Examination of Witnesses (Questions 251
- 259)
WEDNESDAY 24 MAY 2000
MS ANNE-MARIE
GRAHAM, MS
MARION EAST
AND MS
ZENA BRABAZON
Chairman
251. Can I welcome Anne-Marie Graham especially
because she comes from somewhere near Huddersfield, Zena Brabazon
and Marion East. Thank you very much for coming. Can you very
quickly introduce yourselves and then we will start the questions.
(Ms Graham) My name is Anne-Marie Graham. I am the
Head of the Kirklees Early Years Service. That is a local authority
integrated service that brings together the Education and the
Social Services work on Early Years and coordinates and supports
the Early Years Development and Childcare Partnership for Kirklees.
(Ms Brabazon) My name is Zena Brabazon. I am the Head
of Early Years and Play in the London Borough of Haringey. I work
for the local education authority and my job involves being lead
officer of the Childcare Partnership and also the LEA is a lead
partner for the Sure Start programme in Haringey. Like Ann-Marie,
I have the job of developing the Partnership, supporting the Partnership,
and also running a large department which is a direct service
provider, including three centres of Early Years Excellence.
(Ms East) I am Marion East and I am the Co-ordinator
and Manager of Early Years on the Isle of Wight. I run a joint
unit, Social Services and Education, and we too do the education
partnership work, strategic planning and the regulatory work on
inspection and registration of all settings for children under
eight.
252. Can I start the questioning with a difficult
one. When we have an inquiry we are always looking not just to
go over old ground. In Bristol we visited a school with two teachers
who had met the previous inquiry by a Select Committee some 10
or 11 years ago. What do you think this inquiry could add in terms
of value to what is happening in Early Years? What do you think
we should be concentrating on to add value to the process of the
Early Years continuum? What would you like to see coming out of
this in terms of recommendation?
(Ms Graham) We are obviously living through a period
when there are considerable changes taking place, when the whole
field of early education and child care in particular are being
discussed and debated much more than perhaps they have been for
the last 20 years, and funding and support and development is
going into those fields at a fairly unprecedented rate, I would
think. That means that change is happening very quickly, and I
think it would be extremely useful if somebody were able to look
at what that change is meaning, where the gaps are and what the
dangers are. I think we know what the good things are about that.
I am not pretending there are not a great many good things about
that happening from our point of view, but there are areas that
we have concerns about, and I think overwhelmingly it is how you
create a system and fund it to allow the things the previous speakers
were talking about, the integration of care and education. I think
there is a huge consensus about the importance of care and education
going together, but how do we actually get a funding system and
the people who can deliver on it? Far more important than actually
deciding whether you want the Montessori system or a High/Scope
system or whichever "ism" is fashionable at the moment
is actually having those people with the experience and the training
and the understanding and the gift—the gifted amateurs certainly
if they are gifted amateurs—there as well. How do you create
an environment in which they can do that job that they are extremely
good at doing? I think that is our job to some extent, and we
are aware of where the difficulties arise, and where we have to
try and patch these things together. So I think that the Committee
could actually show what now needed to be done to put the mortar
between the bricks, to make the whole thing really stick together
and join together so that in fact we are building a structure
with a lot of stability—I do not mean without flexibility,
but something that rests on very firm foundations for the future.
(Ms Brabazon) Obviously I would agree with all of
that, because we do very similar jobs, and in our jobs we have
the opportunity to have a strategic overview which very few people
have. Our jobs require us, in a sense, as organisers of very large
and complicated arrangements which involve funding from a myriad
of sources, to have a clear strategic and planning brain, and
to be social entrepreneurs within a local authority. One thing
you could add to the debate and to make clear is that Early Years
is about economic development, it is about regeneration, it is
about people wanting to go to work and providing the infrastructure
for adults to do that, but it is also about what children need
and require. We have two sets of users; we must never forget that.
There are children and families, and then there is the economy,
and in a sense the National Child Care Strategy is driven more
by the latter sometimes than by the former. Every day people in
my job have to think about how we are going to organise all this
money to make all this happen. We have been left to our own devices
a bit in the local area. I suppose you could be like Chairman
Mao and have a thousand flowers bloom, or you could have a more
prescriptive system. But somewhere in the middle of all of this
there has to be an understanding and a recognition. In the London
Borough of Haringey, absolutely fundamental to the regeneration
of an area like Tottenham is that we have a strong infrastructure
which supports children and families. With early learning and
the importance of the curriculum, we are talking about integrated
child care and education. One of the key things—and I know
this although I am not a teacher; I know it from working with
our Early Years Centres—is that we are changing practice.
We are doing different things. That is very hard to do because
Early Years is quite a demarcated area, with terms and conditions,
jobs, hierarchy, different workers. As you make the changes you
should be learning from that, and there is a point at which you
might want to legislate for some of these things, at which point
you have to keep doing it on the ground without a legislative
framework which makes it easy. If you know that combined centres
work, if you know they support children and families, if holistic
practice, the type of stuff that Sure Start builds on, and Early
Excellence can illustrate, why do we have to keep inventing it?
I think that is something you may wish to think about, and certainly
it is the experience of the three of us sitting here. We come
from completely diverse parts of the country. We all reached the
same conclusion. Haringey is a massively high provider, the Isle
of Wight is not, but we reach the same conclusions.
(Ms East) One of the things that would help us greatly
in the work that we are trying to do is to give us a bit more
time for consolidation, for review, for reflection on what has
happened so far. Change takes time, and I think people in the
field, whether they run pre-schools or play groups or are in the
maintained sector—Zena is quite right; we only have three
nursery classes on the Isle of Wight, but we also have 70 very
good pre-schools and nurseries, and we do not want those undermined.
They are doing on the whole an excellent job in difficult circumstances.
What we really want is time to consolidate, time to review, time
to reflect, and to recognise that the child Care Strategy on the
one hand contradicts some of our messages about children's rights
and entitlements, and I think the contradictory messages are very
worrying. Practitioners in the field are feeling confused by some
of those contradictions.
Chairman: Thank you for that excellent introduction.
Could I ask for quicker questions and quicker answers.
Mr Foster
253. At what age should age should formal teaching
begin?
(Ms East) In my view, formal teaching should not begin
at four. It should not begin until children are ready. I think
six is probably the age that formal teaching should begin. Like
earlier speakers, I think children are on a continuum, and you
cannot say at six years and one day "This is the moment",
because children are all on a continuum. But I think that the
actual formalising of reading and writing, for example, need not
happen until children are six, because there is so much more they
can be doing to build on those skills before they get to that
stage. If you plan carefully and structure and scaffold children's
learning up to that age, they will very, very quickly learn to
read and write at that stage because all of the foundation, the
pre-reading skills, the pre-writing skills, the emergent understanding
of themselves as writers and readers and thinkers will have happened
in their foundation nursery education.
(Ms Graham) I think the Foundation Stage has the potential
for working very effectively for children in nursery classes and
reception classes in our maintained schools, which points to year
one of the National Curriculum being the start of a more formalised
approach, although I would agree absolutely with colleagues that
it is part of a continuum, and you do not have sudden and rapid
changes to a totally different structure. The key to the success
of the delivery of the foundation curriculum I think is how we
design and staff our Foundation Stage in schools. The majority,
if not all of children at that stage are in maintained schools,
in nursery classes or reception classes. In our own authority
we have struggled financially to create what we call Early Years
Units, which is a nursery class and a reception class working
together. The key to whether that can work effectively is the
staffing of it, and one of the things that is really going to
be important in whether a true foundation curriculum can be delivered
is whether you can staff reception classes appropriately and whether
you can create an appropriate environment. There has been a pilot;
1-15 in a reception class has been piloted in about 50 authorities
where the Government has funded those authorities to provide an
assistant to every teacher for 30 children. Many local authorities
do that anyway, or try to encourage schools to do it and actually
put an appropriate amount of funding in to encourage that, but
I think that is essential and not all schools have it. If you
have one teacher for 30 children where children are only four
when they begin that year, you cannot deliver that curriculum,
and therefore what happens in there, whether you call it formal
or informal, is actually inappropriate, because of what has been
said by my colleagues earlier, in that the forging of the relationship
between the adult and the child, between children and children
is paramount at that stage to create an environment in which those
children are open to learning. So I think the physical environment,
the opportunity for experiential learning, for play, for outdoor
activity and the staffing of reception classes is key.
254. There is a school of thought that there
are some serious implications, particularly for boys, about earlier
starts to their formal education. Could you perhaps elaborate
on that.
(Ms Graham) I would agree absolutely about that. It
is the style of teaching and the environment in which those children
can have the opportunity to learn that is key. We have noticed
the effects on boys. I think there has been an observation of
the difficulties that people are facing later in the educational
world with boys, and therefore there has been a reflection back,
but I think it also affects girls, and the research that Kathy
Sylva did and is now pursuing in this country—I think the
earlier research was in Portugal and the US—looked at the
effect of early learning systems on children, and the different
systems, as to whether they were extremely formal, whether they
were totally child-directed, with free play, or in between, where
you had child-directed activity, a lot of child autonomy but a
strong adult intervention to—I think "scaffold"
a child's learning has been used—earlier. What she found
in that research was that whilst all children could have an immediate
gain from any style of early education and social integration,
that wore off more quickly if it was of some kinds, and where
it was too formal, it became counter-productive after a number
of years, that children were turned off by education. The middle
route worked best and for the longest period of time, if you like,
and that is the danger that we have to wake up to.
Dr Harris
255. This issue of staffing to a certain extent
is one of alternatives. It could be argued that authorities and
the Government are looking at trying to pin down this curriculum
and call it a Foundation Stage and identify targets, whether they
are too formal or more difficult because it is dealing with less
formal things as an alternative or a different way of tackling
problems, other than reducing the ratio. Do you think there is
a danger that having a curriculum will tend to create too many
targets or attainment tests, with pressures coming down from key
stages in school?
(Ms Graham) I have no problem with a curriculum. It
depends what you mean by that. You can have a curriculum for babies.
It is the content of the work that you do with them and the relationship
that you develop with them. I think it is right that we consider
what it is that is going on in that setting between the adult
and the children and between children and children. It is another
step that says you then introduce testing, and I would agree absolutely
that what you do carefully and thoroughly and with rigour, and
not in some casual way, is observe and record a child's progress.
You can do that extremely effectively as long as you have a reasonable
ratio of adults to children. A teacher with 30 children cannot
do that on a daily basis. Fifteen is more possible. Something
like eight or ten would be best. In our nursery schools we have
a one to ten ratio. In our nursery classes we have one to twelve.
That works effectively. With that group we expect continuous monitoring
of children's progress, we expect a lot of knowledge about where
an individual child is in their progression with their learning,
and we also expect that to be passed on to parents. That is part
of what parents are missing seeing, and even more so when a child
is in full day care and having their early education at three
to five within a day care setting, when they are there perhaps
from eight in the morning till six at night. It is really important
that the carer can actually communicate the child's progress and
what learning is actually going on to the parent.
256. I want to ask Ms East if she could expand
on something she hinted at in answer to the Chairman's original
question, which was a contradiction between the Childcare Strategy
and Early Years aims. Do you remember saying that? Could you be
more specific in what you mean.
(Ms East) It is obviously a very laudable aim to support
parents to get back into the work place and into training. However,
I do feel that sometimes that means that the care that the children
get is not always of the highest and best quality. Often, particularly
on the Isle of Wight, people are in agricultural work, they are
in seasonal work, they are starting very early in the morning,
children are being moved about, both from formal care to informal
care, then into another setting, then possibly another setting
after school. Sometimes they are relating to as many as 12 different
people during the day, and that is not because the parents are
not caring, it is not because the parents do not want the best
for their children; it is just because the ways in which care
happens and the time it happens is not always convenient for people
working. You could have a day nursery that opens at five o'clock
in the morning until nine o'clock at night, but I would feel uncomfortable
with that as well, because I think the child's needs are not necessarily
being taken into account.
257. So what is the solution?
(Ms East) The solution is much more family friendly
work places, but I think we are a long way away from that. The
assumption that that is available is inaccurate. Most employers
are not promoting family-friendly working practices yet.
(Ms Brabazon) I think there are models which do respond
to that, and I think that we should not be disingenuous here.
We must recognise that there are different skills and knowledge,
different skill bases and different knowledge bases in Early Years.
The key thing if we are talking about a sound experience for children,
which can also be positive in the National Childcare Strategy,
is that we have to combine models. In my experience, nursery practitioners
are brilliant planners. They plan a curriculum. When you see good
practice in a nursery centre, you do not know how well planned
it is because it looks seamless. It looks smooth. But I know that
our heads of centres, our nursery teachers, spend every day planning
the curriculum and planning it around every child, and then evaluating,
monitoring, observing, wrapping care round all of that in a way
which can inform them. Combined Early Years centres do give a
model for doing that, and they are really not that much more expensive
than running the old model of the day nursery. The difference,
in my personal view, is that you cannot wrap the education round
the care. You have to have that at the heart of it for a young
child, and for parents it is really important that there is a
strong, sound Early Years curriculum. The Foundation Stage moves
us a long way forward in that, and it does recognise the importance
of that separation.
Mr O'Brien
258. Picking up on that, my particular concern
is that the whole of Early Years is very rooted in the socio-economic
position, and where there are areas of cultural difficulty or
lack of parental support, once the child is outside the school
gate, if we share a belief that building inner confidence above
all other things is what we are trying to do in young children,
what is it that you believe can be done and what perhaps this
Select Committee can helpfully indicate some pointers on in reaching
out beyond the school gate? There are those parents that you can
attract into the school, but I am thinking of beyond the school
gate, which is part of the integral approach to how this Early
Years service is going to work, particularly in areas of deprivation.
(Ms Brabazon) I work in an area of high social deprivation.
I live and work in Haringey, which is a deeply socially divided
borough, so I can talk from vast knowledge of some of these issues.
It is a broad socio-economic issue, and you have to also read
it in what is happening to children in society today. I can talk
a lot about my own childhood in Hackney, which was very happy,
but I learned my social skills on the street. I played in the
street, and my sister and I went all round London by the time
I was eight years old. That does not happen to children now, and
in a sense what we are talking about is a compensatory experience,
if I can put it like that. That is where the Early Years stuff
is very important, the issue of outdoor play. If we really believe
that children need to learn through play, and you do it through
experiential learning, and you acquire those social skills which
are so important to navigate your way through life, decision-making,
risk—what we are watching, I believe, is the privatisation
of childhood. Children are locked in with video games and Nintendo
and all the rest of it. People might criticise us for being a
high municipal provider in Haringey, with a network of provision
which extends to play centres, which are purpose-built, are in
parks, which offer out of school provision, they are open all
year round. That is run by the local authority, and we are now
going to be opening those in the evening in the summer for older
kids and so on and so forth. In a sense, we are trying to recreate
the experiences which many of us have taken for granted, and that
is where you do some of the work with children and families, because
children need that space, and not just very young children. As
they grow up they need that space just to be children, to learn
to have social relationships, and to have the social skills. In
a place like Tottenham or any inner city area with social divisions,
levels of poverty, homelessness, living in cramped accommodation,
mobility, all the rest of it, that type of experience of social
engagement, which in the Early Learning Goals for personal and
social comes higher up the agenda, is absolutely critical. If
you came to visit our three nursery centres you would see the
best outdoor play, because they spend all their time playing out.
It is very interesting where you recreate the street.
Chairman: We are visiting Haringey.
Helen Jones
259. We talked about four-year olds and reception
classes and I would like to follow that up, if I may. Although
you talked about pilot projects, you have to accept that many
local authorities do not have those sort of pilot projects, with
four-year olds going straight into reception classes. I want to
ask you two things, briefly. First of all, do you think the increasing
tendency of local authorities to set one starting date for the
school year is in the interests of children? Secondly, following
on, as more and more four-year olds are coming into reception,
is the training of the teachers we have appropriate for dealing
with them?
(Ms Graham) Now that the Government is funding early
education for children from the age of three, it seems to me whether
you have one, two or three points of entry to nursery classes
or reception class is not what is relevant. What is relevant is
what happens when they get there. I know it sounds a bit coy,
but if the provision is appropriate, it is fine for them all to
go at one point and to have one point of entry for the whole year.
Organisationally it is obviously simpler. It is also easier for
parents to understand., I think. It is important how those children
make entry. If they have come through a system where they have
been in a play group, they have been in a parent/toddler group,
they have been in a play group which is in the school grounds,
they have had elder brothers and sisters who have gone in and
out of school, they know the staff, they know the environment,
they go to a nursery class that has a fairly free flow into the
reception class, it is not really an issue that they start in
September when they are still only four, as long as they are not
suddenly shooting into something that is totally different. I
really do think that is the issue now, and it is how you actually
develop that appropriate provision, and how you make sure that
that is not a huge change from the nursery class, and that the
nursery class and the reception class within a maintained school
are working through a continuum, that they work and plan together,
that they know that they are working on the Foundation Stage,
which is common to both of them, and that the the school management
system, the OFSTED inspection system, and the local authority
all support what is going on there. If all those things support
what is going on there, you can work with parents and develop
their understanding and their support for what actually happens
there. The difficulty for parents is that a nursery teacher tells
them one thing, OFSTED tells them something else in the newspapers,
the head teacher might actually say something different, and it
is very difficult for them to work out what is best for their
child.
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