 1990, page 41). A further contrast which is easily drawn between the approaches of Sylva and Athey, is that for Sylva concentration and perseverance can be evaluated by examining observations of children and seeking “bouts” of activity joined together by the same theme: she gives the example of a child constructing a plane at the woodwork table, and then painting that plane in the painting area. By contrast, where a child first makes a model out of wood, and then goes to paint something else, Sylva would record two bouts and therefore a lower level of concentration. Athey’s focus is not on the products or thematic unity of children’s play, however; instead she proposes the notion that children’s play can be categorized into “forms”, and that there could be a consistency of “form” across a number of spontaneous activities. These “forms” of physcial activity and symbolic representations (e.g. drawing, painting, making models with blocks) are dubbed “schemas” by Athey, following the Piagetian account of children’s cognitive development in the sensori-motor phase . A typical explanation of this theory can be seen in the following exposition by Dr Cath Arnold:

“Chris and her team challenged the traditional idea that young children 'flit' from one activity to another and have to learn to concentrate. They found that young children are not 'flitting' but are 'fitting' ideas together, based on their explorations of the environment.

Schemas have provided early years educators with insights into children's thinking. Children use their repeated actions to 'search for commonalities'. For example, an interest in 'jagged teeth', 'stairs' and the letter 'W' demonstrates a child's interest in the zig-zag form; they might also be drawn to 'stegosaurus', 'a king's crown' and a 'saw'.”

Athey’s approach has been enormously influential, both in the UK and internationally, but the findings of the project have not, one might argue, been subjected to rigorous scrutiny at a theoretical level. It is notable, for example, that both Athey and the writers and researchers who have followed her, have kept to the Piagetian theory of clear stages of development (sensori-motor, functional dependency and finally thought-level) well after the rejection of such a clear stage theory across virtually the whole field of cognitive psychology. Although Athey draws on Piaget and claims to be developing his theoretical model, she does not highlight or explain the disparity between her work and his around children’s ages at different stages; so whereas Piaget’s account of the sensori-motor stage focuses on young children under 2 years old, the children in the Froebel Educational Institute Project were all aged three and over. Athey is also vulnerable to the challenge commonly made to Piaget’s theory, that she is unable to give any account of how children’s spontaneous sensori-motor activity leads to the development of concepts. In summary, Athey’s project has exerted a substantial influence over practice in nursery education, without any correlated theory-building. Those who have followed her, have largely reiterated her theory and offered additional examples and case studies. The most notable attempt to expand and develop the theory has been Cath Arnold’s recent book (Arnold, 2010) which seeks to make links between schema theory and attachment theory; but this is an attempt at finding links, not at cross-fertilization, leaving the basic theory unaltered.

The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project

The EPPE Project, jointly directed by Kathy Sylva and Iram Siraj-Blatchford, arguably starts off from where the Oxford Project ended. It is an impressively-designed, large-scale project with a long time scale. Using the same research tool (the Target Child Observation), the project focuses on the same questions of children’s concentration and perseverance, and adults’ conversation and interaction. But unlike the Oxford Pre-School Project, the EPPE Project is unashamedly focused on finding the features of “effectiveness” (Siraj-Blatchford, I, Taggart, B), rather than aiming to foster further discussion and informal research amongst practitioners. The large scale, careful design, extended timescale and the significant financial and political support from the English government through variously-named departments for education all argue for the location of this project in the research tradition of “what works”. The discourse of the EPPE documents assumes that it is possible to identify and promote effective practice which will work across different types of settings. The long timescale of the project has enabled the researchers to develop findings about the long-term impact of different approaches to early years education.

Kathy Sylva has argued that the project “identified the practice most predictive of children's progress - sustained shared thinking” (Sylva, K, and Taylor, H, 2006 page 172). Whilst the EPPE project did find an association between Sustained Shared Thinking (SST) and good outcomes for children, which the EPPE team describe as “the ‘value added’ to children's developmental progress” (Siraj-Blatchford,I Sylva, K, Muttock, S, Gilden,R and Bell, D, 2002 page 16), it is noteworthy that even in the settings EPPE judged to be “excellent”, the proportion of SST was low and little higher than what was observed in “good” settings (Siraj-Blatchford,I Sylva, K, Muttock, S, Gilden,R and Bell, D, 2002, page 52).

The researchers drew on a “broad reading of the literature on effective practice in the early years” (Siraj-Blatchford,I Sylva, K, Muttock, S, Gilden,R and Bell, D, 2002 page 21) to “model” their ideas using NVIVO. Following this modeling, a process of data cleaning and reduction, using NVIVO, led to the development of the code “sustained shared thinking”. Kathy Sylva herself notes that the coding for SST is very close to section 7.1 (Talking and Listening) in the ECERS-E schedule that was devised for the project, describing it as “a good general definition of the principle of sustained shared thinking” (Sylva, K and Taylor, H, 2006, page 172).

The EPPE Project found that there was an association between SST and excellent settings, though, as the graph above illustrates, this appears to be a relatively weak association: there is little difference between proportions of SST in good and excellent settings. There appears to be a similar association between the proportion of direct teaching, and the effectiveness of the setting; but this is not discussed.

In summary, SST is not a finding that emerges from the data using a grounded-theory approach; instead SST was modeled in advance, drawing on the literature review, and was a feature in the evaluation schedule used in the project. Sylva and Taylor also comment that SST is closely related to what Jerome Bruner calls “joint involvement episodes” (Bruner, 1996). So whilst the rhetoric of the EPPE project suggests that it set out to find what works, based on children’s outcomes, there was considerable advance conceptualization of what constitutes effective pedagogy, which the researchers then sought in the settings. The EPPE Project is admirably open and clear about its approaches to research and theory building, so one could not reasonably claim that there was any sort of sleight of hand in this matter. However it is noticeable that whilst the EPPE reports put forward SST as a coding which is associated with excellent settings, the effect of EPPE has been to propose SST as an exceptionally effective pedagogical strategy for improving children’s learning. In effect, there has been a slip between the reseachers’ findings of an association, into a popular view of causation. So SST becomes something which is described in its own right as a “particularly effective pedagogic strategy” (Siraj-Blatchford, I, 2007, page 1), rather than simply a coding which is associated with effectiveness.

As a result, SST becomes a pedagogic strategy that practitioners can be trained in, which will lead to better outcomes for the children, a model of educational research and development which can be clearly located in the positivist tradition. This tendency to ignore the local, the personal, and the specific makes the EPPE project very different to those parts of the Oxford Pre-School Project (for example, Wood et al, 1980) which stress the importance of place, opinion and personality. It is assumed that “effective practice” can be discovered through research, is applicable to all locations, and is something that practitioners can be trained to deliver; this is an assumption which might be found problematic.

The 1990s: the Exe Project and Effective Early Learning (EEL)

This fourth and final notably influential research project was directed by Professor Ferre Laevers in Belgium (the Exe Project), and sought to study the involvement of children in their learning as a way of measuring the quality of their early years education. In the United Kingdom, this has exerted a particular influence through the highly successful “Effective Early Learning Project” (Bertram, T and Pascal, C, 1997).

Laevers proposes that the child’s involvement in activities can be assessed through a number of observable signals: concentration, energy, complexity and creativity, facial expression and posture, persistence, precision, reaction time, language and satisfaction. By participating in the Effective Early Learning Project, practitioners learn how to hone their observational skills in order to make “an overall judgment of the child’s Involvement. The observer can use the signals to build an image of the child. By trying to establish how the child really feels, and by trying to become that child, the level of Involvement can be ascertained” (Bertram, T and Pascal, C, no date, page 4).

In common with the approach taken by the Oxford Pre-School Project, Effective Early Learning focuses on what can be observed about the child’s behaviour using a structured observational schedule, and does not focus on the curriculum design or content. However, even a cursory analysis of the language used raises problems. Can any observer “establish how the child really feels”, for example? Beyond this, the association between involvement and learning is only stated, and no detailed theoretical model is advance to explain further. Laevers (1994, page 5) claims, in what is essentially a circular argument, that “in principle, activities possessing a fair amount of the quality of “involvement” enhance development. This is guaranteed by the characteristics of involvement: an involved person uses the full potential of his capabilities and is highly motivated.” Practitioners engaged in a 1995 Scottish project to explore “the concept of involvement as an indicator for quality in early childhood care and education” raise some serious challenges. Cornali-Engel (page 10) notes that a “child ‘tirelessly’ repeating same activity will get high involvement - creativity and reaction time will be low, but everything lese high, leading to high score”. Rayna (page 19) questions whether the involvement scale might be biased towards lone play and learning by individual children, because it is inevitable that in a group, there will be more distractions and conflicts – but would that lower level of involvement, necessarily mean that the quality of the educational experience was lower?

Significant further challenges to the use of the involvement scale as a measure of quality in early childhood education are posed by Siraj-Blatchford et al (2002, pages 33-34). They point out that the model of measuring engagement is taken from Carl Rogers’s humanistic counselling model, and so neglects matters which are important in education: no value is given to direct instruction, for example, and the prioritization of process allows for no questioning of what the educational content is, whether it is worthwhile, or whether the information is factually correct. Involvement may, in itself, be a useful measure of the quality of the child's experience; it is perhaps Pascal and Bertram's (1997) decision to title their project "Effective Early Learning"which is more questionable.

Problems with the research findings: what does effective learning look like in the early years?

None of these four major and influential research projects, it might be argued, manages to make a convincing case for a definition of effective learning in the early years. As discussed above, the use of the Involvement Scale to measure the effectiveness of children’s learning rests of a number of assumptions, assumes a level of validity in the interpretation of a child’s facial expressions and postures which is unwarranted, and neglects important dimensions of learning and education. The EPPE Project argues that SST is a particularly effective pedagogical practice. But the data from the project does not wholeheartedly support this: there are low levels of SST overall in even the most effective settings, and there is only a small difference in levels of SST in good as opposed to excellent settings.

The EPPE and the Oxford Pre-School Project use the same schedule to distinguish between play that is high and low in cognitive challenge. Athey (1990, page 10) is highly critical of this approach:

“When the researchers in the Oxford study … found they could not interpret, to any degree of usefulness, the worthwhileness of what the children were doing, they brought in ‘experts’ to read transcripts of observed episodes and to assess them as being either ‘complex’ or ‘simple’. These are extremely general categories of evaluation and have no explanatory value.”

Athey’s reading is rather selective and, it might be argued, she is unduly withering. Sylva et al (1980, page 53) are very open about the challenges of interpreting their observational data, and describe how they “turned to experienced practitioners for advice” and asked them to go into settings other than own, and collect examples of simple and rich play. From this process, they concluded that the theoretical propositions of the team were largely consistent with the view of the experienced practitioners – that high quality play was “either sequentially organized and elaborated, or else contained symbolic transformation” (Sylva et al, 1980, page 54).

In the absence of a model like that of Sylva et al (1980), Athey (1990, page 37) relies on a Piagetian model to explain development to higher levels of activity and play, stating that “a schema … is a pattern of repeatable behaviour into which experiences are assimilated and that are gradually co-ordinated. Co-ordinations lead to higher-level and more powerful schemas.” It might be deduced that Athey would need to exemplify such co-ordinations, in order to find a solution to the difficulties of interpreting the educational value of children’s play which, she claims, defeated the researchers in the Oxford Pre-School Project. But in fact she concedes that “in this study, no way could be found to measure co-ordinations” (Athey, 1990, page 51).

In summary, therefore, it might be argued that there is no convincing theoretical elaboration of effective learning in early years education. The field of early education, in this sense, is somewhat analogous to Kuhn’s (1996, pages 162-3) depiction of the field of philosophy, in which he argues that one cannot speak of any “progress” being made – not “because individual schools make none. Rather, it must be because there are always competing schools, each of which constantly questions the very foundations of the others”.

The world, re-visioned

2010-12-03T15:32:00.003Z

If you want to see the world from unexpected perspectives and through unfamiliar lenses, then spend time around young children.

I was thinking that last week, after I heard a four year old boy describe his painting as “like a dog, but like a pattern.” After some thoughtful listening and conversation between him and a teaching assistant nearby, the painting was finally described as a “spotty dog”. I love the way that the boy was putting his painting into two distinct categories (patterns and dogs) and holding onto those categorizations – it seemed a very philosophical way of dealing with the world. It was striking for me to see how making time to listen helped this adult to “tune in” and understand some of the uniquely creative thinking behind the painting. Looking at it later, it could easily have been mistaken for a mere group of dots and smudges – and, it seems to me, it is those mistakes that lead to children’s creativity being missed or neglected.

Later in the same week, I met a teacher who had recently been back in the nursery school she attended as a child and had been amazed by how the windows, which she remembered as being huge and high up, were actually of a fairly normal size and quite low too. It was like having a real-life Alice in Wonderland experience.

Both incidents reminded me of how difficult it is to see or to understand the world like young children do, however hard we try. When we sit together as adults and recollect times of transition in our lives as a way of trying to appreciate how children might feel whilst settling into nursery, we are making a valuable attempt to make an emotional connection. But of course we cannot begin to know how young children feel. I may have strong memories are of moving house, changing jobs, or starting university; but when all these events happened, I was able to draw on previous experiences of change, and I was able talk to friends and family during the process.

Young children do not have the same facility to talk in detail and draw on memories. The best things adults can do, is to observe them with care and sympathy. We need to be open, attentive and intrigued by the unique freshness of their communication.

First published in Nursery World

Wanting every child to have a secure attachment - does it make sense?

2010-10-27T08:23:00.008Z

Whenever there is a discussion about children’s emotional wellbeing, the desire that all children should have a “secure attachment” with their parents and with their key people is usually stated. This desire is well-meant; it is also misguided.

It is wrong in principle for early years practitioners to start defining the types of relationships that parents should have with their children. Firstly, if we say that we want one style of attachment relationship, then we overstep the line between being professionally responsible, and intruding into people’s right to a private family life. Secondly, in trying to categorize children’s attachment, without a proper training in psychotherapy and attachment theory, we would get out of our professional depth.

The desire for every child to have a “secure attachment” does not make sense. Attachment theorists (for example, Ainsworth et al, 1980) have consistently found that infants can be grouped into a number of different categories of attachment. Some have secure attachment relationships, and others have avoidant attachment, and so on. Wanting all children to have a secure attachment, is rather like wanting all adults to be 6 feet tall – we can wish it all we like, but the nature of human growth and development means it is not going to happen. It is inevitable that some infants will not have a secure attachment; and those who are categorized as having avoidant and resistant types of attachment are no more likely to have emotional or behavioural problems later in their childhood (Fonaghy, 2001).

Anyone who has been a key person knows that some children come into nursery, avoid any type of hello or welcome, and want to get involved straight away in an activity. These children do not need to be stopped and made to behave differently; they need to be supported, and their key people need to find ways of building a relationship alongside them as they play. Parents with grouchy babies need to be encouraged to hang on in and carry on being warm and caring, not feel that everything is going wrong because their relationship does not look like a secure attachment.

But we should look out for those children whose response to parting from their parents or being reunited with them is very unpredictable, who show fear or who seem to “freeze”. Research (for example, Zeenah et al, 2003) suggests that they are often in great need of help; and if help is not forthcoming, they are likely to experience continuing difficulties in their emotional and behavioural development.

First published in Nursery World

Narrowing the gap - imagine a journey

2010-09-30T21:08:00.009Z

Imagine a hundred people are setting off on a journey, a long day's walking. You see them all ready to depart, bunched together. An hour later, and the group has started to spread out. Your eye is drawn to a cluster of eager walkers pulling ahead of most of the others, striding along purposefully. But just a short time later you notice something surprising. After making such a promising start, the group you have been watching starts to falter and lots of other walkers pass them by. You wonder what has gone wrong. What happened to all that early energy and pace?

According to research undertaken by Leon Feinstein at the London School of Economics, this is pretty much what happens to a group of children who seem to be developing very well at two, and who are living in relatively poor families. By four years old, this group of children has started to lag behind children with the same good level of development, and whose families are better off. That is clearly not fair. But there is worse news to come.

If you look at a third group of children, whose development is not so strong at two years old, but who come from better-off families, you will see them rapidly catching up with those children from poorer families who were originally well ahead. By the end of Key Stage One, the better-off children have overtaken them - even though they started so far behind.

It is fair at this point to voice some objections. Measurements of child development at two with a score will have problems with reliability. Perhaps most significantly, this data comes from well before the recent period of intense focus, and heavy investment, in the early years. Things might have got better. For example, where I work in the east end of London, children's overall attainment by the end of their primary school education is higher than the national average. On some measures, GCSE results are also above the national average. This is despite Tower Hamlets having the highest levels of child poverty in London. And despite all that, there is a great deal more work to do to give children in the east end of London a fairer start in life.

In England, when it comes to child development, it is your family's wealth which matters most, not your early potential. I think we should feel, if not ashamed, then at least deeply uneasy by the way that poverty can crush the early potential of so many children.

Baby it's true ... or is it?

2010-09-22T17:51:00.017Z

Here's a ten-question quiz about how babies think, which I used recently on a training day. Quite a few people have asked for it - so here it is.

TRUE OR FALSE?

The human brain continues to grow for a year after birth. If our bodies grew proportionately during that period, we would be 10 feet tall and weigh half a ton.
3 month-old-babies know that objects move in continuous lines – they know they cannot disappear from one place and materialize in another (like in Star Trek).
3-month-old babies know that an object cannot pass through another object like a ghost.
3-month-old babies know that objects only move each other if there is contact (like snooker/billiard balls – when one bumps into the other, the other moves.) They do not expect the second ball to move if the first does not touch it.
A newborn baby knows what a tongue looks like – if you stick out your tongue, it will stick its one out in reply. It could only stick its tongue out if it knew that what it was seeing was a tongue.
It is estimated that the brain has 100 billion nerve cells and more connections in it than there are stars in the universe.
Babies think, observe and reason. They consider evidence, draw conclusions, do experiments, solve problems and search for the truth. Even the youngest babies know a great deal about the world and actively work to find out more.
A newborn baby can distinguish between all the different sounds in every language which is spoken.
A one-week old baby notices the difference when a scene changes from three objects to two, and vice versa.
Five month old babies can do the simple maths sum of one and one makes two: if they see a Mickey Mouse, then he is covered by a screen, and then another Mickey Mouse is placed behind the screen – when the screen is removed, they expect to see two.

Answers (and printer-friendly version) here.

Items in this quiz include quotations and adaptations from Stephen Pinker's book How the Mind Works

Book review: Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos

2010-09-02T13:08:00.013Z

Childhood, Well-Being and a Therapeutic Ethos
Richard House and Del Lowenthal (eds)
Karnac Books, 2009

Thinking about a therapeutic ethos in education means confronting a dilemma. On the one hand, therapeutic approaches offer a longed-for alternative to thinking about education as merely the achievement of targets. So the fresh thinking promised by this volume feels like a welcome opportunity to consider possible meanings of childhood, rather than league-tabled outcomes.

Yet, as Stephen J. Ball (2003, 216) argues, things become problematic for teachers when we describe, or perhaps enscribe, ourselves “in the lexicons of belief and commitment, service and even love, and of mental health and emotional well-being.” Ball cites Foucault’s notion of professionals who are “technicians of behaviour’, their task ‘to produce bodies that are docile and capable’. One might substitute “emotion” for “behaviour” and wonder, as Kathryn Ecclestone does in this volume, whether a therapeutic ethos might end up producing a generation of docile and diminished children.

Richard House and Del Loewenthal, the editors of Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos, take somewhat contrasting positions in this lively and eclectic book. Loewenthal generates a contemplative, philosophiocal tone, drawing on Plato to call into question the increasingly technological direction of both therapy, especially cognitive behaviour therapy, and education. House, on the other hand, takes up a Steinerian position which is principled and traditional in its opposition to the modern notion of early years education. However, the desire to preserve a tradition like the the Steiner movement is always likely to place orthodoxy and purity before critical discussion. For example, House (2009, page 166) wonders “which position is likely to generate more net damage to [children’s] development: assuming that children live in a spiritual ‘dream consciousness’ when in reality they don’t; or assuming that they don’t, when they really are?”. It is doubtful whether anyone who is not already a Steinerian will be convinced that children must be be kept in a spritual space, safe from the threat of shared adult:child thinking (constructivism) in early childhood education.

Yet co-existing uneasily with this romantic defence of the traditional, there is a tabloid-shrill discourse of emergency, with “facts” sometimes seeming to be impulsively torn from “research”. House (2009, page 156) draws on the BBC news website and the Daily Mail as evidence for his argument that there is “a major increase in child mental-health and behavioural problems” . But even the BBC’s website is more nuanced, noting that “experts cast doubt on the findings”, whilst the summary from the Office for National Statistics states that “one in ten children in Great Britain aged 5-16 had a clinically recognisable mental disorder in 2004. This was the same as the proportion recorded in the 1999 survey.” Therborn (2008, page 129) describes Bourdieu’s commitment to theory as the “guiding compass of empirical investigation". On occasion, it can seem as if some contributors are waving a rather large magnet around that compass, swinging “facts” into posiiton.

More generally, the book’s overall argument for a therapeutic turn in education, and life as a whole, does not adequately consider whether that this might merely generate another “regime” for the pinching and shaping of the individual’s soul. For example, Oliver James (2009, page 223) commends the process by which a group of staff were guided by a consultant to cope with the demands of their unreasonable boss. The consultant worked with the staff to consider how how their boss made them feel. Together, they produced an image of him as a “tremendously insecure, lonely man”. But I would argue that such a way of thinking and working diminishes everyone. It is not possible to “pin down” another person’s emotional state with such certainty by working on our own feelings. The staff members do not seem to have been helped to stand up to unreasonable behaviour; instead they are all left in a sort of hall of mirrors where emotional hurt is endlessly reflected. They are hurt by their boss, who is himself the victim of some other process of emotional hurt which then acts on them, and so on.

In this respect, Ecclestone’s concern about the “diminished self” (2009, pages 129 to 154) is an important critique. Yet in making a strong argument against inadequately-theorised notions like “self-esteem” and “emotional literacy”, she does not consider the pressing need for schools and educators to to find some way of responding to numbers of pupils who present with angry, confused or withdrawn behaviour. When she cites the problem of young trainee teachers who “uncritically reproduce claims from advocates of emotional literacy” (2009, page 147) one wonders whether her concern might be better directed towards what she sees as a general failure to develop critical thinking. The pedlars of self-esteem remedies, circle time and other simple solutions to difficult problems are straw men in this argument.

Ecclestone does not engage with more sophiscticated practice or theory, like Ricky Emmanuel’s contribution to the collection (2009, pages 91 to 98). Emmanuel’s description of his work with a young child’s suffering is, I would argue, neither diminishing to the child, nor uncritical in its thinking. Emmanuel draws on the Kleinian notion of play therapy, but without the continual verbalisations which Lacan (1988, page 68) complained were symbolisation slammed onto the child “with complete brutality”. Emmanuel describes a process which is like Klein by freeze-frame, the therapist as witness to trauma depicted in a child’s torturing play with plastic animals.

The urge to deny that children suffer is discussed by Sue Gerhardt in her interesting chapter (2009, pages 113 to 126). She disapprovingly quotes the Times columnist Mick Hume, who suggests that “there is no right way to bring up baby. And whatever hotch potch method you use will have no long-term effect on your child. As one wise man said, if you can avoid locking them in a wardrobe or beating them on the head with a frying pan, they should be fine.” On the face of it, his light-hearted argument might be seen as an affront to loving parents: a denial of the power of our affection or its lack. But perhaps it is more deeply unsettling for another reason: that we cannot reliably calibrate the outcomes of love and care, whether at home or in schools, and we cannot understand how one child appears traumatised by what another seems to shrug off.

Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos is provocative and interesting, but I found it unpersuasive. I was left thinking of the English pioneer of experimental education and psycho-analytic theory, Susan Isaacs. She had, for the most part, a keen eye and ear for the suffering and traumas of childhood. Yet she also had an uncompromising commitment to children’s freedom, in contrast to the fearful, “dimished” child. Visitors to her school were shocked to discover children sliding off the garden shed; and Jean Piaget found that his current notion of age-related stages of thinking was effectively demolished as a child riding a bicycle freely about the place theorised out-loud about cause and effect. Yet after years of practice, both as teacher and psych-analyst, Isaacs (1933, page 412) cautioned that “an admixture of education and analysis tends to ruin both”.

First published in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Volume 11, Number 4 2010

References

Ball, Stephen J (2003) “The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity”

Isaacs, S (1933) Social Development In Young Children. A Study Of Beginnings

Lacan, J (1988) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954 Book I

Therborn, G (2008) From Marxism to Post-Marxism

Evidence

2010-09-02T12:43:00.003Z

The government’s announcement that the Early Years Foundation Stage should be reviewed “looking at the latest evidence about children’s development” makes perfect sense.

But “evidence” is always harder to establish than we might hope; too often, announcements are made which do not stand up terribly well. You may have read recently, for example, that research from the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) came to the potentially significant conclusion that children in private nurseries have more time to play than those in maintained nursery schools and classes. But you cannot read this piece of research in full unless you are a member of BESA or prepared to pay them £350. What you can tell from the press release is that their evidence comes from a survey of 510 nursery settings in the maintained and private sectors, who are unlikely to be a representative sample. This “evidence” makes for a good headline, but little more.

On the other hand, anyone can freely read the EPPE (Effective Provision of Pre-School Education) Project, which probably unrivalled in the world for its scope and rigour. All the same, its findings need to be put in context. Take Sustained Shared Thinking (SST) as an example. SST is taking place when a practitioner and a child spend time thinking together about a problem or an idea. When we say “hmm, I wonder why that happened?” to a child as we look at a shriveled bean plant, and we both talk through our ideas for several minutes, we are engaged in SST. When we say “you forgot to water it”, we are doing something else.
EPPE finds that SST occurs most often in settings with the best outcomes for children. On the back of this, there are some very good courses, books and training on using this strategy. But we only know from EPPE that SST is associated with good outcomes for children. For example, it could be that settings where practitioners and children talk like this have many other features which support children’s development very well. SST could be more like the tip of an iceberg of good practice, rather than constituting effective practice in itself.

It is common to wish to improve things on the basis of evidence; but “evidence” needs to be thought over with care and over time, before we jump to conclusions. This is what will make the review of the EYFS so interesting.

This piece was first published in Nursery World

Susan Isaacs and Jean Piaget: a chance encounter

2010-09-02T12:35:00.007Z

Occasionally, it seems, an encounter between two people and a chance observation can change the world. I do not think it is an exaggaration to make this claim for what happened when the psychologist Jean Paiget met Susan Isaacs in the 1920s.

At that time, Piaget was conducting highly structured investigations into how young children develop knowledge. Isaacs had set up the Malting House School and was experimenting with an approach to education which allowed children a high degree of freedom to choose, play, and decide for themselves what they wanted to learn. Piaget’s investigations had demonstrated, to his satisfaction, the fact that children under the age of eight could not grasp the idea of mechanical causality. He had come to this conclusion after undertaking large numbers of interviews with young children. But just as he was explaining his theories to Susan Isaacs in the garden of the Malting House School, the two adults came across a five year old boy on his tricycle.

Asked why his trike was not moving forwards, the boy pointed to the fact that he was back-pedalling. Isaacs records that then the boy said: “Oh well, your feet press the pedals, that turns the crank round, and the cranks turn that round (pointing to the cog-wheel) and that makes the chain go round, and the chain turns the hub round, and then the wheels go round - and there you are!”

This encounter roughly co-incides with a major shift in the focus of Piaget’s work. Around this time, he stopped invesitgating children’s thinking in laboratory conditions by questioning them. Instead, he began to build a new theory of how children learn, drawing on very close obervation of babies, toddlers and young children as they played spontaneoulsy. Pretty much all of the many experiments which are currenltly being carried out on babies’ brain acitivity as they move around, manipulate objects and watch carefully planned events are inspired by Piaget’s work, and develop his theories.

When we are with young children, we can all-too-easily find that we are just going through the motions as we follow daily routines and implement our planning. What was so remarkable about Piaget, was his open-ness to the new and exciting. He was prepared to see things afresh, after that chance encounter in the garden. How many other people would even give a second thought to what a five-year-old said about back-pedalling his tricycle?

Read more posts about Susan Isaacs:

Child Care and early years education: the ideas of Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein and Anna Freud

Susan Isaacs: a life freeing the minds of children

This piece was first published in Nursery World

Creativity in the early years

2010-07-03T08:13:00.019Z

It is nice to think that the Early Years Foundation Stage is the one part of the educational system where children’s creativity is truly valued. Nice: but misguided.

First of all, many nurseries and reception classes still work under the misduderstanding that creativity is about mass-production. I am thinking of those rows of near-identical paintings of flowers, and outlines drawn by adults which are filled with tissue paper scrunched by industrious little fingers.

Then there are the displays made up of children’s drawings which have been cut around by an adult and stuck onto a background. I can remember spending almost a week’s worth of early evenings putting together just such a display as a class teacher nearly twenty years ago. It was all nicely mounted, spaced and proportioned. Parents and staff admired it, but I do not recall that the children took much interest. Years later, I heard Tina Bruce wondering how Van Gogh would have felt if his paintings of chairs had been cut out and used for a display about Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It struck me then that a kind of violence is done to children’s drawing and paintings if we cut them out and use them for our own ends.

If it is to mean anything, the Creative Development strand of the EYFS has got to be about making choices and thinking creatively. After the children are taken to the woods to see the bluebells, surely they should be given a range of opportunities to respond – to draw, to paint, to dance, or to manipulate digital pictures and video, perhaps?

But that train of thought left me wondering if Creative Development is, therefore, all about processes, and leaving children to make choices and be free. But it cannot be. For example, I (truly) cannot sing in tune. Nor do I dance terribly well. Left with just me, no class or group of children could make much development in those areas. I would not be able to respond, model, take part or help them refine what they were doing.
A“free” approach to Creative Development is likely to be less damaging to children than inposing an adult agenda. But it will be no more educative. Young children need capable adults who can help them develop their skills and broaden their horizons, and who have the imagination and understanding to give them time, space and freedom for creativity.

First published in Nursery World

Reference: Cultivating Creativity in Babies, Toddlers and Young Children by Tina Bruce

Patrick Whitaker

2010-06-20T21:25:00.010Z

I was very saddened to hear recently of the sudden death of Patrick Whitaker.

Like many, I was greatly influenced by his wise approach to thinking about management and leadership in schools and Children's Centres. Patrick was always a kind, thoughtful and absolutely supportive tutor to me throughout my MA.

Last week, as a small tribute, I used his book Managing Change in Schoolsin a training course I was running.

I was struck again by his composed and civilised tone in a field that attracts show-offs and worse. He will be missed.

The Early Years Foundation Stage: what experiences are worthwhile for children?

2010-06-20T16:18:00.007Z

This is the PowerPoint to go with my presentation at the AGM of the National Campaign for Real Nursery Education (NCRNE). These are some of the early findings from my small-scale research which I am doing towards my doctorate at the Institute of Education, supervised by Liz Brooker.

If you have comments, queries, or disagreements, please post them below - the discussion on the morning was fascinating. Perhaps it can go on?

If you would prefer to read the PowerPoint on its own instead of embedded below, then click here.

Ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn

2010-06-12T21:06:00.005Z

A few weeks ago I was in one of the backstreets of Bethnal Green in the heart of London’s East End. In the middle of a street with a garage servicing a long line of Black Cabs is one of the old Ragged Schools.

The Ragged Schools were early free schools for the poorest working class children, set up before elementary education was made universal in the 1870s. The children were, by all accounts, literally ragged. One of the most important things offered by the schools was free food and clothing - they were not just about education. Charles Dickens, an early supporter, wrote that “they who are too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other place: who could gain admission into no charity school, and who would be driven from any church door; are invited to come in here, and find some people not depraved, willing to teach them something, and show them some sympathy.”

Today, in the hall of that old Ragged School in Bethnal Green, thriving groups for children and parents are offered through a link to the local Children's Centre. I was lucky enough to be there on a particularly vibrant day, and meet numerous mothers, fathers, grandparents and carers. I listened as a grandmother told me that she came there every week, and that her grand-daughter liked the company, space and freedom. As we were talking, the little girl – who had been glancing backwards – came over, got a cuddle from her nan, and went back to what she was doing in the home corner. It was a strikingly loving and tender moment.

Later on, as I tried to wipe snail trails of Pritt off the tables (with little success) I wondered about the many drop-ins I have seen over the years, some with organised whole-group activities, others with practitioners on-hand to promote interaction between adults and children, working the room to get parents off their chairs. Some of these sessions are good. But others are quite dreadful, with children going through someone else’s motions without much enthusiasm. Parents, assuming it is all for the best, respond gamely or grumpily to the directions and suggestions they are given by staff.

I imagined all those ragged children sitting in rows a century and a half ago, warm and fed for once, but surely also miserable and destitute. I wondered what they would make of their small descendants a century and a half later, playing freely in the space, moving, singing and dancing, and enjoying the affectionate company of relaxed adults.

First published in Nursery World

Transition issues in the early years: changing places

2010-05-13T21:56:00.002Z

This is a time to think about changes children will soon be experiencing. In particular, many nursery children will be thinking about the move to “big school”, and children in reception will soon be leaving the EYFS and starting the primary curriculum.

If any of us stops to think about major changes in our lives – moving house, getting a new job, having a baby or seeing a young person grow up – waves of mixed hope, fear, optimism and apprehension will probably follow. Yet this can only give us a little bit of insight into what change is like for children, who have so much less experience than us, and so much less say in what happens. We cannot properly understand what four and five year olds experience as big transitions loom, come and go.

Early years practitioners tend to help children prepare for certain aspects of the changes to come, and give much less attention to others. Typically, a lot of emphasis is put on providing for the child’s emotional and social wellbeing – and quite rightly. But I wonder whether we think enough about consistent and continuing support for each child’s development and learning? Experiencing interesting and challenging activities, and having the satisfaction of making progress, can help young children a great deal as they settle into a new class.

It is also common to prepare children for new routines, like lining up, assemblies and carpet time. This can be helpful, but it can also raise some difficult questions about what is in children’s best interests. When the researcher Gabrielle White spoke to two boys about their Year One class, she was told by the first boy that spending so much time on the carpet was a waste of time which could be spent playing. His friend was more forthright: “it wastes your life.” (You can read the full report here).

We need to think about everything together: continuing with consistent support for the child as a learner, helping with new routines (providing that they are necessary), and offering reassurance and emotional support. Whilst transition tends to be thought of as something difficult for young children, it is also worth remembering that change can offer children a chance to make new friends and to find a new way with things. There is pleasure in growing up and moving on, as well as the sadness that comes with leaving things behind.

First published in Nursery World

The importance of being educated

2010-03-31T18:52:00.001Z

I am convinced that further education for staff in the early years is the midwife that will deliver better ways of working from an old body of traditions and practices.

There is still some scepticism about early childhood studies degrees and the early years professional status. I think the doubters are wrong, and that they are ignoring the incredible potential of the early years workforce. Many committed nursery nurses have been working with young children for decades without proper recognition of their intellectual abilities, their understanding of children's learning, or their insight into the complexity of managing group care. There are thousands of bright, gifted people in the workforce who either did not get to realise their talents in school, or left school early and chose nursery nursing because it allowed them to start earning money at a young age.

The expansion of higher education, with new routes like Foundation Degrees, distance and part-time learning, has opened up study and research to many thousands of adults later in life. In the early years, this has enabled adults to begin to realise their own potential as learners, as well as benefiting the children they work with. It also means that many experienced nursery nurses can position themselves to train as teachers, if they wish to, bringing valuable experience into schools.

It is true that training for EYPs and teachers needs to be improved. But the deficiencies in training and qualifications should not taint the whole project of increasing the number of graduates working in the early years. It is no longer adequate to think that childcare is something that "comes naturally", or is only learnt through experience. Increasingly, working in the early years is about realising how complex care and emotional development are, how important it is to foster children's love of learning, and how effective multi-agency work can be when it is done well.

Few people doubt that the issues around young children are getting steadily more complex, and heated. In this furnace, a good early childhood setting is just the sort of place where parents can feel confident and secure, receive friendly advice, and feel supported.

We can choose to despair about the way things are going for children. Or we can engage with the problems, and try to do better for the next generation - which is exactly what all those early years staff are doing as they further their education.

The traditions and importance of the nursery school

2010-03-07T12:41:00.015Z

This is the last column I will write as a nursery school headteacher: from the end of April I will be in a new job as Early Years Adviser to Tower Hamlets in east London.

Working in a London nursery school, I have always felt very aware of the history behind, in and around me. It is more than a hundred and fifty years since the great German teacher and thinker Friedrich Froebel invented the “kindergarten” and explicitly recognised the importance of the child’s activity in learning. It struck me how radical a way of thinking that still is, when the compere at last year's Early Years Professionals’ Conference described young children as “like an empty vessel ready to be filled”.

You can make your own choice between seeing children as fancy packages, ready to have stuff poured into them, or as inquisitive and thoughtful beings in their own right: I would choose Froebel every time.

The idea of the kindergarten inspired Robert Owen, who built an infant school for the children of his factory workers in New Lanark, Scotland, and the Macmillan sisters, who worked to open nursery schools in some of the poorest parts of inner London. The early decades of the twentieth century saw an increase in the momentum for a more enlightened style of nursery and infant education. Children were to be offered space, time, and plenty of materials to manipulate and play with, in the presence of thoughtful adults with specialist training. We live in an era that is sceptical of progress: but who can deny that the new nursery and infant schools released children from a kind of prison? Close to where I live now, in East London, was one of the first free primary schools. The youngest children were kept in a big wire cage and the older children of six and above sat still in rows, in classes of fifty or more, under the direction of a teacher on a high platform with a big stick.

Of course, no movement is ever entirely for the good. You could argue that the Macmillan sisters had a misguided notion of the child as a romantic free spirit, needing to be rescued from a debased working class culture. When the nursery school movement got mixed up with the early days of Freudianism, an idea took hold that the child needed “free development” – and if anyone interfered, the child would suffer life-long psychological problems. Wars between nations were seen to result from adults interfering in the natural course of early childhood. These ways of thinking are still around, but they are well past their use-by date.

The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright said that the “secret of whatever got into the architecture of the world” could be found in the early kindgergarten experience of playing with blocks (you can read the full quotation in its proper context here). By and large, the nursery school has kept with that Froebelian idea: learning starts with the child actively engaging with and making sense of the world. Various educational fashions have come and gone: nursery schools have stayed true to the values of play, outdoor learning, and the child’s need for thoughtful, specialist-trained staff. These ideas also have a strong hold in many other parts of the education system, beyond the few hundred nursery schools we still have left in the UK.

I hope that I have engaged with this tradition with enough energy, conviction and thoughtfulness, so that – with the help of many others – a little nursery school by King's Cross is being handed on to the future in good shape.

Revisiting and reconsidering Kurt Lewin and action research

2010-03-06T17:58:00.004Z

The PowerPoint below goes with the presentation I did for the psychosocial SIG at the Institute of Education. Some of the slides are a bit text-full (OK, crammed with text....); it's better if you choose the option to view as full screen. I would be very interested if anyone wants to feedback any ideas on Lewin, his links to the Frankfurt school, Eric Miller's use of Marxist theory or anything else on this topic.

Value for money and outcomes...or community engagement and ethical actions?

2010-03-06T17:48:00.004Z

The National Audit Office has once again queried whether Sure Start Children’s Centres provide good value for money. The Centres exist to reach the most disadvantaged families, but the NAO reports that on average centres succeed in allocating just 38 staff hours per week on outreach (you can read the full report here; it opens as a PDF).

It is tempting to respond by disputing these findings or wondering how robust they are. Perhaps it is wiser to accept the fact that targeted outreach work is something which is extremely difficult to do.

The pressures are contradictory. On the one hand, there is the desire to make the centres places that families want to come and use. Services like Stay and Play, relaxation and pampering, and respite crèches for tired parents are all popular, and to that extent they are worthwhile. But the evidence that they make any significant difference to the lives of young children is not easy to come by.

More targeted services, involving outreach and home visiting, may seem to have a better chance of engaging with the so-called “hard to reach” families. But there is always the danger of coming across as rather unappealing; exactly what families are trying to stay out of the reach of. Parents do not want to be lectured, and made to feel like hopeless school children all over again. Family support services which focus on multiagency assessment and planning can feel just like traditional social services.

This is not to say that outreach services cannot be shaped and run so that they are experienced more positively. They can be: there is some fine practice. But it is hard to do, it is still quite experimental, and it is under-researched. For example, I doubt that any new medical intervention on the scale of Children’s Centres would even be proposed without a great deal more formal experimentation, piloting and evaluation.

The danger is that because so much money has been put into Children’s Centres, we feel under crushing pressure to demonstrate the impact. We could end up in a dizzying spiral of activity and recording. We would then become steadily de-professionalized, working away merely to generate data to show we are doing a good job. Instead, we should be stopping and thinking, as well as planning and doing. We need to show outcomes, but we also need to think about whether we are acting in the best interests of children and families, being ethical, and being responsible.

First published in Nursery World

Why are we so anxious about children?

2010-01-06T18:45:00.005Z

On New Year's Eve, the Guardian reported that fourteen under fives are excluded every day for violence against teachers or fellow pupils. We should, of course, expect under fives to have the greatest difficulties in behaving acceptably in school. Many young children have passionate feelings, with little thought for consequences. Yet this has usually been balanced with a strong desire to please adults, to be liked and accepted in school.

So what might be causing the present problems? I expect some possible answers to this question will come quickly: the increasing pressure on little children to learn to read and write through formal instruction, the stresses experienced by many parents as they try to combine work with family life, perhaps the growing targeting of children by advertisers.

But I would like to suggest another factor: the culture of fear around childhood and young children. This is problematic in every way possible. In some nurseries and reception classes, children are hardly trusted with the most elementary responsibilities or freedoms, because adults are so fearful of the consequences. Children are kept in sight, confined to rooms and seats, and regulated in ways which would have simply been inconceivable a few decades ago. Whilst some children can tolerate this type of custodial schooling, there are others who cannot. What might have once been boisterous behaviour in the playground or indoors, unseen or wisely ignored, might now quickly escalate into a confrontation.

This fearfulness about what children might do if they were a little less regulated paradoxically goes along with a great deal of nervousness about setting the limits on behaviour children need as they grow up. Many parents are afraid to say no, afraid of public reaction and a “scene” if they try to curb their children’s behaviour. Similarly, swimming pool attendants, staff in parks and shops and all sorts of other people who would once have upheld standards of public behaviour are afraid to do this now. I think they may be afraid that the child’s parent will turn on them, or that they will be accused of some sort of child abuse.

But if we cannot overcome our anxieties about young children having freedom, and the worry that they will be somehow damaged by all sorts of ordinary adult interactions, then we can only expect to see a continuing rise in school exclusions, together with damage to children far beyond our worst fears.

Read Tim Gill on growing up in a risk averse society here (opens as a PDF in a new window)

An ill-mannered gripe

2009-12-20T17:22:00.006Z

Despite the impression that teachers are some sort of front for a revolutionary socialist action group, given intermittently by the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Express, my experience is that many school staffrooms are pretty middle class and reactionary.

On my final teaching practice in Oxford, I was treated to nostalgic tales of how much better things were when there was still corporal punishment. A few years later, I sat close to a couple of Chinese children in a Sheffield primary school whilst the deputy headteacher gave a laughing account of going to see a dance where there were people "dressed up like little Chinese". And only a few months ago I sat next to a well-regarded headteacher who works in a primary school in a poor community and listened to her wondering aloud about how the recession could be affecting local parents, or "our layabouts" as she called them, when none of them ever did a day's work anyway.

Still, this did not prepare me for Mike Kent's column The Gripe Before Christmas, on the last page of the Times Educational Supplement. Kent, a headteacher in Camberwell, London, is a pretty good columnist, though he is no Ted Wragg. So I wonder what made him decide to get all his laughs this week at the expense of the parents of the pupils in his school?

A whole line-up of comic, London working class characters were brought forward to be sneered at: women so fat they need two chairs per buttock, parents who can't keep quiet for a moment and leave their mobiles on, parents who have become so thick-headed with exposure to Jerry Springer that they whoop and scream at every opportunity, and even a mother who was ill-mannered enough to bring her baby along, which woke up and needed feeding. For shame.

What happened to the idea that schools should be places where parents would feel welcomed and respected?

There are, of course, times when the behaviour of some parents might be at odds with what is best for the children; and schools should not be meek about saying so. But the lapse in good manners here is surely Kent's, not the parents'. They only turned up to see their children; Kent has turned them into a freak show.

The Ofsted Early Years and Childcare SEF - it's amazing what you can get on Ebay...

2009-12-05T18:19:00.010Z

If the time ever comes to look back with amusement at the current, crazy times in early years education, then the appearance on Ebay of Ofsted-friendly smoke alarm logbooks, policies and even Self Evaluation Forms (SEFs) ) is one of the moments I will recall. As I'm writing in December 2009, you can find some examples here and here - or search in Ebay for Ofsted or SEF.

In the old days of the Early Excellence Programme, before there was Sure Start, Children’s Centres or the EYFS, I remember one of the select band of Early Excellence Centres being inspected by Ofsted for its early education, and by the local social services department for its childcare. The distinguished lead inspector from Ofsted commented that the social services team were nothing more than an irritant, tagging along behind Ofsted riffling through folders and paperwork, counting toilets, peering at soap dispensers and toilet roll holders, and checking out rooms with tape measures.

The distinguished lead inspector from Ofsted commented that the social services team were nothing more than an irritant, riffling through folders and paperwork, counting toilets, peering at soap dispensers, and checking out rooms with tape measures.

Nowadays, I think I would be pretty pleased to see those old social services daycare officers, who took a kindly interest in the children’s welfare when they were not burrowing through their files. When completing a SEF, it can feel like Ofsted is less concerned with the reality of daily life for the children than it is with measuring and accounting for everything. Schools are even asked to account for how they ensure that three and four year olds get the skills they will need in the workplace, a question that apparently led one primary school to cite role play in the nursery around vets and hairdressers as a way of preparing children for their future employment.

However wonderful your work with children, you would be advised to prepare for trouble if there are any flaws in your filing or recording of information. I will not speculate on whether a nursery with wonderful paperwork but dubious practice could come out well in its inspection. Let’s hope not.

So it is hardly a great surprise that Ebay is full of SEFs, policies, posters and logbooks to help people cope with the current inspection regime. I applaud the ingenuity of all those resourceful chimdinders and nursery managers who are making a little bit on the side for what would otherwise be hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime, hunched over paperwork and laptops at home in the middle of the night. But if the buying and selling of this stuff on Ebay doesn’t make us wonder whether something is wrong with the state of early years education and care in

England

– what will?

This article was first published in Nursery World.