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Starting the PGCE

Well, the sun is shining, and I ended the teaching day sat under the trees in our Arboretum with the people who are going to be my personal tutees. It was easy to be upbeat, while remembering that this experience, the workload and learning challenges of the PGCE never make for an easy year. So much to learn, for some a lot to unlearn, and this year above all some key messages the Government want us to deliver.

This isn’t going to be a moan. I read, for example, the latest drafts, tweets and releases on redefining SEN and am determined to think  “here is another challenge” and then worry how the trainees and the trainers – and most importantly the schools – will deal with this, but today of all days we need to look at all this with some hope. Here is a large and competent bunch of students all looking at us, keen to get going, nervous of the step they’re taking and I feel I need to say

“We are professionals with you. As I’ve said before, we have beliefs we profess – and we want to share our vision with you.“

So what are we asking the Early Years PGCE students to learn? What does an Early Years teacher need to know?

I could list phonics, transition, pedagogies, child development, curriculum documentation, leading the team, dealing with parents, answering critics – the list is very long. Maybe I want them to know one thing: how children learn best. All being well, the rest may fall into place when they have grasped the beginnings of that.

Fighting talk

Perhaps it’s fighting season. Michael Gove has set up one target – school playing fields -the disquiet around which could be a topic for some of my Outdoor Learning module this coming semester, but it’s various postings from Michael Rosen that drew my attention today, and which are linked here without comment.

This first one is a reposting of his, from the blog of a childminder reflecting on phonics. The second is from Michael himself addressing Jim Rose, replying to Rose’s letter in the Guardian which is itself a reply to Michael Rosen and others…

Thinking again about play

To start with a quotation:

“Psychologists and educators have found it difficult to come to a definition of what play is – partly, perhaps, because the phenomenon is more easily recognised than it is pinned down to a rigid classification. However, understanding some of the complexities of play needs some unpicking. We can identify play when we see it, but going beyond a mere description is a more complex business.”

So much from the Reflective Reader we wrote back in 2007.

Has the new framework for Early Years changed any of this?  It has to be admitted that there are a number of other documents  and web sites which augment the framework, not least Early Education’s key Development Matters material, which must not be overlooked. But a quick look through the framework makes for depressing reading in many ways.

If we look at para 1.9:

Each area of learning and development must be implemented through planned, purposeful play and through a mix of adult-led and child-initiated activity. Play is essential for children’s development, building their confidence as they learn to explore, to think about problems, and relate to others.

Children learn by leading their own play, and by taking part in play which is guided by adults. There is an ongoing judgement to be made by practitioners about the balance between activities led by children, and activities led or guided by adults. Practitioners must respond to each child’s emerging needs and interests, guiding their development through warm, positive interaction. As children grow older, and as their development allows, it is expected that the balance will gradually shift towards more activities led by adults, to help children prepare for more formal learning, ready for Year 1.

We are clearly here in the realm of an instrumental view of play, one in which practitioners view play not as having intrinsic value but as a means to an end.

The gloom that hangs over this for me is the increasing interference of adults in children’s activities “to help children prepare for more formal learning, ready for Year 1.” Not only school readiness, but ready for a top-down curriculum done to children… So the official/enacted curriculum is already strong on what we need children to be like and we are no further on than the Desirable Outcomes in the 90s.

Or am I being too gloomy?

At the heart of my disquiet, I think, is the lack of clarity I started this post with.  Part of me sees this difficulty in coming to a shared understanding  about what play is as liberating – an ambiguity that allows for creativity, for risk-taking, for making time to read a book or whittle a stick; part of me would like a definition, and if I’m honest I’d like it so that we could have a bulwark against the intrusion of issues such as “school readiness” and top-down pressure. But there is a third element here, and I’ll end with a question:

As tides turn and fashions change, to what extent can EY practitioners steel themselves to live with this ambiguity, since the lack of definition actually makes us easy prey to the notion that Early Years practice is in effect just preparation for real learning?

Grenier on Nutbrown

Julian Grenier is a thoughtful blogger, so it was interesting to read his reflections on the Nutbrown Review on his Inside the Secret Garden blog.  I share his disquiet about EYP status, I must admit: in 2002 I waved the flag for Senior Practitioner status and the Sector Endorsed Foundation Degree – and am still proud not only of our achievements in HE, but of the journey (yes I know it’s a cliche) of the thousands who have done the programme up and down the country. Then the goalposts changed, and I have since talked loud and long about Early Years Professionals, and we made a point of including EYP standards when the team here wrote the reflective reader (pause for a quick plug) . Now we move to maybe where I would have liked to be when I moved from being a headteacher ten years ago: an increasingly graduate group of professionals and certainly a well-motivated work force with access to Higher Education.  Places like Oxford Brookes will continue to work energetically with and for these people, as well as work training Early Years teachers in line with whatever is accepted from the Nutbrown recommendations and in accordance with the vision of the Government and the sector.

But until the sector bites the bullet and calls teachers teachers (and pays them accordingly), and recognises that expertise, we will continue to have this rather odd and too-casual upskilling of some of the most important people in our society.

Julian is right to be concerned.

Nutbrown Review of Qualifications

Not a rant this time, just the links to the pdf of the report, and to the DoE webpage on the review which also has other useful links.

Here are the nineteen recommendations:

Recommendation 1
The Government should continue to specify the qualifications that are suitable for staff operating within the EYFS, and the Teaching Agency should develop a more robust set of ‘full and relevant’ criteria to ensure qualifications promote the right content and pedagogical processes. These criteria should be based on the proposals set out in this report.
Recommendation 2
All qualifications commenced from 1 September 2013 must demonstrate that they meet the new ‘full and relevant’ criteria when being considered against the requirements of the EYFS.
Recommendation 3
The previously articulated plan to move to a single early years qualification should be abandoned.
Recommendation 4
The Government should consider the best way to badge qualifications that meet the new ‘full and relevant’ criteria so that people can recognise under what set of ‘full and relevant’ criteria a qualification has been gained.
Recommendation 5
The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, by September 2022, all staff counting in the staff:child ratios must be qualified at level 3.
Recommendation 6
The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, from September 2013, a minimum of 50 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios.
Recommendation 7
The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, from September 2015, a minimum of 70 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios.
Recommendation 8
Level 2 English and mathematics should be entry requirements to level 3 early education and childcare courses.
Recommendation 9
Tutors should be qualified to a higher level than the course they are teaching.
Recommendation 10
All tutors should have regular continuing professional development and contact with early years settings. Colleges and training providers should allow sufficient time for this.
Recommendation 11
Only settings that are rated ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted should be able to host students on placement.
Recommendation 12
Colleges and training providers should look specifically at the setting’s ability to offer students high quality placements.
Recommendation 13
The Department for Education should conduct research on the number of BME staff at different qualification levels, and engage with the sector to address any issues identified.
Recommendation 14
Newly qualified practitioners starting in their first employment should have mentoring for at least the first six months. If the setting is rated below ‘Good’, this mentoring should come from outside.
Recommendation 15
A suite of online induction and training modules should be brought together by the Government, that can be accessed by everyone working in early education and childcare.
Recommendation 16
A new early years specialist route to QTS, specialising in the years from birth to seven, should be introduced, starting from September 2013.
Recommendation 17
Any individual holding Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) should be able to access routes to obtain QTS as a priority.
Recommendation 18
I recommend that Government considers the best way to maintain and increase graduate pedagogical leadership in all early years settings.
Recommendation 19
I am not recommending that the Government impose a licensing system on the early years sector. However, the Government should consider supporting a sector-led approach, if an affordable and sustainable one emerges with widespread sector support.

Learning poems

I will leave it to two voices more eloquent than mine to explore in two very different ways the notion of children “as young as five” (why always that cliche?) learning to recite poems. They express in different voices a counterpoint of the disquiet we have all, I think, felt at pronouncements on the the content of the new National Curriculum, esp in its looking at English in the first years of Primary.

Michael Rosen, whose poems really do inspire young children – and by that I mean everything from getting them to make rhymes themselves (In one nursery I worked in we had “Don’t put Teresa in the freezer/Don’t put Nick in the sick” as a response to Michael’s Mustard in the Custard poem, on Youtube here) to falling about on the floor laughing – is as eloquent and wrathful as ever, an Amos Starkadder kind of rage aimed at the current decisions, when he critiques the new curriculum proposals. Here, in story form, he mocks everything he can lay his hands on about the idea of reciting poetry in the Gove model.

If Michael Rosen is Amos Starkadder, perhaps Mary Beard is Flora Poste: determined to bring a sense of order to the seeming chaos (I note, however, that she and I have different views on Cold Comfort Farm).  Mary is, however, no fan of the Gove model either. Here, in her Times Blog (linked in my Blogroll, as you’ll see) she too expresses her doubts.

So why don’t I like what Gove is suggesting? Because it’s bound to be one size fits all kind of learning and so completely uninspiring.

I fear she is right, that this could be the beginning of a canon of a great works way of looking at literature that will be dull and unresponsive to children’s interests and needs. And this will be the challenge: making this work, cutting through the political rhetoric on any side to see that at the heart of it is not the creation of children and schools from Ladybird Reading Scheme books of years gone by, nor yet dismissing this because Michael Gove has come to be disliked and mistrusted, but saying calmly and passionately to parents, trainee teachers, Governors, Inspectors, “This is what we have always done, and done well. The children in this school delight in spoken and written English, from Early Years (where they learn to recite and love and parody and store up for later those rhymes we call, well, nursery rhymes) to the riches of Heaney, Clare, Causley, Marvell – yes, and Rosen too, and, in time, Vergil.  This is what we do, this (if you’ll let us explain) is how we do it. We are not disempowered idiots, or people jumping on and off bandwagons when we are urged to do so: we are a profession; we have beliefs we profess.”

And I was going to leave it to Michael and Mary. Maybe I should have.

Maurice Sendak

“Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake” as one poet-translator put it, after Callimachus. In the midst of saying goodbye to some really good students, and “doing” the marking, and sorting staffing and timetables and the other stuff, I am suddenly saddened by the news of your death.

I remember my parents being asked whether they would let me read Where the Wild Things Are (I was 10!); I recall my delight at sharing it, and Little Bear, and Chicken Soup with Rice with my children; news of your coming out at 80 reached me a day or so before I was to present a paper on Outside Over There, my first external academic paper! I feel I have had your books as part of the scenery of my intellectual life for so long.  I hope you wouldn’t have found that metaphor unwieldy; you were so much of a dramatist, both directly involved in theatre and in creating alarming and joyful explorations of dreams, both terrors and pleasures.

Ah enough. Better obituaries than mine have said more, and your own work is the best tribute to your genius. The best epitaph that I’ve seen was a quotation from you in the Guardian:

You cannot write for children. They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.


Ulysses

An interesting workshop tomorrow at the Ashmolean gives me pause for thought: what Illustrating Ulysses brings to my mind (apart from Attic vases) is the challenge of looking at the relationship between text and illustration. In the work I’ve being doing this is very much hand-in-hand, and very often precedes publication but this blog brings the practice into (very) adult literature. If, as this writer suggests “some great stories come in daunting packages” what then does the illustrator make of them? What does Bloom look like – or for that matter, any central figure, no matter how detailed the author’s work in describing them?

And of course we might then consider the iconography of children’s literary figures, from Alice (much disputed) or Frodo (trumped by the films? This site asks  a curious question) to Red Riding Hood, who, despite growing into her costume (and her age, curiously!) as Jack Zipes outlines, carries as much baggage with her as any character from more complex texts.

So, since this is a brief pause in the day for me, I just want to finish by asking (myself as much as anyone) where does  a collaborative project of writing and illustrating differ from illustrating a classic?