Category: Uncategorized

Key themes in EYFS: some further thoughts

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.

Profiles

There’s a mini learning journey for practitioners here.

We start off on the EYFS home page and click on profile. Hidden (far too well, really, as we come to expect live hyperlinks to look obvious) on this page is a link to the NAA work on the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile:  and in case they move it, here is the link as it appears at present: http://www.naa.org.uk/naa_17850.aspx

And here we meet Ellis and friends. This link takes us to Ellis and Ashton’s exploration of plans to build a spaceship, with windows, teleport (or lift; there is a professional disagreement between the two designers here) and a jumping device.

Their learning journey is made clear for us by the possible scale points which is downloadable, but it also made me think of the remarks of Margaret Edgington in The Foundation Stage Teacher in Action (2004, p158):

However intensive their study of children during initial teacher training, teachers still have a great deal to learn. Early years teaching is quite simply about studying and learning about children. There are two related parts to this study. First, teachers need to understand about children in general – ideally from birth until at least 7 or 8… They need to understand environmental, sociological and psychological theories in order that their view of society is broadened, and is taken beyond their own limited life experience.  They also need to know that individual children develop uniquely… Throughout their careers, teachers need to develop further their general view of children through the study of individuals. [my emphasis]

Hmmm.  Did I say a mini learning journey? It might be just part of the practitioners’ job, but I wouldn’t want to underestimate the task.

Outdoor Activity Week : 16th–23rd May 2009

Although publicised by the IOL, it actually comes from the English Outdoor Council:

This is one of their aims for the week:

Encourage your school to be doing something adventurous in the outdoors this year. Book a week at a centre. Produce leaflets showing the opportunities that are on offer in your local area. Invite the media to visit some of your initiatives.

And it is a media-focussed initiative, to some extent. So what does a practitioner do?

A full text of the guidance – some of which is from last year, so the dates aren’t quite right – is to be found here.

One of the things that isn’t quite right is a broken link to teacher net. Using the (rather cumbersome) search facility found an interesting case study that looked worth sharing, from Turners Hill in W Sussex.  This is where it gets interesting from my point of view.

Wouldn’t it be great to share good practice, not in the spectacular but in the particular? What if schools – Growing Schools or not – told their parents, their local community, and perhaps most importantly their neighbouring practitioners what great things they have been doing outside? The synergy (not sure I really like the buzz word) demonstrated at Turners Hill is exemplary.  As the case study reports:

…it was impossible to plan for one area of learning without thinking about the other areas. What is started at one stage needs to be developed in another. Learning should be for life!

And where this might be a Shibboleth for some, it seems to be real practical work in this school.

They aren’t alone, of course, and in the “Thinking Primary” section of QCA’s pages on the Rose Review, are case studies from schools. Here, for example, we see Berkswich Primary School Head teacher Martin Holmes and deputy Head Jill Pearce-Haydon publicising their school with a similar vision: “We use the environment to support learning. Our work has an ecological theme and we have created a rich outdoor learning area to curriculum delivery.”

How rich is rich, then? The article continues:

In fact the school has an outdoor theatre, a mathematical garden, a play area designed by the learners, a scientific quadrangle and a water harvesting area that provides power for the school’s other ecological areas such as the weather station and irrigation system!

But how does all this relate to a successful learning experience?

“It is all designed to provide an active learning environment for the children. The wormery is open to all and water system has transparent pipes so that the children are able to observe it working. Our curriculum is one that focuses on direct experience and creating ‘wow’ moments. We know that children don’t see learning as subjects, they see learning as learning.”

Seeing learning as learning. Not seeing subjects as  separate things, however we deliver the bits we need to deliver. Not seeing walls between English and Geography any more than between inside the classroom and outside. All tall order for a school: a tall order for teacher-trainers who are preparing students for jobs in schools like this.

Coram Boy

Having listened to the BBC R4 dramatisation of the novel (not available for download) , I was intrigued to get the book for Christmas – after some very heavy hints, of course!

And this link will take any readers to Jamila Gavin’s own website and her thoughts on risk, creativity and education.  She is at risk of being accused of elititism when she writes

“I’m asking that we are more selective with what we give our children in school. We should recognize that, for a vast majority, it may be the only opportunity to give them contact with the finest achievements of many civilizations. I think a fear of “elitism” has meant that generations of children aren’t hearing the finest music, reading the finest literature, or being given access to the best of human achievement.”

But she does have a point, and  I feel Coram Boy is a work that in its bravery and clarity gives her the authority to talk about ‘the finest literature.’

Rose Review: Interim Report (first thoughts)

Better late than never, the interim report of the Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum is finally out. This link goes to the BBC’s reporting; this link to the page from which (until or unless DCFS move the URL)  the ipsissima verba of Jim Rose can be downloaded.
Provisional Recommendations 10 and 11 are the ones I was looking for most eagerly, especially after this morning’s reportage about key subjects &c &c. They are
Recommendation 10:
(i) Entry into reception class in the September immediately following a child’s fourth birthday should become the norm. The Review will explore how this might be achieved without unduly restricting parental choice, for example by allowing parents to choose a period of part-time attendance.
(ii) The DCSF should provide information for parents and local authorities about the optimum conditions and the benefits to children of entering reception class in the September immediately after their fourth birthday.
Recommendation 11: The Review will consider how best to support teachers and practitioners to provide effective play-based learning.
Hmmm. This seems to suggest that children will be in school – not nursery, where the quality may be seen to lie, but in Reception classes – when they are four and a bit. Le Roy le veult. So far, my mouth turns down.  However, unpacking recommendation 11 – “how..to support…effective play-based learning” is more encouraging. Into school with you, little child, and if your parents don’t like it, you don’t have to go all day, but there you will find play-based learning, as outlined by the best research.
I remain cynical about the will – and mostly the budgets –  of schools and the expertise of YR teachers  to implement this.  This isn’t to do down the commitment of teachers of young children, but to note that they continue to be faced with a continuing dynamic that looks to SATS looming (despite what the report has to say) and the demands for early, noticeable acquisition of secretarial and calculation skills, which simply raises the questions – deeply related – of funding, vision and qualifications…
And the question for us in ITT has to be: how do we train new entrants to the profession to bring this change about?  How do we help create EYFS teachers, rather than very early Primary teachers?

Improving development outcomes for children through effective practice in integrating early years services

Now, this report is rather hidden in its efforts to prove its reliability. It is the “Scoping study” from Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children and Young People’s Services http://www.c4eo.org.uk/themes/earlyyears/scopingstudy01.aspx

The points (p16-17) on effective practice are worth examining:

The ten studies highlight some effective features of integrated practice. The main areas of practice are professional development of staff, links with parents and the home environment, collaboration between partners, and the involvement of a broad range of stakeholders.

The first aspect of effective practice identified is training and ongoing professional development for staff. Some studies suggested that there is a link between the qualifications and training of staff and positive outcomes for children in early years’ settings (Sylva et al 2004). Some studies suggest that shared training involving different professionals helps to build a common language and way of working and that this helps build effective integrated teams (Schneider et al 2007). Training focused on the skills needed for integrated working also facilitates the development of effective teams (Bertram et al 2002). The opportunity that staff from different agencies have to interact and build relationships during such staff development activity is also important (Bertram et al 2002).

The studies also demonstrate the importance of links with home activities to support the early years’ approaches in settings. In general, the quality of the home learning environment is shown to have an impact on outcomes for children (Sylva et al 2004). More specifically, outcomes can be improved where centres work closely with parents and they share educational aims, as this enables parents to support children at home with activities or materials that complement their experiences in early years’ settings (Sylva et al 2004).

The selected studies also highlight the importance of the nature of collaboration in integrated settings, and there are several key elements of effective collaboration identified:

  • Effective and frequent communication between different professionals is important, and there are indications that bringing different professional groups under the same roof can aid communication and collaboration (Schneider et al 2007).
  • Integrated teams need to have common aims, a shared philosophy and agreed working practices, along with an understanding of the roles of all team members. Within this context, it is important that individuals act as team players and are flexible in their approach, taking note of the needs and expertise of others (Smith et al 2004).
  • The leadership and management of integrated centres and teams play a key role in developing and sustaining an effective team (Bertram et al 2002).
  • Finally, the studies demonstrate that it is important to involve a broad range of stakeholders/constituents in integrated centres and teams. Children and their families benefit from having a wide range of agencies involved, as this works towards a ‘one-stop shop’ to meet all their needs directly or through referral (Schneider et al 2007). The involvement of parents in integrated centres also benefits the parents themselves, but also the services offered, as parents often have a clear idea of what they and their children need (Schneider et al 2007).

And from this I’ll pick out – without comment for now – just some key words:

  • Effective and frequent communication
  • common aims, a shared philosophy and agreed working practices
  • sustaining an effective team

Escape into the Outdoors: messages from children’s literature

I’m trying, in this exploratory study, to add to an understanding of how we experiences for children in the outdoors: what professionals see as the “enabling environments’ encouraged by the new Early Years Foundation Stage and, in the context of this particular paper, what messages children’s books give about The Great Outdoors. My interest in this subject stems from my time as a headteacher, and from involvement in the Forest School movement. One particular ‘critical incident’ sticks in my mind: a wet day in a local nature reserve, when a Forest School leader asked the children we’d taken “What do you think we’re likely to meet in the woods?” He had in mind the toy badger with a packet of chocolate biscuits, waiting in a shelter in a pine wood plantation a quarter of a mile further into the woods; the children were not so sure. Where Dorothy and her companions in Oz look for “lions, tigers and bears – oh my!” my class were concerned about Big Bad Wolves – storybook wolves. As Alison Lurie explains, recollecting her move to the country as a child, “Well, I thought, if there were cows, which I’d seen before in pictures, why shouldn’t there be fairies and elves in the woods behind our house?” I suspect the same was true of the children that were with us that day. Before coming to the specifics of the three texts I’ve chosen, therefore, I’d like to start by looking at a larger, mythical landscape.

Imagine a European village – it could be in England, too, for much of England’s inhabited history:, and similar stories exist worldwide, so we might make this a global context: a clearing, with fields, a small group of dwellings, some field system &c,  and – woods. It is a landscape we know from picture books – for me, most tellingly, from Michael Foreman’s illustrations for Barbara Walker’s Teeny Tiny and the Witch Woman,. Rackham (1980) in the major work Ancient woodland: its history, vegetation and uses in England (London: Arnold) tells us to distinguish Forest from woodland and wood-pasture, managed woodland spaces from the wildwood, or primeval woodland. His view is that this latter type of woodland was cleared very early in the settled history of England. It is interesting to note, however, that large areas of deep woodland are found in those cradles of W. European folklore, France and Germany, still in the early modern period

Nevertheless, the folk inheritance persists: the woods are the place where the unwary get into trouble. We see Snow White taken out somewhere lonely to be done away with; she finds anonymity (for a while) among marginalised miners. In ”The Green Lady” (collected in Neil Philip’s Penguin Book of English Folktales), the unwary Red Riding Hood-like protagonist finds herself mixed up with pagan practice. There are Hansel and Gretl, the Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, Rapunzel  and many other stories set in the woods. We also meet this mythic place of magic and danger in the more modern folk-style tale of Linda Williams’ (1986) The little old lady who was not afraid of anything, which sees the eponymous little old lady taming the supernatural in the woods where she is foraging. One of the few stories to exist in both the English and German collections, Rumpelstilzen (Tom-tit-tot in England) has the deep wood as the dwelling of the demonic creature at the centre of the tale. Walker and Foreman’s “Teeny-Tiny and the Witch Woman” – a tale apparently with world-wide cognates – sees the boys confront not only non-Christian practice but child-sacrifice and cannibalism. In England these woods may not have been extensive, but they may have been a barrier to travel as well as an economic resource. Patterns of kinship and maybe feudal loyalty keep this a close-knit community. People who don’t “fit in” might be excluded: travelling families; foreigners; outlaws. Dangerous people on the margins of society. So dangerous, in fact, that in his chapter “The Ban and the Wolf” in Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben notes the description in early English law of the marginalised and excluded bandit, vilified as wargus, wolfshead or werewolf, who moves from juridical exclusion into “the collective unconscious… a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city…” a mythic representation of the excluded man, friedlos (as Agamben cites an earlier author): without peace and under sentence of death.

Managed or not, the woods, therefore, might be the place where the unwary get into trouble. And in the mediaeval period, get into trouble they did. Shulamith Shahar concludes that “means of preventing accidents were very limited” (1990 p144), and that it may be adult neglect of young children due to work requirements that caused the accident rate to be at its highest in the harvest season. Warning stories, therefore, may be seen as part of the limited preventative measures at the disposal of families in later mediaeval and early modern Europe: don’t go in, and you will avoid danger. But a transgression, an ignoring of the adult injunction takes place (I think at once of Peter and the Wolf, the most recent popular wolf-folk tale), and then the tale unfolds, with the most obvious message: notice the signs, and be wary. Don’t be taken in by the stranger’s hospitability, and seek an opportunity to escape.

It is interesting to note the motif of prohibition and kidnap brings OOT very close to folktales such as the Swan-Geese, meticulously codified in Propps’s Morphology (1968, p96ff). Ida was supposed to look after her baby sister “but never looked” and when the goblins – small, cowled figures, miniature gothic Grim Reapers – come in from outside, Ida makes “a serious mistake” by climbing the wrong way out of the window. So far, a straightforward reuse of the folk motifs, although the prohibitions have not been explicit as they might have been in a true folk tale of this kind, and there is nothing of the ‘temptations’ of adolescent sexuality that mark Labyrinth, the film that springs from the book. For our purposes, what, so far, does the reader of the book know about the outside?

Sendak is able to show a “nice” outdoors, and to return to it at the end of the book, as a place where Mama sits, with the dog, “in the arbour.” Mountain and seas are visible – and Papa being ‘away at sea’ is a current theme in the text and pictures – but at a distance. It’s when Ida and the baby get into trouble that Outside appears less secure. Even the sunflowers in OOT have a dreamlike, surreal quality, purpose: a hint of the triffid about them, perhaps. Where these plants loom in as Ida discovers the kidnapping of her sister, they have a menace that echoes the shipwreck in a thunderstorm in the other window. Nature breaks in, chaos reigns as Ida reveals her coldness towards her sister, while in the other window, symbolizing Ida’s ambiguous anger, a strom is sinking a ship: Papa is in peril; family stability is tthreatened. When she is in “Outside Over There,” Ida is in a dream world, where she is shown to be without a firm footing, “whirling by,” flying or floating, and the goblins are somehow initiating her sister into their goblin world – we must assume permanently – as a changeling. This outside over there world is a jumble of rocks and shore and cave; it has less of the ordered iconography of the scenery we can see from Ida’s garden. Ida’s Papa’s ship is also in the background, an anxiety for Ida and the reader. Ida’s magic music saves her sister, reborn and reconciled to Ida, and they return home – fairly rapidly, as if the land they were in was just around the other side of the house. Because in a way it was; OOT is about a mental and emotional landscape of sibling jealousy and childhood anxiety; the Outdoors what takes up most of the book is the place where Ida’s emotions have dislocated her from her family and her home.

This is a clever use of the motif common to folk tales and much, later children’s literature in which adventures happen away from adults, in a place of greater freedom – freedom to experience peril and to find resolution independent of adult intervention. It is worth noting that similar freedoms can be found in pedagogical literature advocating outdoor play, where risk and uncertainty can be seen as more possible in the nursery garden than inside (Stephenson 2002) “Magic,” as Zipes notes (1983, p 172), “is used paradoxically not to deceive us but to enlighten us.”

It would be too easy to send a lot of time in the exciting, terrifying fantasy worlds of Maurice Sendak – if only because he has been so much discussed. Is this ‘outside’ terrifying because of the breakdown he was experiencing while writing it? Is Ida’s coming outside so fraught with peril because for Sendak as a gay man, he felt menaced by his own coming out? The outside is, after all, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

I must admit that Where the Wild Things Are might have fitted with my other two choices better, given the age range one might expect to read it – yet Ida was modelled on a five year old, and the basic story of the text – sibling jealousy and reconciliation – is one that the readers of Percy the Park Keeper and Charlie and Lola might recognise. “The process of reading (Zipes 1983 p 174) involves dislocating the reader from his/her familiar setting and then identifying with the dislocated protagonist so that a quest for the Heimische or real home can begin. The fairy tale ignites a… quest for home…” The quest of Ida and Percy is the same quest as Frank Baum’s (1900) Dorothy: to discover a way to resolution of their dilemmas, a way home, or a way to create a home.

Quest for home is the central dilemma in Butterworth’s After The Storm. Percy’s world- and the world of his post-Beatrix Potter animal companions – is disturbed by a terrific storm. Five years before publication, mean wind speeds of 86 mph were recorded (Met Office), and 15 million trees were lost in Southern England. Percy has to cope with repairs in the Park following a great storm, which has resulted in loss of habitat for ten or more animals. The blindingly obvious starting point – for which I apologise – is that Percy’s outside world is a park; he is steward of a managed environment. The weather – that limiting factor for so many children – is a force of chaos, disrupting the goodly order of Percy and his friends, but there is little else that will harm them. Only when the troupe of animals and Percy look at the gloomy pine woods as a possible home for the displaced animals do they experience something of the mistrust of the great primeval wood, ‘“too dark” squeaked the mice. Too gloomy,” said the hedgehog’ and the illustrations show them looking dubiously into a dark stand of pine. Percy’s navigation of the stream brings them to a large oak tree, which, with teamwork and DIY, is made into “a fine new place to live.” The tree survives this makeover, but Percy ends the story by taking an acorn to plant where the original tree had been. Here, the environment is a lived in and accessible place, not without difficulties – the weather, problems of finding suitable places to live, streams to fall in, but essentially tameable. Percy lives with animals that retain more of their animal nature than perhaps they do for Beatrix Potter, but nevertheless are anthropomorphised – extensions of the human into the natural world, if that distinction is to be allowed, or, in another light, tamed members of the wild, managed by a benign humanity, to whom they are smilingly grateful.

Nature as inimical; nature as friend I chose three very different books but with certain criteria: they had to be current books but from a wide(-ish) span of publication dates, they had to illustrate something of the outdoors but without an overt ‘green agenda’ message. Given the date of the third text and its subject, the lack of ‘green message’ must be seen as an explicit choice. Samantha Hill’s 2006 retelling of a TV episode based on Lauren Child’s Charlie and Lola Nature is seen as something to be explored. The bolder Charlie leads the overenthusiastic Lola through experiences of winter which allow her to feel comfortable in its strangeness. They see bears swimming in Arctic oceans and penguins sliding on the Antarctic ice. Lola appreciates this, but realises that it wouldn’t do for every day, and gleefully lets her model snowman melt. Lola’s unfamiliarity is conquered, and she is ready to accept seasons and regions: hard concepts. It is the hardness of the concepts perhaps that steer the writers away from current concerns: the polar bears swim in the ocean, they are not victims of a disappearing ice cap; penguins skate on the ice with no thought to environmental damage. This is not to say that Child hasn’t looked at weightier environmental issues, for example in What Planet are you from Clarice Bean? The image of a melting snowman at then end might leave some older, more knowing readers uncomfortable, but we encounter here a very different, third way of looking at the outdoors: Nature is just Nature. Little Lola will have to learn this before being concerned at the fate of anyone further away than the dog Sizzles, stuck in a snowdrift.

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