PBM 4024 Pugh R 20492693 Excellence in Early Years: International Perspectives
Programme/Pathway / MA Education ProgrammeModule Start Date: / September 2013
Module Code: / PBM4024
Module Title: / EXCELLENCE IN EARLY YEARS : INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Student's Name: / Rosanne Pugh
Student ID Number / 20492693
Tutor's Name / Denise Corfield
Latest submission Date: / January 12 th2013
Actual submission Date: / January 6th 2013
Received by:
Date Received: / ………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………
Title
Global perspectives on “school readiness”.
Rationale.
How we can help children learn and develop in the best possible way? Can international perspectives on early education inform our understandings of the school readiness debate?
“There is a mischievous mistruth in the belief that doing certain things early helps children get ready for the next stage. The best way to help a child get ready to be 5 is to let her be 3 when she is 3 and let him be 4 when he is 4, and to hold high expectations of what children in their first 48 months of life might achieve” Nutbrown (1996: 54)
My interest in this area is driven by an international work history steeped in Early Years Education. I trained and worked as a teacher specialising in education from birth to eight years, graduating from The University of Sydney, before emigrating to the United Kingdom where my varied roles continued within the early childhood sector over twenty three years until now. I have recently been to Italy on an international study tour (2009) to examine the acclaimed Reggio Emilia (RE), approach and have chosen to contrast approaches in this region of Italy to England, in the light of ideas surrounding school readiness. Due to complexity of this task and the need to make comparisons meaningful within the word count available, only these two approaches will be contrasted.
My current role is as a Headteacher of a small rural Primary school, where I have a substantial four day a week teaching responsibility for children in The Early Years Foundation Stage. I have deep empathy for all early childhood educators who are under increasing pressure to see children’s best possible start in life in terms of a more formalised approach for all, regardless of maturity, and to abandon developmentally sound teaching for narrow academic targets and curriculum imperatives. This paper argues that mathematics and literacy are rapidly scaling a continuum of increased status to the detriment of the holistic nature of early learning and the true value of play, where potentially play is moving to the periphery of children’s experience – reduced in quality and scope.
This research and the attendant evidence will critically examine underlying theories and tease out interweaving elements that define the best learning environments for our youngest children. Evidence from my own practice reflects a spur toward excellence through the influences of the RE approach in which we see “depth in original thought in both children and educators, problem solving, viewing an issue from many perspectives, and the involvement of an active learning community…” Stewart and Pugh (2007:33)
Portfolio evidence attached demonstrates these influences in children determining their own role play areas from related real life experiences; in being encouraged to draw upon rich cultural home experiences which are further facilitated by the adult creating space for children’s thinking processes (Appendix 1). In Appendix 1A film footage depicts children working with artists in a project focused on Impressionism and documents living links across the curriculum with community involvement. Again, in Appendix 2, there is evidence that adults support the children to wrestle with their own theories, pre-empting a visit with self-posed questions and sharing these child-owned questions with parents. Making learning visible (Appendix 3) through documentation is shared through an explanation for parents, who are encouraged to value and to “see”, revisit and reflect on learning alongside teachers. An explanation of the place of play as a facilitator of learning is offered. Many photographs give this documentation life and enable a pictorial learning journey to be openly shared with the community, (Appendix 4). Opportunities for learning in literacy and numeracy are clear in these images from reading menus, recipes and signs to time sequencing, measuring and counting with all the associated, essential vocabulary. Appendix 5 demonstrates children extending their literacy learning through play, specifically play stimulated by from adult provocation through story telling and drama.
This approach will be contrasted to the concept of “school readiness”, currently favoured by Conservative Ministers, evidenced in Education Select Committee responses to the Inquiry into The Foundation Years- Sure Start Children’s Centres 2012, who are determining current policy and practice in infant settings and schools. The focus on the impacts of these elements on my own professional practice will highlight the best start for children as seen through the Reggio lenses, which in turn enables the critical re-evaluation of my own pedagogical and cultural framework. ‘….looking at other approaches ‘provides us with a sort of lens for looking at our own situations.’ Moss (2011:8)
Contemporary Cultural Context
There is hot debate as to the best approaches to education with a recent focus on international league tables (Pisa Tables) as the bench mark for success and consequent ability to compete economically in a global market place. Educational achievement is seen as the pathway to a country’s prosperity and England at the latest data count is at best stagnant, at worst slipping down the ranks, now out of the top twenty in all subjects under scrutiny; Maths, English and Science. The response form The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, is to ratchet up standards across all curricula and age groups, effectively formalising the early educational environment in an attempt to secure “school readiness.”
This current cultural context is highly contentious. Chris Keates, leader of the NASUWT teachers' union argued the Pisa results should not be used to "talk down our public education system", that high performing countries promoted teacher professionalism and worryingly had the least happy pupils. Criticism of the limited measures and narrow focus has been cited alongside irrelevancy in making meaningless international comparisons unfairly when countries are so different. The influential UK head teacher, Anthony Seldon, warned of governments becoming "increasingly mesmerised and bedazzled" by the Pisa tests. "Such tests are deeply flawed and their impact is profoundly damaging to young people," he says as reported on BBC news website, seen December 3rd, 2013.
A group of teachers, charity leaders, authors and academics, (129 signatories) publicised their discontent in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, September 11th 2013, regarding a “too much too soon” culture of traditional lessons in early years education. They have called for a fundamental reassessment of national policies; reject the introduction of a new baseline test for five year olds and qualifications for child care staff that make few references to learning through play.
Analysis
This work has been organised so that the portfolio of evidence, in their original forms, sit in numbered appendices at the end of the writing. To enable full interaction between evidence and discussions within the text, relevant extracts from the portfolio have been highlighted. For ethical reasons all persons are known only by their first name within the portfolio and appendices. Permission to share photographs and films of children has been secured from all parents and have been made public by the BBC in our participation in the “Masterpieces in Schools” Project .
With rapid changes resulting from shifting political perspectives in the context of educational provision, there is an urgent need to locate, articulate and question our beliefs. To expand our understanding of pedagogy, we need to acknowledge that pedagogy is personal, it is one’s own journey of understanding. It encompasses social, political and cultural values. Everyone has a view of childhood. What we want for children is supported by our knowledge, theory and experience. Our cultural expectations of a child living in Victorian times, for example, are wildly different from aspirations we have for our children today. We see shifts in expectations with successive governments and recently, with the inception of the Coalition we see early childhood serving as a “waiting room” for school. School readiness has increasingly become the current vision of Conservative Ministers, effectively stripping the earliest years of a time of learning in its own right, whilst diminishing the importance child development as crucial to healthy human growth and well being. This is dangerous territory and very high profile, with Baroness Walmsley securing a debate on the importance of early years education in the House of Lords in November 2012. In this debate Lord Paretkh declared that early childhood education deserved its own status, to have its own value, its own pedagogy - not just act as a stepping stone for what goes on in Primary school, otherwise he points out, what happens in the preschool years will be determined by the curriculum that follows it. It could be argued that whilst lip service is being paid to the value of play as a vehicle for learning, it is not borne out in expected outcomes for all children, especially bearing in mind that some children will be four years old when assessed in June 2014.
For the purposes of constructing a critical discourse on the idea of “school readiness” it will defined in this paper as preparations for reading, writing and maths alongside “guiding the development of children’s cognitive, behavioural, physical and emotional capabilities, so that children can take full advantage of the learning opportunities available to them in school” DfE and DoH (2011).
In order to structure an analysis of international practice and contrast this to a local evidence base, it is essential to recognise the complexity of this task where elements interweave. My approach will be to tease out influences, which are linked, by thinking about them one by one.
1. Important consideration needs to be given to the types and nature of relationships surrounding the child. Children’s social understandings grow from their connections to others.
2. How children’s time is spent is crucial, so that they do not feel pressured or hurried along in their development.
3. The way in which space is organised for learning opportunities greatly affects children’s behaviour and learning patterns. Space shapes and structures children’s movement and choices. It suggests possibilities of how they might play.
4. It is vital to examine what infants and young children actually experience across a day or sessions. For example, how the day unfolds for them, how they rest, share meals and relate to others, as well as how learning and play opportunities are presented.
5. Finally, how opportunities are fostered for problem solving is important. How are children supported to be active and creative? This is described as the creative process. Stewart and Pugh (2007)
Reggio Emilia
Having no set curriculum gives freedom to staff to consider possibilities to provoke children’s thinking, alongside artists and mentors, (pedagogista) where children are considered to be competent and capable, active- “knowledge builders”, not passive receivers of knowledge. (See Appendix 5). Reggio educators see themselves as researchers of learning where constructing knowledge is a spiral process of revisiting ideas in many different contexts, times and situations. When asked on the study tour (notes taken at a lecture International Study Tour RE 2009) if the teachers were concerned they would not meet the expectations of Primary school they thought the question silly. “Ready for what?” Why would they be concerned? Reggio is committed to the children in the here and now, to their current fascinations, if they do that with precision, they are meeting their educational objective. The Reggio philosophy would consider the idea of “school readiness” counter intuitive, limiting the potential of children, the expression of their hundred, hundred languages, by focussing on a constrained set of skills required by schools, e.g “being able to sit still and listen, tie shoe laces, go to the toilet and understand the word ‘stop’?” , Field, F (2010:22), It could be argued there is a possibility to set low expectations and narrow skill sets in England by not focussing on higher aspirations for children’s thinking, learning and development, Whitebread and Bingham (2012).
In Reggio relationships are in the context of collaboration within a community where all are learners. It is described as a “pedagogy of listening” , centred on dialogue, negotiation and discussion where adults stay with children over years, working in small groups. Children have rich enhanced environments and extended time in which to play with ideas in role play and by interacting with objects and adults. Without a set curriculum, inquiry projects are given time to run their course; possibilities are explored, tested, refined and represented through documentation. In England we are adopting a “race against time” culture, where children’s underperformance in Pisa terms is reported in being so many “months behind”. Expectations are being visited upon children earlier and earlier as if this equates to good educational standards. This is exaggerated further in early years, given for example, that months matter when you’ve only been alive for 32 of them. Worryingly, the exemplification for writing by which standards are judged for the end of the Foundation Stage (DfE , 2013) is now reminiscent of KS1 work, as are the expectations for mathematics. Additionally, the illustrations offer dubious content, given that some of the writing examples have traditionally represented independent work but look like heavy teacher input was given, for example a 5 step instructional text on how to put on a red nose, or to look after plants.
Written evidence submitted by TACTYC challenged The Education Select committee on school readiness, “Although the reception year is intended to be part of the Early Years Foundation Stage, (EYFS) the Early Learning Goals (ELG) for literacy are set very high. A smaller percentage of children reach the expected level in the writing goal than any other since the early years profile was introduced with boys and summer born children likely to find them most difficult. This should at least raise the question as to whether the goal is at a suitable level.” Furthermore, TACTYC point out that research by the DfE, (2010: RR034) indicates a poor correlation between the points in the writing ELG and achievement in writing at the end of KS1.