The Guardian Letter, Fri 21st Feb 2014

Local politicians must take action to protect provision of quality for young children. We are profoundly concerned about the widespread loss of local early years provision of quality and the resulting harm to children and their families. We understand that the resources available to local government are being reduced, and therefore difficult decisions must be taken. But we urge local politicians to protect early years provision, which can have a lifelong, positive impact on young children and their families. Otherwise, we will all pay in the long-term for cuts being made in the short-term.

Since 2010, the number of children’s centres in England has reduced from 3,631 to 3,116; and some of these centres are information hubs open in name only – “half a person and a bunch of leaflets” as Naomi Eisenstadt, the first national director of the Sure Start Unit, has summarised the situation. The House of Commons select committee also reports that “many maintained nursery schools have closed in the last decade” (over a hundred in England) despite robust evidence to show that they offer the best outcomes to disadvantaged young children. The benefits of attending a maintained nursery school last right the way through the school system: their closure represents the worst sort of short-term thinking. The youngest and most vulnerable children are being harmed by these irresponsible actions.

Where is the quality for two-year-olds? Local government has a vital role to play in the successful delivery of the national programme to provide free nursery places for disadvantaged two-year-olds. We know children will only benefit if they attend a good-quality early years setting with appropriately qualified staff. So we are dismayed that some councils fund settings without a good Ofsted rating, and further dismayed by the cutbacks to training courses and to teams of early years advisers. Without training and ongoing support, how will quality be sustained and the poorest settings improve?

A recent report on summer-born children has highlighted the pressure being put on children and parents by local authorities and schools to enter reception class before the age of five.

All these short-term actions which damage children in their early years will have an upward impact as they go through their schooling. This in turn damages communities. Local authorities must do more than blame national government and the economic recession. We therefore call on candidates in the forthcoming local elections in England and Northern Ireland to stop cutting early years provision and pledge their support for the high-quality provision that will benefit young children and their families now, and for years to come.

Helen Moylett President of the British Association for Early Childhood Education, Prof Tina Bruce Marion Dowling, Retired Her Majesty’s Inspector, Bernadette Duffy Head of Thomas Coram Centre for Children and Families, Prof Aline-Wendy Dunlop, Jean Ensing Retired HMI, Professor Chris Pascal, Rosemary Peacocke Retired HMI Prof Iram Siraj, Lesley Staggs Retired national strategies director of early years, Prof Kathy Sylva, Prof Colwyn Trevarthen, Denise Hevey Emeritus professor in education, University of Northampton, Anne Nelson National Association for Primary Education, Wendy Ellyat Save Childhood Movement, Jo White Headteacher/head of centre, Portman Early Childhood Centre, Dr Margy Whalley Director, Pen Green Centre for Children and Families and Pen Green Research Base, Ben Hasan Chair, National Campaign for Real Nursery Education, Jane Payler Chair, Association for the Professional Development of Early Years Educators, Pamela Calder On behalf of The Early Childhood Studies Degrees Network, Melian Mansfield On behalf of Early Childhood Forum, Nancy Stewart Early Learning Consultancy Emeritus professor Tricia David, Nick Swarbrick Oxford Brookes University, Dr David Whitebread University of Cambridge, Beverley Nightingale University Campus Suffolk, Rosalind Godson Unite/Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association, Penny Webb Proprietor of Penny’s Place Childminding, Kathryn Solly, Edwina Mitchell On behalf of OMEP, Michelle Melson, Chris Palmer Chair of trustees of Centre for Research in Early Childhood, Birmingham (CREC), Maureen Saunders Trustee of CREC, Sheila Thorpe Trustee of CREC, Professor emeritus Philip Gammage Trustee of CREC, Professor emerita Janet Moyles

Resistance or debate?

A selection from Saturday’s conversation on BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03tqx9x) between David Blunkett and Nick Gibb:

NG: …He [Michael Gove] doesn’t set out to be non-consensual, but what can happen is that if you’re determined to ensure that the reforms are implemented which he is they will ruffle the feathers of those people who are resistant to that reform.

DB: Well I’m not sure about calling the teaching profession The Blob is actually all that consensual…

NG: No, well, the Blob isn’t the teaching profession, the Blob is not the teaching profession…

DB: Well, who the devil is it then?

NG: The Blob, I’ll tell you who the Blob is, the Blob are the academics in the education faculties of the Universities and the Local Authority advisers and they have a particular orthodoxy that they impose on the teaching profession….

[A discussion on who has power continues]

NG: …. Now, well, now they have less power because automony has been given to the professionals and at the expense of the education faculties and at the expense of the local authorities and that is why there is this anger by those people about what Michael Gove is doing

DB: Nick, Nick, you’re fighting a past battle, you’re fighting a past battle begun twenty-five years ago in 1988 by Ken Baker and you’re still fighting it now [….] That battle’s over; the battle for the highest standards in every school, the life chance of every child whatever their background, that battle will continue…

NG: There is still an intellectual battle to be won about child initiated learning, about mixed ability teaching, about how you teach arithmetic…

I can’t spare the time to challenge the logic in the first section about consensuality and resistance (or to hark back in any detail to David Blunkett’s phrase about people being “cynical”), so here are just a couple of thoughts from the Blob, if that is who I am (quite apart from the insult, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the pigeonhole; I am in no way knee-jerk resistant, for example): if there is an intellectual battle to be fought over child-initiated learning, then perhaps the research done by the Universities might be useful evidence – or is an intellectual engagement really not about weighing evidence, but about who can shout the loudest, be the rudest (and I know some HE and school colleagues who have not held back here)? And on the side-swipe on child-initiated learning, do we discern how The Foundation Stage might be further dismantled, with insights from psychology and sociology – not to mention the everyday pedagogy of the nursery I brought with me into teacher education – swept aside in the kind of rhetoric I have commented on before?

Open Air Schools

A now lost phenomenon, largely built on how people understood tuberculosis – but does the Open Air School movement have something to teach 21st Century Britain?
Check this out: http://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/aspen-house-open-air-school-lambeth-doing-the-world-of-good/

As the blog post states:

This was an education rooted squarely – though without the rhetoric – in the principles of the Swiss pedagogue, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: a focus on the equilibrium between head, hands and heart, a belief in the free development of each child’s potential through observation and discovery of nature and the material world.

Calleva Atrebatum and all that

It hardly seems worth putting links to the claims and counter-claims that have followed Michael Gove’s irascible statements about Blackadder views of World War I. Perhaps the best (and genuinely critical) précis of the [can I call it?] debate, is to be found here, in a blog post on the Imperial and Global Forum from Marc-William Palen at Exeter. In any case, it’s not the argument I’m really interested in, and Dave Aldridge’s work on remembrance (see his blog for a taste) already goes way beyond what I could say.

What prompts a blog post tonight is a quotation in Charlotte Higgins’ book Under Another Sky, which I was given at Christmas and which I am really enjoying. In exploring Roman Britain she has moved from messy Londinium to the quieter and more ordered Silchester – Calleva Atrebatum – only to reveal it, too, is a site where tangles of Romano-British religious practices, loyalties and rivalries do not make for a straightforward narrative. She contrasts this with Rosemary Sutcliff’s vision of Calleva in “The Eagle of the Ninth,” and quotes Sutcliff saying that she is “happiest…in Roman Britain:”

“If I could do a time flip and land back in Roman Britain, I would take a deep breath, take perhaps a fortnight to get used to things, then be all right… I have a special “Ah, here I am again, I know exactly what they are going to have for breakfast” feeling…”

One way of looking at this is to say that it is part of our own spiritual and cultural identity that we construct a world we feel we would like to be at home in; Rosemary Sutcliff had a great gift for portraying that home, and giving flesh to long-dead bones, stories to long-forgotten artefacts. I could feel the same about some parts of the Middle Ages – but I know (as I suspect Sutcliff knew) that this is fantasy, really. Sources help us do history better than stories do – although stories have a part to play.

I am less sure that some of the voices raised are clear about this themselves, when we/they discuss World War I. I suppose I can claim to have had a Grandpa in the Boer War and in the trenches – I still have the touching and eye-opening letters he sent the young woman who was to become my Grandmother; I have met people who were there, listened to the way they avoided talking about the enemy as a group of people, only as a single, dehumanised Enemy. I guess there are quite a few people who have similar experiences. I guess most of them, like me, will not claim, on the strength of that, to pontificate about what it was “really like” in the trenches.

My worry is when politicians, rather than historians, start telling us what must be taught in schools about how things were. Myth-makers with the power to wreck history?

Tim Whitmarsh’s review of Charlotte Higgins’ book in the Guardian makes an important point:

The temptation to retool our Roman heritage so that it looks the way we want it to can be overpowering.

Perhaps the “Great Times in WWI” story is a rewrite that seeks to up the patriotic flag in history; I think it has badly backfired. I think at the heart of Whitmarsh’s caveat is something that historiography always seeks to explore; the temptation to which he refers is something that perhaps the Secretary of State and some of his opponents have succumbed to. A group of people want World War I to be glorious sacrifice, or the noble and legitimate struggle for freedom; another group want it to be mindless, a massive slaughter of young, uncomprehending men rising from lousy, mud-swilling trenches to their deaths.

In some ways, now-quiet Calleva stands as a very good warning to people seeking to make history fit their view of what it should have been. It is not only ancient history that makes myths. Higgin’s chapter ends with an example from a schoolboyish copy of a scene from the Aeneid (itself, of course, a reworking of an imagined history – but let that pass) where the guests at a feast are hushed:

But for me the clamour of the people of Calleva Atrebatum is forever stilled. I will not – I cannot – hear them. The silence is not the hush of expectation, but the chill of secrets.

Whereof one cannot speak…

What to talk about today?
Goodness: from PISA to Tom Daley, there are lots of stories to look at, from (on a different tack) the HE action to odd but delightful metareporting (Twitter – Guardian-Academic Journal) on academic blogging.

I’d like to make

some witty mash-up line about at least two of these (“Tom Daley came out yesterday, PISA came out today; I know one piece of news gladdens the heart,” doesn’t do it, really) or
some deep and meaningful connection between workload and blogging

or at least use the Wittgenstein line as an excuse to remain silent on all these subjects, since they are beyond my ken and I will only talk drivel. But even using that as a line has been trumped by this from poetry rapgenius:

You probably need to read the whole book to get the punchline.

Yes, you probably do.

So here are the Guardian on PISA, the Indie on Tom Daley and the really interesting (and free access) article on academic blogging from Mewburn and Thomson. They can speak for themselves and I should be silent.

Hallows? Thoughts about Hallowe’en

Three aspects of Hallowe’en and a reflection.

This is going to go on a bit, I’m afraid, as I want to look at

Hallowe’en and its modern popular expression.
Hallowe’en and Christianity (the longest section)
Hallowe’en and UK schools

“When I were a nipper” – the argument from memory comes first, here – Hallowe’en was overshadowed by the much more exciting Bonfire Night, which had a run-up in collecting for a guy, &c., carving a lantern from a swede (a labour of love) and somehwere, for a Catholic child, the Holyday of All Saints followed by the day of prayer for the faithful departed, All Souls (a reasoned, modern Catholic view of this day is to be found here, in the Dominican student pages, Godzdogz). For for my mother, as a war widow, the day of remembrance and the military solemnities around it, were especially important, too – something Dave Aldridge has written about thoughtfully. This was all about the dead, but not all in sorrow: fireworks, and mischief were mixed up with sadness and silence, with black vestments and red poppies.

This is not the modern landscape, where the American Halloween (note the spelling) occasions fancy dress, trick or treat, pumpkins, and a much greater sense of gleefully enacted horror. I won’t bother with many links here, despite the fact that the bounds of taste do get overstepped in an effort to maintain the frisson. Yuk.

So Hallowe’en has become a feast of horror in some eyes, where the dead, the uncanny and the downright nasty are mocked and celebrated by small children and adults alike.

But what about Christianity? Where does Hallowe’en sit?

One of the key books in the history of the Reformation has got to be Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic, one of those books that, when I first read it, changed my opinion about so much I had been brought up with. After all, I had lived in the shadow of Pendle Hill, the stories of the witches and the story of my family’s struggles with Protestant Christianity part and parcel of the culture. The overall premise – this is a gross over-simplification – is that the Christianity of the Word that comes in heightens a growing mistrust of popular practices from beliefs in fairies and spirits to dealing with “cunning men and women.” This is not to put Hallowe’en (yet) into a Merrie England which includes a pretty and rational Roman Christianity (I am choosing my words here) – but to suggest that opposition to it has a connection to a (very seventeenth century?) vision that any divergence from a particular view of Christian practice is wrong, evil, Satanic. A very broad brush-stroke account of this argument is to be found here, although the details are a bit dodgy.

Its roots with regards Christian practice, are in some ways about the celebration of a major feast, All Saints. Hallowe’en, as a name, is after all, shorthand for the Vigil of the Feast of All Hallows, or All Saints. It might be that we should see the week or so of Church and popular festivals that occur here as having very different roots but all coming to express something similar: a celebration of the oncoming of Autumn, of shorter days and longer nights, of the dying of the light, and therefore the remembrance of the dead. Christians celebrate the same things as non-Christians at this time, maybe always have done. By this argument, this All-the-Dead celebration is just one more Christianisation of a different tradition; Christianity’s magpie proclivities are seen as stemming from the appropriation of the synagogue service and Passover, through Roman cults and the imperial court. Any purging of Christian practice has been a pick-and-mix approach which chooses one lump of tradition to keep and another to discard.

And yet, partly because of its opposition to (or distraction from) All Saints and All Souls, or because it looks at the dead as menacing, some thinkers from Pope Francis to US Evangelicals have seen this is something to be viewed with a deep mistrust. As one writer puts it,

“…the underlying essence of our celebrations of Halloween is based upon modern Wiccan interpretations of pre-Christian paganism and involve occultic rites and practices that Christians should have no dealings with.”

Once upon a time, the missionary elements of Christianity might have been tempted to view the unchristian as anti-Christian. Matthew 12:30 (perhaps contra Luke 9:50) suggests that Jesus’ teaching backs this up; certainly “He who is not with me is against me,” and other similar sentiments, suggest an uncompromising attitude. Modern opposition to any kind of syncretism uses these texts, and lines from Paul about “having no dealings with darkness.” There is another strand to this, however: when Gregory the Great writes concerning the mission to the Angles he exhorts Mellitus to baptise, rather than destroy the pagan temples, so that “seeing that their places of worship are not destroyed, the people will banish error from their hearts and come to places familiar and dear to them in acknowledgement and worship of the true God.” It might be that this leads to a syncretism that Christians (or maybe some Christians) would find theologically unsound. I can’t make the time to rehearse this argument, from Basil on the use of pagan “classical” authors through to musings on Christian/Jewish or Christian/Islamic relations in Vatican II (and beyond), but there has been at least some uneasy dialogue with culture outside orthodox Christianity throughout its history, maybe from the moment Luke quotes Euripides in his account of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus.

So what of schools and Hallowe’en?

There seem to be two different practices developing here: one is to ban it as a modern invention, as American and/or anti-Christian (I’ve heard a teacher say she wouldn’t have it in her class “because it’s contrary to my belief”), as in the arguments glanced at above. The other is to allow, or encourage some forms of celebration, whether with the whole pumpkin and fancy dress thing, or with a more muted event, with maybe a ghost story and witchy songs.

The first has an odd lack of logic, at least in a state school (not controlled or aided by a religious group): if Hallowe’en is the pagan festival of Samhain, then surely the school’s equal opportunities comes into play. The pro viso – as with any celebration – is that there should be some sense of respect and real knowledge, and that it should fit with the long-term planning for a school, or a class. And this is the caveat for the second: it’s got to be a learning opportunity. But then again, so has Christmas.

This has hardly been a proper sic et non, so my final reflection only hangs to the above by the fingertips, but here it is.

Winter is on us, or just around the corner. Our food is changing, too, and tomatoes give way to squashes. The days are shorter, darker. And when you are four, or five, or six, these are big changes. In particular, the child that is afraid of the dark, or who now has to come to terms with coming home in the dark after After School Club, needs time to explore it. They also might need a way of celebrating their control of it – through lanterns, through the sanitised parade in fancy dress, through seeing this potential occasion for fear minimised and mocked. Look it in the face and see it as something to play with.

There is certainly unthinking excess, a possibility for going over the top with children, and adults have a role to play here, but I would end with a plea: take Gregory’s injunction to baptise the nefas, to take the secular and use it. We live with this at so many levels; why not counter fear of the dark, the gloom of winter, with saying “I am bigger than this”? It’s not a bad message for children, after all.

Suffering from Childhood

Again the thoughtful and thought-provoking Ken Robinson talking about the nature of learning. http://embed.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html
Learning or compliance? Teaching or testing? I won’t comment much more, but it does tie in to some extent with last night’s post about my position as an HE lecturer; what he says about teaching children also applies, mutatis mutandis to many University classes, too.

Maybe that Latin tag is ill-advised?

Well being and the curriculum

The battle recommences. From the noise of battles between EY specialists and the Labour Government at the height of its sense of power in the 90s come similar misunderstandings from the present Government. Liz Truss, whom I have mentioned before, has again become part of the whirlwind, although a quick trawl of the web this evening finds that her interjections today are not visible, not even on her own website. Puzzling: if I can find her words later, I’ll link them, them, of course.

As a sideline, it should be noted that BBC reportage is, as so often, skewed, so that it reports on “Starting School.” It’s not about the date of entry, or the age of the child, but of the pedagogy, the approach to teaching and learning, that best supports a child for their learning today and their learning tomorrow.

The Save Childhood Movement echoes (?is a reincarnation of?) the Toxic Childhood movement that gained media attention with Sue Palmer’s book. Its very attractive website (linked here) has some powerful things to say about how “Play is not a frivolous thing,” “Some of the best and deepest learning is slow” and “Healthy neurological development relies on real experiences in the real world” – http://www.savechildhood.net/summit-key-points.html#sthash.sUcLRySP. Nothing I’d disagree with, and I see the points, too, that they make in their letter to the Telegraph today.

I’m tempted to suggest that the division, however, doesn’t exist where the battle lines have been drawn. It’s not about formal learning being needed earlier for disadvantaged children; it’s also not about well-being and play taking over the whole curriculum. For me, it’s about how people who know – and the list of signatories to the Telegraph letter contains a host of people who do know – deserve to be listened to by policy makers.

Blogs like Twitter

…instead of Moves like Jagger?

This is again to provide links to some ideas people may find useful.

The upsurge in interest – and the rising intake – in undergraduate education programmes here at Brookes naturally gives me a bit to think about, not least about staff deployment. I was, therefore, interested – maybe dismayed – to find this model of the academic as a unit in the workforce described here by Pat Thomson.

I hate newspaper reports that talk about “research shows,” and “today’s research”, so I apologise for this link to the Telegraph on reading for pleasure, but I need some time to find the original report.

And at its worst (or maybe as its norm?) this blog – along with so many other blogs – is just opinions blurted onto the Internet. The debates about the Big Questions are also being enacted elsewhere. The Great Education Debate is one place. Go and have a look.

New National Curriculum

“…the most important thing is to make sure that we understand when children arrive in school how well they’re performing so that we can then ensure that those children who are bright are really stretched…”

Just to make a start on the documents and comments, here is the SoS on Daytime TV [sic] and on the BBC website – but here’s the consultation report on the National Curriculum and, as a sideline, the new report on cultural education, from the DfE website . Watch this space.

Ever wishing to present both sides of an argument, here is an interesting site, if only for the ways in which evidence is now used by education policy-makers. Gove versus Reality is clearly a site as polemic as Michael Rosen’s blog -which means that they need to be read as voices in the political debate. Rosen’s latest (9th July) entry, for example, is entitled Educational League Table Lies and looks at the SoS’s ideas about league tables nationally and internationally. It is lengthy, well-argued, but polemic. It has a short line here which I will end with, since it’s a warning to me as much as to policy makers:

Gassing on about ‘world-class education’ sounds like busy-work: ‘Look what we’re doing to make things better.’ This is a con.