Tag: Curriculum

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.

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?

SATs and “They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads…”

Back to Ken Robinson’s TED speech, cited earlier.

We are instantly into the notion of the embodied mind here, and reach back to Plato, to medieval Christian mistrust of the body, and so on. I’m not suggesting there’s a quick fix for this change in thinking. Educationalists look – or can too often look, if we’re more phrasing it more cautiously – at intellectual activity as the sole or principal purpose of education. The debate about testing using SATs (which is not quite an annual event, but does reappear often) brings it mind to again, although it’s interesting to note one of the sources of the current disquiet is the Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee report, published today.

The Ecclestone-Furedi scrutiny of the therapeutic in education [see for example, Kathryn’s fascinating professiorial lecture, the text of which can be accessed via this page] explores whether dealing with feelings is a valid way of treating learners – but might, of course, not move the ‘embodiment’ notion any further, seeking rather to look still at activity that is primarily non-embodied: the emotions rather than cognition. In other words, well-being is less the polar opposite of cognition in educational terms than the debate might suggest.

More on this later.

“Education from the neck up?”

I want to try and unpick the question of formal and informal curricula a bit more.
McCann’s account of Samuel Wilderspin’s desperate attempts at gaining his distressed pupils’ attention by instituting learning through play show how far we have come – and not come? – since the day in 1826:

When their mothers had left, nearly all the children started crying ‘Mammy! mammy!’ Wilderspin’s wife tried to calm the tumult but had to leave the room and Wilderspin also ‘exhausted by effort, anxiety and noise’ was compelled to follow her, ‘leaving my unfortunate pupils in one dense mass, crying, yelling and kicking against the door’. In despair Wilderspin picked up his wife’s cap adorned with coloured ribbons, put it on to a clothes prop and dashed back into the schoolroom. ‘All the children’, he found to his amazement, ‘ . . . were instantly silent.’ The silence was only momentary, however, but before general disorder could break out again Wilderspin had cried, ‘Now we will all play “Duck”, and I will be the great Duck.’ The children immediately began a chorus of ‘quack, quack, quack’. Then he said, ‘Now we will play at “Hen and Chickens”, and I will be the old hen, and when I cry “cup-biddy”, “cup-biddy”, you must all come.’ Wilderspin was surprised to find that it all succeeded admirably and twelve o’clock came before they knew where they were.
(cited in McCann, P (1966))

It is an isolated incident in the early career of an educator – at one level. It can also be seen as a turning point (as McCann (1966) and Singer (2005) might argue) in the application of enlightenment educational theory to practice, the incident that exemplifies a growing understanding of “child-centredness.”
We have come to the key phrase. What does it mean to be “child-centered”? I suspect that, at its bluntest, it means (as Singer seems to imply) a power-shift towards listening to children, reflecting on those needs and how they are expressed. The questions I raised in the Reflective Reader (Wild and Mitchell 2007) remain pertinent:

  • How does the practitioner know when to intervene?
  • Is it about policing behaviour, or about instruction?
  • Is play a private world for children?
  • Can this level of interaction be sustained where the curriculum is led in such a way that the adults’ time is taken up with direct teaching?

But of course the bigger questions remain: how do policy makers and implementers understand children’s learning? At what level is child-centredness a genuine political, practical and moral choice?

Or is this the wrong question? Ken Robinson’s light but engaging speech (“Education professors…They live in their heads… disembodied; they look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads…”) raises questions about how learning and intelligence are conceived, and whether the needs education addresses are employment based (“Don’t do music, you’ll never be a musician”) which he describes as “benign advice, profoundly mistaken.”

It is fascinating to read in Margaret McMillan’s Education through the Imagination (1923 edition in front of me, but the first edition is pre WWI) that

“The learning of facts and of formal arts, the training of the verbal memory, the discipline of the classroom and the school are very good things in their way, but they are only means to an end. The energy that wins them and uses them is needed everywhere…” (p11)

McMillan is vociferous about how parrot-learning is a destructive thing – but in looking at her attack on formal learning we need to remember not only the context of much Edwardian/Georgian schooling (pace Wilderspin above, and others) but also the psychological construct she is using, in which memory is seen as unsubtle, a monolith that “has to be broken up…to be of real use.” (p21).

‘New’ Phonics: What will need to change?

…one of the questions heads and leaders are asked to think about in light of the principles and recommendations of the Rose Report.

We have to consider the Rose Report recommendation that a high-quality phonics programme is “the prime approach to teaching word recognition for the vast majority of children.” This is the basis for the Letters and Sounds programme, although guidance is clear that this is one of the possible approaches, others being commercially produced or home grown programmes.

It would be possible – and maybe a bit cheap – to query line-by-line some of the difficulties that the “new” approach takes or even some of the research that supports it. It’s here, here to stay until the wind changes at least, so the question at the head of this entry remains. What is to be done? What will the changes in EY look like?

The worry is, of course, that EY practitioners face a de-skilling here that says “You know nothing about this, so We are going to tell you.” Could this corner people into “playing teachers,” overloading the day (or session) with adult content? This might mean, as far as I can see it, using a model of pedagogy for the youngest children that is sometimes barely sustainable in Y2: too much adult-directed material, often drawing heavily on published material that may or may not be connected to the children’s own interests. I have already highlighted this in discussing HMI 2610.

It need not be like this. In fact, this really should be a very small part of the day for young children, and taken into account when thinking of an appropriate balance of child-initiated and adult-led activity.

What may (I think it’s contestable, see below) need to change is a view that children “just pick this stuff up.” The new model of reading, the so-called simple view, knocks this on the head, and points the way – perhaps a little unsteadily – towards a need for direct teaching. But I am unsure how many schools, how many teachers, would want to think like that any way. I think it’s contestable because I feel it’s a gross over-simplification to say that EY practitioners have such a poor view of children that they do not understand how young children learn. If anything, the contrary might be argued: that very many EY practitioners know this one thing very well, but what they don’t know is how to articulate that knowledge. What I am less sure of is how the talk of improving outcomes sits with a vision of child as a competent learner, a co-constructor of their world view. There is still some work to do at what we might call a philosophical distance (and by implication, no real time to do it properly, such is the pace of change) around how the first themes of Early Years Foundation Stage marry with this deficit model of education, and a view that children need x or y because the Government has organised it to be so.

Perhaps final word goes to the EYFS FAQs, then:

Will I have to change my practice now that we have EYFS?
No – as long as you have been using Birth to Three Matters and/or the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage effectively, as the EYFS brings these two documents together. You will now be able to see more easily how your work with any group of children fits into the birth to five continuum. What providers will need to do is check that their provision meets all the statutory requirements. The introduction of the EYFS gives all providers and practitioners the chance to review their current provision and to ensure that they are meeting the needs of all the children in their care.

More on this another time, perhaps.