Examination of Witnesses (Questions 310
- 319)
WEDNESDAY 14 JUNE 2000
PROFESSOR CHRISTINE
PASCAL, DR
TONY BERTRAM
AND DR
MARGY WHALLEY
Chairman
310. Can I welcome you here. We certainly know
Christine Pascal well who has been helping us with our inquiry,
but I have to say that the Committee and the other specialist
advisers have made sure that Christine will have no idea of the
questions we are asking her. We are going to be as tough with
her as we possibly can. Welcome all three of you. I want to get
straight into the questioning and really say, first of all, you
have been sitting there listening to the previous session, have
you any comments on what you heard or do you agree with everything
you heard?
(Professor Pascal) I can speak with a
more liberated point of view about what practice is out there
and I would agree that everything is not perfect in the state
out there. We have a lot of work to do; we are starting from a
very low base point in this country; there has not been the investment
in good quality early years provision to the same extent as you
saw, for example, when you were in Denmark. We are also a very
different country culturally—we are much more diverse—and
we come from a value base that has valued individuality, families
making their own arrangements, and that has led to a huge diversity—you
called it "patchiness"—of provision and to some
of the best early years services and practices in the world that
I have seen. On the other side of that, however, we have settings
where the practice is not as it should be given what we know about
what children's needs are and what parents' wishes are for those
children. So we are starting from that viewpoint. Nevertheless,
we are on the cusp of a revolution in this country where at last
we have taken hold of the wake-up call: that we do have to invest
in provision at this age and stage more seriously, and to look
at it and try to put in place a more coherent network system that
will provide all our children and families, because I would not
ever now want to separate the children from the families, with
the services and support they need at this critical stage in their
lives. We do have a lot of work to do. I would agree with Lesley
that this foundation stage is a beginning but only a beginning.
We have a lot of work to make sure it dovetails well and I hope
begins to influence what goes on at key stage one—and two
I do not think is necessarily perfect yet—and I also think
provision for the 0-3s needs a lot of support and development
and investment too. So I would be stronger really than what they
said but also say that I agree we have made a start and that the
curriculum guidance that they talked about this morning is only
one part of a whole range of other initiatives that are trying
to expand provision in this country but at the same time make
sure the quality is there.
(Dr Bertram) It all comes down to how we construct
our view of childhood. Some of the questioning earlier on which
I found interesting is clearly that there are different subgroups
within our country that view children in different ways. I suppose
you could go back, if you were polarising this argument, to Rousseau's
Emile and look at this romantic view and say, "Here is a
child who needs to be nurtured, loved, encouraged and protected;
all we need to do is give them love and let them grow" and
an alternative view would be William Golding's novel, Lord of
the Flies, where these children were landed on to the romantic
treasure island, the adults were removed, and what happened was
chaos so William Golding's view was, rather than this romantic
view, what you needed was some firm rigid discipline, a more pragmatic—and
perhaps problematic—view as well of childhood. I think that
is the basis of this; that within our society you have people
who, to one end or other end of that polarisation, view children
differently and I think there are differences between QCA, for
example, and OFSTED; there are differences within our own country
in terms of north and south and how children and families are
viewed; I think there is a difference in the view of children,
for example, in Ireland and Wales than there is in the south of
England and that is the difficulty you have. How do you bring
together all these different perspectives?
(Dr Whalley) On the Danish experience, we have an
exchange programme with Denmark with Aarhus and have been working
closely with them for about five years so we have the pleasure
of watching Danish students interacting with our children, and
what they bring is breadth and a knowledge and understanding of
all childrens' different languages, drama, dance and the arts.
What they have said to us and the reason they value the placements
with us every year, and they come for six months each year, is
the rigour and challenge and they are excited by seeing young
scientists and young mathematicians in the nursery—not doing
a prescriptive curriculum but a very imaginative and challenging
curriculum. So we can learn from the Danes and they are learning
from us; that is what I would offer on that experience.
311. So what is effective early learning?
(Professor Pascal) That is a nice question and I will
start off with that. I think we have tried to have a view of learning
that will take a child through the rest of their lives. For us,
effective early learning gives children what they are going to
need in the long term to become a life long learner, somebody
who can participate constructively, fully, and engage with all
the opportunities that the world in their life is going to offer
them. It is a long-term view. Something that is effective early
on will give the child something that they can use and build on
later. What we have tried to do is draw on the best professional
knowledge we have, and drawing from the research in development
projects internationally to say, "Okay, well what it is that
seems to characterise an effective learner that goes on later
on?" One of the main messages we got from that is that not
only do children need knowledge and understanding of the world,
they need literacy, they need numeracy, they need to be scientific
investigators, they need to be creative, they need that broad
traditional curriculum and access to that early on in a way that
is appropriate. We also see that what seems to be determinably
effective in the long-term is children that have those other issues
that you were talking about, positive attitudes, dispositions,
social confidences and ability to co-operate and interact with
other children. The other element of that is that they have what
we call—and the QCA document has picked this up—emotional
well being, they are okay with who they are and where they come
from and have a place in their world. These early experiences
of organisations, these early nurseries or daycare centres are
often the first experience of the child outside of the family,
and they get very strong messages from those early external experiences
about how other people are going to see them and how they are
going to be able to find their place and sense of belonging in
that world. So effective early learning not only, I hope, gives
children lots of access to the richness of language and the exploration
of the world, but it is also spending a lot of time ensuring that
children develop the positive attitudes and dispositions, the
social skills, the self-esteem and the emotional security to go
on and access that in the long term.
Mr Marsden
312. Reference was made earlier to the variety
of backgrounds of those working in early education, and the contrast
has been drawn with Denmark. Do you regard that variety of backgrounds
as a strength or a weakness? Whichever of the two it is, how would
you justify it compared to what we have heard elsewhere?
(Professor Pascal) I think it is both of those things.
I think one of the things we have here is people coming from different
disciplines and different professional backgrounds, so you have
a very strong pedagogical tradition through the teacher training
that has gone on, and some of the teacher training, particularly
in the specialist colleges, historically has been very good in
developing a very strong philosophy and pedagology and professional
practice to do with young children's learning. On the other side
of it we have another group who have traditionally come out of
the health background and have been very much into child development
from that point of view. You have another group who have good
skills in working with families and communities. The advantage
that we have now is that we have a range of professionals in the
field, and the way the knowledge base about what makes for an
effective early education system is formed is that it has to be
integrated, you cannot separate out the education, the care, the
families, you have to bring that together.
Chairman
313. It has been separated for so many years.
(Professor Pascal) Absolutely.
314. Why have we waited all this time for someone
to have the common sense to say that the services ought to be
joined up?
(Professor Pascal) I am going to get Margy to come
in there.
315. I am coming into somebody else's question.
(Dr Whalley) I think we are going back, in a way,
to a tradition that began at the beginning of the century with
Margaret MacMillan where we did have integrated education with
care and I think it has lost its way and I think we are reclaiming
that tradition now. There are centres that have been working,
like Hillfields in Coventry, for 25/30 years in this way, but
it is being seen as an expensive way of working instead of a cost
effective way of working. I think now that has been redressed
through the early excellence centres.
Mr Marsden
316. Given that that is now being returned to—and
I do not say this cynically, but it is seen as flavour of the
month—what is going to be the best way in the medium to
long-term of progressing that? Is it going to be allowing a situation
in which people continue to come from a number of different backgrounds
but work very closely in an integrated way, which you are talking
about, or is it going to be by developing a much more streamlined
unitary professional development in which all of those elements
must play a part?
(Professor Pascal) I do no think there is one solution
to this, I think the issue of bringing things together that were
separate has to be tackled on a number of fronts. I think from
the professional development and training areas, including the
development of these new early child degrees that we have that
are multi-professional and bring people together, they specialise
in one aspect. So training is key.
317. Can I just press you on that point? Are
you saying, therefore, that we should not see the new early childhood
training and degrees as the be-all-and-end-all for career development
in the future?
(Professor Pascal) I do not think it is the be-all-and-end-all,
I think it is a central plank of the way that we need to review
the training opportunities and provide more opportunities for
training across the professions together that holds on to the
specialist knowledge that is there but gives access to that and
provides people with a common foundation and common route through.
The other bit of that is that the career structures and career
patterns have to follow through with those kinds of training.
So, starting with the system of very rigid career structures;
you were a nursery nurse and you had that kind of training and
then you stopped there. You were a teacher and you had that kind
of training and you progressed to there. You were a family worker
and you had that kind of training, we have to provide a much more
cohesive qualifications and training framework and following that,
a much more cohesive and sensible career structure with issues,
terms and conditions of work and all of those kinds of issues.
318. Can I ask Tony something, because you said
something which I found intriguing, about different attitudes
towards childhood between north and south and all the rest of
it? Are these the sorts of things that need to be reflected in
the sort of provision that we provide in different parts of the
country, or different socially economic groups of people?
(Dr Bertram) I think that settings for early years
children should very much reflect the community in which they
are based. In terms of looking at aims and objectives of what
the setting is trying to do, that ought to be resolved, I think,
at a local level. I think there will always be national patterns
with regards to qualifications and training. I think what Chris
says is right, there needs to really be a climbing-frame of qualifications.
At the moment you have academic and vocational and it is very
difficult to get across. We need to make lots of different routes
up and also make horizontal relations so that people move from
one group to another. The other thing I would like to say about
diversity is that there is one way in which early childhood practitioners
are not diverse and that is in gender, and I think there is a
whole issue there that needs to be raised about the professional
and private attitude to the involvement of men in the raising
of young children.
319. Are we at the stage, perhaps, in early
years education that we were at in terms of men being involved
in the nursing profession?
(Dr Bertram) Absolutely. I think it needs that sort
of focused and targeted development.
(Professor Pascal) One of the things is that the early
excellence centre pilot programme, which began in 1997 to try
and pioneer and promote the idea of more integrated practice,
has been quite a successful programme, even though it is still
at the early stages in trying to show people how to work together.
What that programme is also doing is highlighting the things that
make integrated practice difficult. We are going to move provisions
nationally towards a more integrated model. I think that that
is this Government's intention and certainly something that I
believe is right. The one nice thing is that internationally other
countries are beginning to come and look at the way we work and
are trying to work in an integrated way to learn from us, and
it is nice to be pioneering that again, but that programme has
got to identify the barriers to integration if it is going to
have a widespread effect, because the system, as it has developed
historically, does not work collaboratively and in an integrated
way; the funding is separate, the training is separate, the ethos
is separate and the provision is provided for in separate places,
so there is a big job to be done at a number of levels and on
a number of fronts. The training is one bit of it, but we have
to look at it at a national level. As funding comes down for support
for families and children we have to look at buildings and we
have to look at career progression.
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