Select Committee on Education and Employment Minutes of Evidence


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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