Examination of Witness (Questions 64 -
70)
TUESDAY 4 APRIL 2000
MS JULIE
FISHER
Chairman
64. Julie Fisher, who is the Leader of the Early
Years Advisory Team. We have met before. Would you like to be
say a few words to open or do you want to go to questions?
(Ms Fisher) I am more than happy for you to pick up
your issues because my remit is quite broad and I want to make
sure I am answering what it is that you want to know about.
65. You are described as the Leader of the Early
Years Advisory Team, what is your team? What does it comprise
of? Why is it like it is?
(Ms Fisher) The Advisory Team in Oxfordshire is responsible
for three main areas, one is the support of all settings within
the Partnership. The second is the training programme, both within
the maintained sector and the non-maintained sector. Thirdly,
monitoring the quality of all the settings who come within the
Early Years Development and Child Care Partnership. To do that
I have five advisory consultants or head-teachers in Oxfordshire,
one belongs to each division. They in turn line-manage Early Years
Partnership Workers, who are part-time secondees from different
sectors who work alongside the private and voluntary sectors.
We have quite a large team of people trying to make sure that
at county level, at divisional level and very much at local level
we are responding to the needs of the settings but also upholding
some of the rigour that Rosemary referred to in terms of monitoring.
66. I find with Early Years that they are such
a nice bunch of people you cannot believe they are ever going
to fall out. If we are going to have rigour are there going to
be occasions when you are going to have to say, "This provision
really is not up to standard, either it should cease to provide
or certainly change its practices pretty radically if it is going
to be part of the provision"? Does that happen? It must happen
that you lose people out of the system quite regularly.
(Ms Fisher) We have not yet but the system is in place
for that to happen should that be necessary. I chair one of the
task groups Rosemary referred to, the Quality Task Group, and
they were responsible for saying that before a setting could actually
join the Partnership, and join the plan, there were certain criteria
that they would need to fulfil in order for them to make sure
that when they were in that Partnership and an OFSTED inspection
came along they were likely to be able to meet the kind of criteria
that were necessary. Equally, we did not want to assume because
they were fine when they started that that kind of quality was
maintained. Again there are criteria for saying that if a setting
seems to be losing the quality that we had deemed necessary at
the beginning, if we apply certain criteria to them and they fail
to meet them, then they will be asked to leave the Partnership
and leave the plan. I am delighted you think we are nice. I think
that that is actually a real strength of Early Years. There is
something about a passionate commitment to young children that
does bind us, that is true, but equally because we care so much,
we want to see the quality maintained. Most people that you will
meet will say that they strive towards the best kind of quality
they are capable of giving.
Charlotte Atkins
67. I think the point you made there about what
they are capable of giving is an important one. We have seen a
range of settings today. Of course I realise there is an even
greater range of settings. In terms of quality of provision do
you believe that some provision does not reach the highest quality
because of lack of training? Would you like to comment on that,
especially in view of the evidence we have had in earlier sessions
where the Pre-school Learning Alliance was talking about a number
of pre-school learning play groups closing down, looking at the
challenge they face and also the rigour with which those mainly
voluntary based settings should be delivering the learning agenda.
(Ms Fisher) The issue of quality is undoubtedly the
biggest challenge the Partnership faces. The whole of the Early
Years sector faced it before the Partnerships were introduced.
This brought to a head the notion that if you want to make judgments
about quality, you have to be very clear about whose criteria
you are using and whose judgment you are going to rely on as to
whether or not that quality is sustained. Part of the current
problems faced by settings is the fact that even though we espouse
similar quality, and people will use that term a lot, OFSTED themselves
recognise that there are differences between the different kinds
of providers. Currently there is a totally different inspection
regime for those settings in the non-maintained sector from those
in the maintained sector. Instantly you have a divide. There is
a divide of different qualifications of the inspectors, a different
length of time they will spend in a setting, different training
they receive and different criteria that they use. All of those
things will lead to an undermining, to some extent, of the notion
that there can be currently a level playing field. Under one sort
of inspection regime settings are not even required to write down
their planning, and that is the case in Section 5, the non-maintained
sector, and yet in Section 10, the maintained sector, a school
with exactly the same aged children is required to write a development
plan, schemes of work, long, medium and short-term planning. That
instantly makes people feel that there are significant differences.
One of the ways in Oxfordshire that we tried to tackle that was
to say if we wanted people to work together we had to create our
own OFSTED 7.5, if you like, and say if we are in a Partnership
together let us strive towards the same kind of standards. Oxfordshire
has developed the Oxfordshire Quality Framework for Early Years,
which is a framework that all settings, irrespective of the sectors,
sign up to and work towards. We did not want it to be something
some people were excluded from. Everyone can work towards it,
that is the challenge, to improve on the previous best, as Tim
Brighouse likes to say. That is really what we are aiming for.
There are differences that are very hard to eradicate. The biggest
of those must be around training and qualifications. Although
everybody can undertake training, and increasingly people are,
it is very hard to make up on a deficit where one part of the
sector starts with a four year graduate training to specialise
in how young children learn, what they should learn and all that
that entails. When you are trying to make up that sort of gap,
very often it is too massive. When the DfEE gives us funding for
training, which it does, and is generous about it, one day's training
does not make up that kind of gap. That is the biggest difference.
The other is the funding of resourcing and space. If I were to
take you to some of our best performing early years provision,
and that would probably be our nursery schools, then you would
see space, indoors and out, you would see resources indoors and
out, you would see qualifications of staff, numbers of staff,
all of whom led to the best kind of provision that we all want
for our children. We could not start from there. Oxfordshire is
a microcosm, if you like, of the national scene. I remember speaking
to Estelle Morris three or four years ago who said, "If we
could start from anywhere we would not start from here."
What we have to do is to put in the most rigorous plans we can
to improve people's qualifications and training and to bring the
resourcing more in line.
68. Obviously you are saying there is a tremendous
variation in quality, should there be some sort of kite mark for
training so that we know what we are talking about? I think what
is very clear is when we go into a play group and they say that
the staff are trained that means very different things from if
we go into a nursery in the maintained sector. Should there be
a basic level below which that should not continue? Are parents
in Oxfordshire or anywhere else aware of the differences of provision?
Or is it just a matter that they do not have the choice because
they have to go for a local provision, so even if they were aware
of the difference in provision and what that offers their children,
actually there is not a choice there anyway so having the choice
is not a reality?
(Ms Fisher) If I start with the issue of parents being
aware, it was one of the things about the voucher system that
made most people most uneasy, that the notion was perpetuated
that if you paid the same amount of money you would get the same
kind of provision. It was trumpeted that if you said that you
would follow the desirable learning outcomes, if you agreed to
be inspected, then you were given the grant. I think there is
no doubt from speaking to parents that there is a grave level
of misunderstanding that the differential between the kind of
settings that were available was as great as it was. Some of those
differences were actually strengths. Part of what makes a play
group different from a nursery school can be a strength. In some
ways there was a loss when there was an attempt to level everything
to the same or similar levels. There is no doubt that there is
a lack of understanding of the range and the difference. The issue
of choice I think is a knotty one because here in Oxfordshire,
as in a lot of authorities where there are both urban and rural
areas, the notion of choice is not as available as people will
tend to sometimes imply. Very often in the rural sectors it is
whatever provision is on the doorstep, sometimes in our urban
areas it is the provision that is on the doorstep. If you were
to offer every kind of provision there is to every parent that
would be a very different issue and it would be interesting to
see what they would take up. In response to the issue of training
I think undoubtedly there should be a basic level of qualification
that anybody working with young children should attain. I think
it would be absolutely untenable in any other phase of education
that anybody with the immense responsibility of educating and
caring for young children should do so with no qualifications
at all. It is a very different issue managing your own child and
working with your own child to working with other people's in
large numbers. It is an area and a field in which qualifications
should be imperative. I think then you have the climbing frame.
Then there are a range of qualifications for a range of different
adults who have a range of different responsibilities. What I
think we must not lose sight of is the fact that those settings
that come out best, whether you are looking at Section 10 inspections
or whether you are looking at our own monitoring or whether you
are looking at the beginnings of research findings, are those
where there are qualified teachers. That says something very important
about that overall deep knowledge and understanding about Early
Years education and what it means. Yes, there needs to be a basic
level but it must not stop there and everyone must go on getting
better. Perhaps there is a short and a long-term plan. Certainly
the notion of working towards a graduate profession is right and
proper. If you need to be a graduate to work with secondary aged
children, you need to be a graduate to work with the youngest
children, there should not be a differential. Because that will
take time to reach and to get to we must work with everybody to
make sure that their qualifications improve.
Dr Harris
69. Could you comment on the almost complete
absence here, as elsewhere in the country, of men from this teacher
setting?
(Ms Fisher) In my previous life I was also a lecturer
in earlier childhood so I was involved in initial teacher training
and we had exactly the same dilemma of recruiting men to Early
Years. It is true to say that many men who came into Early Years
were under the misapprehension that it was an easier phase of
education to go into. One of the things we need to do is to make
sure that the public at large understands that Early Years education
is challenging and difficult. I think there is an issue around
men working with young children generally, irrespective of what
that role is. There is still the notion it is a woman's role and
woman's work. There has been a real achievement with the Early
Excellence Centres and the centres with combined education and
care, they have put an immense amount of effort in recruiting
fathers and other male role models into the centres so from a
young age the children see it is all right to be a man working
with young children. The combination of that kind of work, of
the settings, and going out into the community and of fathers
seeing that their role is to be with their children and that that
also is all right, should improve things. However, you cannot
get away from the fact that whilst the profession, to a large
extent, is funded so poorly in terms of salaries, again it is
not going to attract people for whom the salary is key. That may
be another reason why it does not attract men.
Chairman
70. I think we are going to move on. In thanking
you, if somebody was reading between the lines of what you said,
this may be totally unfair, are you not really saying, to anyone
who listened to your evidence, that the best possible route really
is to get a child as early as possible into a school setting rather
than anywhere else?
(Ms Fisher) That would not be true. I am glad you
said that in order to give me the opportunity to refute it. It
is not just about schools, it is about schooling, perhaps, that
is appropriate for young children. If you take a young child into
a nursery class or a nursery school, particularly, you have their
resources, as I said before, and trained and specialist staff
who know about the learning needs of young children. You cannot
assume that that is the case in all schooling settings. There
may be reception classes where the experiences of the young children
are not appropriate and that may be around the fact that the member
of staff employed in that class simply has not had the specialist
training that they need to have an awareness of the learning needs
of young children. It is not about school, it is about provision
for young children by people who are specialists in educating
them.
Chairman: Thank you very much for that. I thought
you would like that last question.
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