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‘Food for thought’ headings which highlight points of good practice in
ways that can encourage reflection and discussion among practitioners, as
well as sharing in partnership with parents.
Where are the threes ‘officially’?
Three-year-olds are welcome in any of the different types of early years
provision: nursery schools and classes, playgroups and pre-schools, day
nurseries, different types of centres for young children and with the
childminding service. Families are encouraged to accept some kind of out-of-
home early years experience for their three-year-olds, but across the UK
attendance is definitely voluntary. A different national framework operates in
each country of the UK:
In England from September 2008 the three to five Foundation Stage early
years curriculum, will be replaced by the birth to five years framework of
the Early Years Foundation Stage.
In Scotland, the Curriculum Framework for Children 3-5 applies to the
experiences of threes. Current developments focus on a Curriculum for
Excellence to cover from three to eighteen years of age. In the earlier
years, the main focus for development is for a continuity of more active
learning and play from the early education of three to five years olds into
the first years of primary school.
In Wales, the main focus of development is on the Foundation Phase for
young children from three to seven years, bridging the early years
curriculum into the first years of primary school.
In Northern Ireland the Curricular Guidance for Pre-School Education
applies to three- and four-year-olds, often mainly threes. Young children
start primary school in the September of the school year after their fourth
birthday. The main focus for current development is the Early Years
Foundation Stage that applies to the first two years of primary school,
with children aged four or five years of age.
Development matters in the Early Years
Foundation Stage (EYFS)
From September 2008 in England threes are ‘officially’ within a framework
that spans the full range of early childhood. All early years practitioners in
England need to become familiar with the details of the EYFS but the good
practice described is not new. Part of your task, in finding your way around the
EYFS materials, is to recognise just how much is familiar, when your early
years provision already has good practice. (See ‘Further Resources’ for
information on how to access materials about the EYFS.) The EYFS follows
the developmental areas pattern, established with the Foundation Stage, and
there are only a few changes within the details of that structure.
There are six areas of learning within the EYFS.
Personal, social and emotional development
Communication, language and literacy
Problem solving, reasoning and numeracy
Knowledge and understanding of the world
Physical development
Creative development
This framework is one way of considering the breadth of children’s learning.
But of course children do not learn in separate compartments; the whole point
is that children’s learning crosses all the boundaries. The aim of identifying
areas of learning is to help adults to create a balance, to address all the
different, equally important areas of what children gain across the years of early
childhood.
When the EYFS is in place, all these records have to connect with the six areas
of learning. A rich resource of developmental information and practice advice
is provided in the Practice Guidance booklet of the EYFS, in Appendix 2 that
runs from pages 22-114. None of this material should be used as a checklist, or
have-to-do grids. It is crucial that early years practitioners and teams hold tight
to this key point. In each of these very full pages, the same pattern applies.
The developmental information in the first column, ‘Development
matters’, is a reminder of the kinds of changes likely to happen - not an
exhaustive list of what happens, and in this exact way. The examples work
like the Stepping Stones guidance of the Foundation Stage.
The broad and overlapping age spans are deliberate: birth to 11 months,
8-20 months, 16-26 months, 22-36 months, 30-50 months and 40-60+
months. The aim is to refresh about development, supporting
practitioners to take time over all the ‘steps’. There should be no headlong
rush to the ‘older’ age spans, let alone the final early learning goals
(ELGs). None of the descriptions, apart from the ELGs, are required
targets or outcomes.
So, the only part of all this information that is statutory is the description
of the early learning goals. They only become relevant for observation
within the last year of the EYFS (just like with the Foundation Stage),
which is the reception class located in primary schools.
Practitioners working with younger threes will mainly look at the 30-50
months span. It makes good sense to look at the 22-36 months span, if
you work with just the threes or children whose development has been
significantly slowed by disability or very limited early experience. There
should be no sense of rush, but it makes sense to begin to look at the
early parts of the 40-60+ age band with older threes.
The ELGs, placed at the end of every 40-60+ age band, should not be
used to shape the experiences of threes. They are not realistic expectations
for younger children and they are not intended to be applied to three-
year-olds.
Child-focussed observation and planning
It will be necessary for practitioners (in England) to adjust their flexible
forward planning and child-focussed documentation to reflect the six areas of
the EYFS from September 2008. However, the adjustments are minor for
those practitioners who have already been working with the Foundation Stage
framework. Practitioners with mixed age groups, of twos and threes, can leave
behind the frustrating problems of creating a bridge between the aspects and
components structure of Birth to Three Matters and a framework of six
developmental areas. Early years practitioners should have a sound basis of
child development knowledge. If any practitioners feel unsure of realistic
expectations, then the Development matters column should be used as a
detailed source of information to build that knowledge across early childhood.
Food for thought box
In the English Foundation Stage, the Stepping Stones and examples of children were intended as
descriptions to highlight ways in which three, four-and five- year-olds might be learning and progressing
towards the relevant early learning goal. The stepping stones were never intended to be subsidiary goals,
nor to work like a developmental checklist or inflexible observational tracking system.
However, anecdotal evidence suggests that some settings felt that they should, or were required, to treat
the stepping stones in this way. Some teams even became burdened with an attempt to show ‘evidence’
that children had ‘passed’ each stepping stone before they were ‘allowed’ to move on. This
misunderstanding created impossible, paper-heavy systems in which children were not observed as
individuals and often lost the precious attention of adults who were too busy filling in pro formas to play
and chat.
So it is not entirely surprising that, when the EYFS developmental information emerged in 2007, it was
seized by some commentators as a harassing list of ‘targets’, ‘outcomes’, required ‘milestones’ and so on. It
is the responsibility of any practitioners, with team leaders, to take the opportunity of the EYFS to return
to child-focussed practice and ensure that any written records clearly pay their way in terms of direct
benefits for the children.
The situation about any kind of written planning and documentation is the
same as has applied all the time for the Foundation Stage, namely that there
are no statutory written formats for observation and planning. The early years
inspection body for England, Ofsted, does not require any specific approach to
the need to be observant and to have a planful approach. The key messages
from the EYFS materials are that any formats used by practitioners need to
show:
The progress of individual children over time, at their own pace and set
against realistic expectations for their age, ability and experiences.
That planning is responsive to the needs and interests of individual
children: through continuous provision (the learning environment) and
flexible use of planned activities.
How observations of children make a difference to what is offered to
individuals and to sensible short-term changes to planning opportunities
for a group of children.
There is plenty of scope for fine-tuning through short-term planning -
that ‘what next?’ or ‘next steps’ is a real part of the process.
Over pages 22-114 of the EYFS Practice Guidance each page has other
information and suggestions:
‘Look, listen and note’ (second column in from the left) is a resource of
suggestions, very like the ‘Examples of what children do’ in the
Foundation Stage. This is not a list of the observations everyone has to
do; they are reminders of the pitch and level at which it makes sense to
observe across that age range.
The other two columns - ‘Effective practice’ and ‘Planning and
resourcing’ - are similar to the right hand pages throughout the
Foundation Stage file entitled ‘What does the practitioner need to do?’
Indeed, you will find familiar sentences from that resource.
Food for thought
Young children are important as themselves; they are not pre-anything. For this reason I avoid using the
word ‘pre-schooler’ to refer to children under five years. We do not call adolescents ‘pre-workers’ or
people in their fifties ‘pre-retirees’!
Some early years settings are known as pre-schools. Consequently that term for a group is familiar,
although by no means do all settings choose to use this term. There are some potential problems about
defining your group, and therefore your early years experiences, as ‘prior to school’. However, in my view,
calling young children themselves ‘pre-schoolers’ seriously increases the risk that their learning and
experiences are valued only as school preparation.
Value children as themselves
Young children need to be and feel valued for what they are at the moment.
Their development unfolds because they are encouraged and allowed to relish
what they are learning at the moment. Four-year-olds need to have been
enabled to enjoy being three-year-olds, five-year-olds need to have spent time
being unharassed four-year-olds. Such a perspective may seem obvious but,
unfortunately, the sense of pressure felt by some early years practitioners, and
some parents, is that children, even young children have effectively been
pushed onto a treadmill, especially an intellectual treadmill. There has been far
too much ‘getting children ready for ...’, ‘making sure that they can ...
because ...’ and a sense that ‘children must/have to/ought to ...’
The aim of the Early Years Foundation Stage should be that children have a full
and enjoyable experience of learning. Despite the rhetoric of some educational
materials, the aim of the Early Years Foundation Stage is not to prepare
children for Year 1, then Key Stage 1 and SATS (in England). Some of the
most serious problems arise for children when adults take a school model and
impose it on younger children. This often occurs when adults misunderstand
or ignore the insights that a knowledge of child development offers, for
example:
Children learn from their whole day and not only within the hours or the
activities that adults define as ‘educational’. Children need and learn a
great deal from care, an adult caring orientation and active involvement
in daily and weekly care routines.
Children learn a considerable amount from play, but they do not learn
only from play and this learning can be seriously curtailed if adults over-
structure, over-direct and, frankly, highjack children’s play and play
activities.
Children’s current learning, and the step-by-step nature of their learning,
must be recognised as valuable now. What three- or four-year-olds have
learned is not of value just because it will set them up more effectively for
school work. Children can sense and are disturbed by adult anxiety and
pressure. They begin, sadly, to feel that their current learning is never
enough; they will see themselves as always chasing something, never
getting there.
If we want children to be enthusiastic learners and set themselves up as
much as possible for the challenges of primary and secondary school, then
they must experience generous respect and adult enthusiasm for their
current skills and struggles. What children are learning is valuable now,
not just because it leads onto something that adults think is more
important.
The positive disposition to learn
Children are learning about the business of learning. The outlook that they
take on in the years before starting school can establish a firm base of
enthusiasm and build strong self-esteem. On the other hand, experiences that
disrupt children’s confidence, and make them doubt their ability, can seriously
undermine their outlook for the school years. Experience within early years
settings is also significant for the attitudes that children develop towards key
adults outside their family. Do the children begin to believe that adults are
there to help and support? Or do they build an image of adults who are more
likely to nag, disrupt enjoyable play, make you do apparently pointless tasks
and perhaps make you feel as a child that what you produce is never quite
good enough?
Any discussion of early learning has to acknowledge that the individuality of
children matters. They learn by making connections to what they already know
or half understand. Learning is a personal experience and adult support or
guidance can only help with full recognition of individual children. Adults can
enable children to learn; you do not make them learn.
Healthy emotional development for young children is supported by a growing
belief that they are competent individuals, a sense of ‘I can’ and that ‘I can’t
yet’ is not a disaster, because adults are supposed to help children who are
struggling or have made a mistake. Many four- and five-year-olds are
beginning to realise that they have a great deal to learn in the future. Children
need a positive outlook on themselves as learners if they are not to feel
overwhelmed by the prospect of years of having to tackle new learning tasks
one after another. They desperately need supportive adults who will tune into
realistic expectations for the age group and to individual children’s version of
being a five-, six- or seven-year-old.
Children’s positive disposition to learn includes all
of the following:
Curiosity and the wish to find out and explore;
A desire to become competent, to be able to do or say something;
A motivation to keep trying, even if something is neither easy nor
obvious at the outset;
A sense of personal satisfaction for children when they practise, improve
and realise that they have managed a new skill or idea.
Enthusiastic and supportive adults help children to develop this positive
outlook. Alternatively, children may learn from negative experiences that they
are incompetent, that adults think they keep making mistakes and that there is
no point in trying, because you are either ‘good at something’ or ‘useless’.
What makes a supportive early years
practitioner?
Some of the confusion about how best to support the learning of young
children seems to arise from an image of school learning and the behaviour of
school teachers. The Early Years Foundation Stage guidance uses the term
‘practitioner’ to refer to all adults involved in supporting children’s learning. It
is useful that the words ‘teach’ and ‘teaching’ (prominent in the Foundation
Stage) have been replaced. There is a very strong emphasis on play as the most
powerful, and appropriate, vehicle for early learning. However, the phrase
‘educational programmes’ has been chosen to describe the framework of
experiences. These words continue to carry a weight that may still create some
difficulties in practice. The wording in the EYFS also focuses on the
importance of ‘planned and purposeful’ play. This broad concept has caused
some problems over the years, when adults become over-keen on their plans
and purposes.
Some early years practitioners, and parents as well, appear to have linked early
education and discussion about educational goals with their childhood
memories of school, school work and teachers. These memories are from a time
later in childhood than the Early Years Foundation Stage, even if they are
accurate memories.
Uneasy early years practitioners, especially without specific guidance from
managers, have concluded that to support early learning they must behave
close to their selective memories of what a ‘teacher’ does. This model has
included greater adult direction of children’s activities, including excessive use
of paper and pencil activities through worksheets, a focus on group rather than
individual work and more of a classroom feel, even for very young children.
Anxiety about inspection and demands for evidence, based sometimes on
direct experience of the behaviour of some inspectors, has increased the move
to directive planning and interruption of children’s actual learning for
presumed learning.
Yet, of course, good practitioners, who have trained as a nursery teacher, do
not behave at all the same way as teachers of primary school age children.
Effective early years practitioners of a non-teaching background need to step
away from the ‘school teacher’ model that is in their head. Good nursery
teachers have long followed the threads of children’s current thinking and
created a welcoming environment that enables children to learn through play
and nursery routines.
Janet Moyles, Sian Adams and Alison Musgrove have been involved in the
SPEEL project (Study of Pedagogical Effectiveness in Early Learning). The
view of the project is that teaching in the early years is more complex than in
the rest of the educational system. Genuinely helpful adults need to follow the
child’s learning rather than a plan of activities that assume learning has taken
place, so long as the activity has been completed. The team acknowledge that
allowing the child to drive the learning can seem or feel as if the practitioner is
doing very little.
The SPEEL team filmed adult interaction with children. However,
practitioners chose the time, to capture their view of effective adult behaviour.
Practitioners discussed their footage with a researcher. The examples in the
report show a rather directive adult style of communication. On reflection,
some practitioners realised that their own plans for what children would learn
had led them to monopolise the conversation. Some practitioners found it
hard to explain how they had chosen what to say or do in these recorded
sequences.
