Examination of Witnesses (Questions 219
- 239)
WEDNESDAY 24 MAY 2000
MS ANN
JAMIESON, MS
PAMELA CALDER
AND MS
HELEN PROCHAZKA
Chairman
219. Good morning. Can I welcome our first set
of witnesses to the Select Committee. As I have said already,
we try to make these things a good mixture of formality and informality
in the sense that it is not a mad inquisition; we are here to
learn, and you are the people who really know about early years.
We have found this inquiry so far extremely enjoyable, we have
learned a great deal, we have been out and about in the country,
and we have had a great deal of expertise given to us. Thank you
for your time and your willingness to come. Can I start by asking
you to briefly introduce yourselves.
(Ms Calder) I am Pamela Calder. I am
at South Bank University as a psychologist. I am also the Convenor
of the Early Childhood Studies Degrees Network. I am here to speak
on behalf of the Early Childhood Education Forum.
(Ms Jamieson) My name is Ann Jamieson. My job is Director
of the Early Childhood Unit of the National Children's Bureau,
which means that I chair the Early Childhood Education Forum and
we convene the Local Authorities Early Years Co-ordinators Network,
which meets regionally and nationally, and some of its key representatives
are here this morning. My own background is that I was educated
in Edinburgh in Sterling and have a degree in psychology and social
policy. I have worked in both Social Services and in Education.
I set up the Integrated Early Years Service in Sheffield, which
seems to have survived I left.
(Ms Prochazka) My name is Helen Prochazka. I am a
Montessori practitioner. I am a partner in two nurseries. I am
also currently Chairman of the national Montessori body, Montessori
Education UK. I have taught for quite a number of years in a variety
of settings and I am involved in training.
220. Can I open the questioning by saying one
of the things we find speaking to experts in this area is that
there seems to be pretty much a "happy family" in Early
Years, much more so than many of the other areas that this Committee
investigates. There seems to be a great deal of agreement. Is
that superficial? Are there not deep divides between the various
organisations and actors in Early Years? What do you think are
the big dividers, rather than the things we all agree on?
(Ms Jamieson) I think an awful lot of them are to
do with organisational issues and pay and conditions issues. They
are the logistical rather than the philosophical. The Early Childhood
Unit has just completed a national audit of guidance materials
across the board for children 0-14, and what we have found is
a healthy local diversity in that guidance, but a massive and
overwhelming national consensus which combines the key principles
of education and care without batting an eyelid. The evidence
of that integration is all around us. People, for example, issue
guidance about food in Early Years settings, but they say at the
same time that food should be an essential part of the curriculum.
Essentially, I think you will find overwhelming consensus that
care and education cannot actually be separated, that children
must be safe and secure in order to be able to learn best. Good
practitioners look at all aspects of the child. There are stunning
differences in pay and conditions between different types of nursery
nursing, education and in care, and huge differences in pay and
conditions in the private sector compared to the maintained sector,
and a lot of those differences force those organisational differences,
force an awareness or a defence of the position.
(Ms Prochazka) Perhaps what also needs to be said
is that the work the Early Childhood Education Forum has done
over the years that it has been in existence has really been to
explore all the kinds of issues and principles that underpin our
approach to early childhood education. Over the years increasingly
practitioners and people from diverse backgrounds and different
ways of working with children have come increasingly to realise
that the fundamental principles are good for everybody, and ones
that need to be upheld.
(Ms Calder) I would just like to say a little bit
more about the funding issues which relate to pay issues. There
is a page in the OECD report, page 28, which shows you the difference
in hourly pay, from a child minder at £1 to £3 a child
to play workers at £3-£5 to nursery teachers at £17
an hour. So it is not surprising that nursery teachers are seen
as the pinnacle of achievement. One of the things we would want
to say is that we want the integration of care and education,
and nursery teachers at the moment cannot provide that. They are
only trained for children from three and above, and they are trained
with a focus on cognitive learning. Again, some of the issues
are around issues of pay. If there were equal pay for people who
were trained across care and education—it is not a divide
in terms of philosophy. The divides, where they are, come in terms
of issues of funding and of pay.
Charlotte Atkins
221. Moving away from pay, and looking at the
Montessori system, how does that differ from other Early Years
provision? What are the points in the Montessori system which
would differ from non-Montessori teaching?
(Ms Prochazka) I think over the years the difference
has perhaps been more marked than it is now. Now the focus with
early years practitioners is a desire to put the needs of the
individual child at the forefront of whatever is provided for
that child. That is what the Montessori approach has since its
inception aimed to do. The pendulum of views on the early years
has swung backwards and forwards, and our approach has just continued
in pretty much the same way. At times it has been in harmony and
at times out of harmony with current thinking. However, more and
more the emphasis is on looking at the needs of the child, of
the family in the community and trying to provide an experience
for growing and learning that meets those children's needs.
222. Are you saying there is nothing distinctive
nowadays about the Montessori approach? What about the situation
that children are not corrected? My own child, I should say, went
to a Montessori school, or a school that claimed to be Montessori,
so I am not anti-Montessori. What I am trying to draw out here,
because we have not taken any evidence on the Montessori system,
are the distinctive features. We have people who fight avidly
for the Montessori system, and this is your opportunity to tell
us what the difference is. I understand from our adviser that
you have an approach where you do not correct the individual child.
Could you explore this?
(Ms Prochazka) I would take issue with that. The child
has freedom to operate within the environment according to their
inner needs and drives and interests, but where that need infringes
on the well being of the community or the other children, obviously
there needs to be correction. So it is a question of classroom
management and discipline. They are not free to run wild, but
they are encouraged to develop along their own path. We tend to
favour, rather than having lots of pre-planned group activities
like "This morning we are all going to do painting"
or "We're all going to do cooking", to structure things
in such a way that children can choose from the range of activities
available what they would like to do. So we tend to work with
smaller groups.
223. How does it differ from the High/Scope
system that we saw in Bristol and also in the United States?
(Ms Prochazka) To be honest, I am not familiar in
detail with the High/Scope approach.
(Ms Calder) I think I know the High/Scope but not
the Montessori.
224. We will have to draw our own conclusions.
What would you say the effectiveness over time has been of the
Montessori approach?
(Ms Prochazka) You end up with very independent learners,
who are making choices as to what they want to do, they are carrying
their activities through to a conclusion, they are quite organised
in terms of selecting the materials that they need from what is
available in the environment, they know when they need to ask
for help, and the help is forthcoming.
225. You seem to rely quite a lot on particular
bits of equipment. I remember the soap powder, the aduki beans
and all sorts of things, which seem to figure very highly in the
Montessori approach.
(Ms Prochazka) We have activities that are designed
to develop hand-eye coordination and the development of fine motor
control that are specifically graded within the environment for
the children to choose from and work towards. The ultimate objective
is to make the children competent in the wider environment. We
teach them how to cut in stages so that by the time they go to
school they can use their scissors competently and safely.
226. You are also very keen on phonics, are
you not? That was taught at a very early stage.
(Ms Prochazka) Yes.
227. When would you start introducing phonics
teaching?
(Ms Prochazka) When the children show an interest
in letters and sounds. We do a lot of work with sounds first and
gradually linking the letters. It is a process that just happens,
but generally from the time they are four and a half they have
usually learned sounds and letters of the alphabet.
Valerie Davey
228. I want to move to the early years. We started
this report on an age 3-8 basis, and then realised that we ought
to go back to nought. Given that the Early Childhood Education
Forum talks about education from nought, what kind of education
do you think a child goes through 0-3 and how are the local authorities
in partnership going to be sure as far as possible that that is
encouraged?
(Ms Jamieson) Arising from what you talked about a
second ago, there is a lovely description of High/Scope in the
Start Right report and Kathy Sylva's report on the biggest bit
of research. It seems to me that there is a consensus, certainly
in the Early Childhood Education Forum, and I think in the Local
Authorities Early Years Co-ordinators Network, that children's
powers of learning are at their highest from birth, and the adults
around those children can have the biggest impact on shaping and
supporting those predispositions with younger children. Evidence
shows that the best style of working with children is to not allow
the child laissez-faire, but to very closely observe the child,
and for the adult practitioner to take direction from the child
so that the adult maximises the child's innate curiosity, goes
with it and—there are different words for this but some
people would say—"scaffolds" or supports that
learning, following the child's natural instinct. So there is
a natural curriculum which children always devise for themselves
by wanting to experience at first hand the world around them.
There is an abundance of that curriculum if only adult practitioners
have the skills and the rigour to be able to engage with it. Most
of my colleagues genuinely believe that. Most people also believe
that parents have a natural instinct to follow the child, but
that that instinct on the parents' part can be enhanced by supporting
the parents' learning at the same time. I think there is increasing
evidence in Britain that helping parents to take their own learning
seriously has a big impact. The Peak Project in Oxfordshire I
think is a huge example of that. All of those parents get a certificate
for participation in supporting this curriculum of the children.
229. You pre-empted my second question. Essentially
what we are looking at is encouraging parents to know how best,
given, I recognise, their innate predisposition to do the right
thing, but getting the confidence to carry that forward so that
those children aged 0-3 get the very best start.
(Ms Calder) But not all children are going to be only
with their parents, and it is a matter of advising other people
how to relate to children as well, and parents too. Although some
have very good skills, not all of them have, and you can harm
children very early on if you do not encourage their interest
in other children, in the environment. There are ways of working
with children that do not necessarily come naturally, and that
is why the question is not when do you start education; education
is there from the very beginning. It is how you work and in what
ways you work with children as they grow older. The way of working
will not change, but what you are specifically trying to teach
them might change.
230. Do you have any levels of achievement for
children? I hate to put a target for a one-year old or a two-year
old but parents would be encouraged to know the kind of things
that they can anticipate.
(Ms Calder) There are countries in Europe where they
are working and thinking about a kind of curriculum for one-year
olds. It is the sort of things you would expect children to do
anyway, for example, talking, so one of the things you do is make
sure you talk to the children and listen to the children, but
so that you are listening to what they have to say and not talking
at them. It is those kinds of things.
(Ms Jamieson) I do not think anybody would seriously
say that it was harmful to give parents an idea of what the normal
distribution of attainment was for one-year olds. Most one-year
olds should be able to sit up. It does not really matter if they
cannot walk at that age. They should be able to point to things
that they are interested in. There are a lot of signs. You can
sign-post that kind of development, and it is helpful for parents
to have that understanding, and it is quite shocking that some
parents do not. What is also really interesting is how children
can continually surprise adults. We regularly use a series of
photographs from Italy of an 11-month old child who sits and looks
at pictures of watches with an adult, and the adult, following
the child's interest, talks to the child about the watch that
she is wearing. She lets the child listen to the watch, and the
final frame of the sequence of photographs is this 11-month old
putting an ear down to see whether or not this image of the watch,
which she knows is different to the one she has just heard ticking,
ticks as well. That is not an Einstein; it is probably a child
within the normal distribution, but people know how to encourage,
and parents are utterly delighted with that. Most adults I know
are delighted with that sort of thinking.
(Ms Calder) Also, children's relationships with other
children, play with other children and being able to talk about
play with other children is part of what you would expect.
Mr Marsden
231. Ann, I wonder if we can just go back to
your opening remarks and link them into a specific question about
achievement. I think you said in response to the Chairman's question
that there was a very broad consensus in this area—not over
pay and conditions, and you made that point very clearly, but
in terms of the balance of care and education in the process.
In a way, is that not rather curious? If you look at other areas
of education, if you look at the debate about selectivity in education,
funding of universities, there are great debates going on between
people who feel passionately on different sides. You seem to be
presenting a picture here of everything being sweetness and light
in Early Years. For example, if we are talking about care and
education, is there not at some point, however blurred, distinctions
in priorities to be made in terms of what is actually provided?
I am curious to probe whether this consensus is in fact a tyranny
of consensus or whether there are real differences between what
the balance should be between the care component and the education
component in Early Years.
(Ms Calder) I would say you cannot separate them like
that. It is an inappropriate question.
232. You might think it is an inappropriate
question but I suspect that parents up and down the country ask
it daily.
(Ms Calder) With a young child, you cannot care for
it without in some sense educating it or not educating it at the
same time. If you are changing the nappy and not looking at the
child you are damaging it. If you change the nappy and talk to
the child at the same time, it is learning to relate to people,
it is learning that its own responses are contingent on other
people's responses. You are doing the two together. I suppose
in a sense we are still caring for our children when they are
in school. We are keeping them safe. We do not call it care, but
we are still caring for them. We are still concerned about what
they are fed in school dinners.
233. Are you then saying at no stage, even going
up to three or four-year olds, do people in the Early Years area
have differences about the amount of time and attention that should
be given to some form of formal framework? We have heard from
Helen that the Montessori approach is clearly a distinctive approach,
however much some of those matters may have been taken on board
in the main consensus.
(Ms Calder) I think you are using "formal"
in a slightly different way.
234. I am sorry if I have committed a sin against
the Holy Grail.
(Ms Jamieson) I would like to dispel any myth that
there is a smiling consensus everywhere around us in Early Years.
I do not think that is what we are saying. What we are saying
is that there is a level of consensus about the inseparability
of education and care for young children, but there are lots of
very vigorous debates about how and what later on. Quite clearly,
healthy debate about education is a good thing, and I think there
is a lot of it in Early Years. Please do not think what we are
saying is that it is all sweetness and light. It is not, but you
do need to take seriously the fact that when it boils down to
it, most people agree about from birth, about the importance of
engagement with parents, and most people seem to me to be agreeing
that safe and secure is an important prerequisite for children's
capacity to think about what is going on around them. We have
just done an analysis of a very large amount of observation of
under-threes in day care, and what that overwhelmingly shows is
that teachers want to look for the opportunities to "scaffold"
the children's learning, but they have to look at whether or not
that child is engaged in a relationship with others in the setting
first.
235. Can I ask finally on that point at what
stage, given that we accept the holistic approach, you think it
is appropriate for us to be talking about evaluating or measuring
achievement in children? We have heard reference earlier to a
broad idea of what one-year olds might do or what two-year olds
might do. At what point does it become appropriate to measure
or evaluate achievement?
(Ms Jamieson) My own view is that we should assess
and plan with children continuously. We should do it right from
the start. But that is a formal evaluation which I think works.
I think the best systems document continuously the individual
child's progression, and that documentation in itself serves as
a script for a dialogue between parents and the key practitioners
in that child's life, so there is a continuity occurring.
236. Just to be clear about this, you are saying
there is no formal stage at which you say, "Right, all this
generalised observation now needs to be channelled into something
more specific."
(Ms Jamieson) I think there is a distinction to be
drawn between the way we measure children's achievements once
they are past six or seven and able to cope with more formal structures.
237. But up to then you would not?
(Ms Jamieson) Up to then I would document it continuously,
but I would do something more vigorous than we do at the moment.
Dr Harris
238. Could any of you comment on the current
compulsory school starting age and issues to do with when formal
schooling should start?
(Ms Prochazka) Traditionally, the Montessori approach
has viewed what has now come to be seen as the Foundation Stage,
that there is a continuum from three upwards to, ideally, we would
say, six, and this figures in Europe. Certainly I think all of
the practitioners are unhappy at the intake of four-year olds
into inappropriate provision in reception classes. There is definitely
a need to be looking at that and making sure that the provision
that is available to those children is suitable for them, and
that the parents are clear about the fact that the school starting
age has not changed, although if you talk to parents they have
the sense that it has.
239. As well as the issues of when schooling
should start, and when people should go to what might be considered
to be larger classes in school, there is the issue of the formalisation
of education. Perhaps one of you might comment on whether current
practice, wherever it is, is too formal at too early an age, or
perhaps the alternative, that there need to be goals set and standards
reached.
(Ms Jamieson) I thought there was a lovely article
in the Times Educational Supplement just a couple of weeks ago
which compared French and UK children. The French system of nursery
education is exceptionally formal. What this nice study revealed
was that British children are doing better on problem-solving
tasks than their French counterparts.
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