It seems to me that, while I can pick out what interests me the most – play and outdoors – and have done so, to some extent in earlier entries, the bundle of documents in EYFS is so wide-ranging that we might just as well pick out safeguarding and learning. What really are the Key Themes?
Well, we have the documents’ own four key themes, and I must say I like the layout on line that gives us a page like this one, with no nonsense.
But is the learning and development section so overarching that, despite all the other words, teachers will still focus on outcomes rather than provision? When staff and governors at my old nursery school, Bartlemas, chose “Investing in the Whole Child” as our mission statement, someone pointed out to me how interesting it was that people working with young children tend to go for statements to do with what adults provide, and schools for older children, or with a more ‘top-junior’ ethos perhaps, emphasise what the children will do. I’m not sure if this holds water, but it’s interesting to reflect on this huge divide between the philosophy that looks at education as input and the one that looks at it as output.
So if we look at EYFS in terms of output, the learning and development sections are the place to be to find key themes – or is it? Teachers might look to the ‘development matters’ section for things to identify as learning objectives (although some – most- are so broad as to be unusable on their own) but they are only one strand out of four. Planning and resourcing is to do with adult investment of staff time and interest, focus, even money; look, listen and note is again about investment of attention, focused attention; effective practice speaks for itself.
So we have four key themes, one of which might get grabbed by the hesitant educator as the real business of EYFS; and within that one theme, one column concerns itself with outcomes, and even that is tempered with statements like this last one:
The challenge for practitioners is to ensure that children’s learning and development occur as an outcome of their individual interests and abilities and that planning for learning and development takes account of these.
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/4/4.htm
And maybe Ellis and his friends, whom I mentioned in the previous entry, give a good exemplification of this way of working, of looking at and providing for children’s learning.
I come no closer to identifying them, these central ideas, apart from identifying my own bias, which comes from my experiences with my own children, in my own practice in schools, and seeing practice as I visit other settings. Perhaps we really do have to take the document at face value, and say that, whatever might be made of them in poorly provisioned pre-schools or lacklustre reception classes – not that this is the whole or dominant picture – the EYFS is founded on principles of each child’s unique development, where genuine and positive relationships work with good provision to enhance a child’s life chances. Voila: the four key themes all in one sentence without a bullet point in sight.
nicktomjoe 