Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
BERNADETTE DUFFY,
ANNA FIRTH,
PROFESSOR TED
MELHUISH AND
SUE PALMER
21 MAY 2008
Q1 Chairman: We are starting an amazing
new adventure today—we are looking at the national curriculum—so
it is very exciting for us. We have just finished one adventure,
looking at testing and assessment, and this is our new adventure.
We think that we are going to enjoy it. Where better to start
than with how the National Curriculum impacts on the earliest
stage of development in children? A previous Committee—the
Education and Skills Committee—looked at that in some depth
six years ago and there was an early years report, which we very
much enjoyed doing. It is nice to be back in that territory—not
that we have neglected it entirely over this time. We are here
to learn. There is an Early Years Foundation document and we would
like to hear what you think about it—its strengths and its
weaknesses. We will take anything that you say today into our
deliberations. I am going to ask you all quickly to introduce
yourselves. Do not give us your biography again, but say what
you think about this new Foundation Stage.
Bernadette Duffy: I am Bernadette
Duffy and I am Head of Centre at Thomas Coram Children's Centre
in Camden and chair of the British Association for Early Childhood
Education. I welcome the new framework from both perspectives.
The principles and commitments in the statutory part of it are
sound, although it would be surprising if any document came out
that we did not want to develop, change and alter slightly. Overall,
however, it is a positive document.
Anna Firth: I am Anna Firth. I
am the Open EYE Campaign Co-ordinator and mother of a little boy
who is going through the Foundation Stage at the moment. Open
EYE is very much in support of parts of the framework. We are
fully behind the four principles—they are very welcome and
long overdue—and we are right behind the welfare requirements.
We believe that some of the learning and development requirements
have been set too high for five-year-olds and some four-year-olds.
We would like to see the removal of the information and communications
technology goal for those young children, and we want parents
to have a real choice. At the moment, if the document becomes
statutory without exemptions, there will be no free choice for
parents. Those are our three concerns.
Professor Melhuish: The Early
Years Foundation Stage is basically this country's first attempt
to produce clarity about what should be done with children in
the early years, given that a large amount of Government money
is now being put into that. It is right for us to specify the
kinds of experiences that children should go through in this early
years provision, which to a large extent is Government-funded.
It is the first stage in our development of such a curriculum
and therefore it will inevitably undergo change as people learn
to do it better than they have done previously. We are trying
to achieve something that other countries, notably Scandinavian
countries, have been working on for the past 30 years. We have
been working on it for only a few years.
Sue Palmer: I come at this from
the point of view of an independent literacy specialist. For the
last 12 years I have been out on the road for half of every year
talking, from an independent point of view, to teachers and practitioners
about literacy. I was concerned from the beginning, when curriculum
guidance for the Foundation Stage arrived in 2000, that literacy
targets were set far too high for five-year-old children. I constantly
hear reports from practitioners and teachers in the field—thousands
and thousands of people around the country every year—and
could see coming the sorts of problems that you identified with
the tests and targets agenda in your most recent report. The sorts
of problems that come at the moment from practitioners in the
field relate to high targets for literacy, specifically these
ones, which they think will skew practice and push a more formal
approach further and further down, so that we effectively schoolify
early years care and education and bureaucratise it through the
extent to which accountability is documented.
Q2 Chairman: Let us get into the
questioning and we will drill down on many of those issues. All
of you on the panel welcomed the general framework and the general
impact of the Foundation Stage document. Could you drill down
in a little more depth? You have heard each others' opinions and
you have heard some of the reservations. Bernadette, you were
full of praise for the document. What do you think about the sort
of reservations that you have heard from Open EYE and Anna sitting
next to you?
Bernadette Duffy: I understand
the position on the communication, language and literacy goals.
Over the years, a lot of evidence from the Foundation Stage Profile
suggests that although such goals are achievable for some children,
which is great, they do not seem to be consistently achievable
for all children at the end of the year in which they become five.
So I sympathise with Anna's position that perhaps we have got
those goals wrong. Certainly, the British Association for Early
Childhood Education feels that they are more appropriate for year
one. Therefore, we would wish to see those goals apply to slightly
older children, so that the goals are genuinely something that
children at the end of their fifth year would be able to achieve,
rather than having unrealistic expectations for those children.
With regard to parent choice, I come from the Thomas Coram Early
Childhood Centre and parent choice is the subject of one of our
series of workshops on the Early Years Foundation Stage that we
have been doing with the parents at Thomas Coram. My experience
has been that parents do not want so much choice but they want
good-quality provision, and they want good provision for their
children. Certainly, from our work at Thomas Coram for a year,
the feedback from parents has been very positive. They like the
principles and the commitments, which seem to make sense to them.
A lovely comment came from a parent yesterday when she was looking
at the unique child principle: it suddenly dawned on her how important
it was to praise her child. I am not so concerned about parent
choice because, if the provision is good and of good quality,
that is something that parents want. However, I share the concerns
about the literacy goals.
Q3 Chairman: Anna, may I ask you
a question, before you come back on that? As I have visited early
years settings, it has been suggested that children who come from
underprivileged or less privileged backgrounds, where stimulation
in the home is lacking in terms of vocabulary, praise and all
those things that most of us in this field know about, need stimulation
earlier and perhaps a different balance of formal-informal education
from more middle-class children who have a great deal of stimulation
at home. Is there a sense in which you want one setting for more
middle-class young kids, and a different setting for the less
middle-class?
Anna Firth: No. There is a crisis
of perception about what is appropriate stimulation for young
children. From all the evidence that we have accumulated at Open
EYE concerning disadvantaged children—I do not put myself
forward as an expert, but I can talk about the evidence that I
have seen and it is very clear, as I understand it, and Sue Palmer
will be able to speak about this far more than I can, that disadvantaged
children need more vocal stimulation and less formal drilling
in phonics. So they need a more relaxed environment where they
will be able to talk and be listened to, and have all the social
skills put in place that, for whatever reason, have perhaps been
missing. So, no, we are not saying that disadvantaged children
should not be stimulated; all children should be stimulated at
an early stage. It is a question of what that stimulation is and
when that stimulation takes place. However, as I said, Sue Palmer
is the right person to deal with that issue.
Professor Melhuish: Anna has made
the good point that the nature of stimulation needs to be adapted—that
is how I interpret what she said—to the needs and current
developmental status of the child at that point. Some things will
be appropriate for a two-year-old, but they would not be appropriate
for a five-year-old, and vice versa. We need to be very
aware of that. That is why the training of staff in child development
who work in the early years is critical, and we have a long way
to go. A dichotomy tends to be drawn between formal education
and play-based education or experiences, but it is a false dichotomy.
Basically, children play and when they play, they learn. In evolutionary
history, the reason that man has come to the top of the evolutionary
tree is, to a large extent, because he has been very good at learning
through play. Play is a fundamental way of learning about your
environment and trying out new things. If you allow children to
play in the right kind of environments, they will learn about
those environments and develop intellectually and socially. However,
you cannot leave children to play indiscriminately. You need structuring
of their environments, where the environments and experiences
that they are offered are appropriate to their developmental level.
If you do that, the child's spontaneous interest will often take
them along a learning experience, which in other terms would be
educational. You have not drilled the child—"You shall
learn that this shape means `A' and this shape means `B'"—but
you have offered the child the opportunity to learn that, through
appropriate structuring of the environment. I am also struck when
looking at international comparisons. If you look at those countries
with the very highest scores in educational achievement in the
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), they are
often those where formal "education"—as we call
it—starts at seven or so. If you go to those countries,
you will see that the typical three-year-old is having an immensely
full learning environment provided in their pre-school settings
and that pre-school attendance is almost universal and involves
highly trained staff. Therefore, the dichotomy between formal
and play education arouses emotions and powerful feelings, but
it is a false dichotomy. We need to consider the learning experiences
of the child and how best to encourage them.
Chairman: Sue, you were nodding away
there.
Sue Palmer: I think that Ted Melhuish
is right. If you go to places such as Finland, which comes top
of all the charts internationally in literacy, that practice is
exactly what you see between three and seven. It is wonderful.
The big difference—this is the critical issue—is that
formal education officially begins at seven. Because of that,
practitioners are free to conduct the sorts of activities and
structuring that Professor Melhuish has described. We have formal
education effectively beginning at the end of the reception year.
That is happening with the Foundation Stage guidance and the National
Curriculum, which pushes the beginning of formal education down
two years. That has an inevitable effect on the attitudes of the
practitioners, who, as we have heard, are less well trained, less
familiar with what young children need and have only a guidance
framework, which ends by saying that children should be able to,
for example, write in sentences, some of which are punctuated.
Naturally, that guidance affects what people do. If we were to
start formal education officially at seven, as they do in what
I believe are more enlightened countries, we could ensure that
the foundations that we are putting in really are sound for children's
literacy and learning. I think that in a driven country, like
the UK, where we care a lot about competition and getting on,
if we keep it in the state that it is at the moment, that will
inevitably make people think that we have to press on earlier
and younger. As someone who has spent a lifetime caring about
standards of literacy, I think that that is one of the major things
that is holding us back and means that literacy standards improvement
has stalled. We are trying to start them too soon. I hear constantly,
as I am out on the road, about people with phonics tables for
two-year-olds and things like that. One nursery teacher who said
to me, "I'd be down on the floor playing with the children
and then I'd think, `Oh, I'd better write this down'", sums
it up beautifully. The moment for sustained shared thinking is
lost, which is what EPPE—the Effective Provision of Pre-School
Education Project—found was the most important thing for
children's development. The moment is lost because they are busy
making a note of it. That is an indication that the schoolification
and the bureaucratisation takes over, and you do not lay the foundations
that one sees laid so effectively in Nordic and other European
countries that do better than us in international comparisons.
Q4 Mr Chaytor: May I ask Ted about
the international research on early years? A lot of this appears
to confirm the importance of the kind of approach within the Foundation
Stage for children aged three to seven. What does it say about
children under the age of three?
Professor Melhuish: Under the
age of three, most countries have a more lax or varied provision
than they do from three years upwards. The research evidence shows
that children under three are learning. Children's learning, particularly
of language skills—just vocal language—is critical
to their later education. Some American research, for example,
suggests that children's language development by the time they
start school is the best predictor of their longer-term educational
development. A lot of that language development learning takes
place in the first three years. What makes a difference in the
first three years is communication to and from the child, with
responsive adults and other people who know the child can respond
appropriately to them. That facilitates the child's language development
and also their social skills, because social skills and language
development tend to go hand in hand. The child will become much
better able to cope with later learning experiences, if that kind
of experience is offered in the first three years. At the moment,
we tend to think of zero to three as care and three up as education.
That distinction between care and education is misleading, because
children are learning literally from the womb upwards. We need
to think about the longer-term learning of a child.
Q5 Mr Chaytor: So in terms of public
policy in Britain, what more should be done to deal with the nought
to three stage?
Professor Melhuish: We need to
ensure high quality childcare. Also we have found that children
can benefit from group experiences and high-quality, centre-based
experiences on a part-time basis from as young as two. Disadvantaged
children seem to benefit in particular, because if there is a
high-quality environment that offers good learning opportunities,
the child is getting opportunities that they would not get in
a disadvantaged home. There is therefore scope for closing the
gap to some extent by improving those opportunities. One thing
that the international comparisons show is that pre-school education
is probably the most cost-effective method that a country can
adopt to enhance its overall human capital.
Q6 Mr Chaytor: I want to ask Anna
about choice. In your opening remarks, you stressed the importance
of choice, which is at the heart of your reservations about some
aspects of the Foundation Stage. There are 69 learning goals in
the Foundation Stage. Which of those 69 do you think parents should
have a choice over?
Anna Firth: Can I deal with the
issue generally first and then come to the specifics, please?
Parents feel that every child they have is unique and special,
but also different. Within one family, parents might have one
child who is academically gifted and very vocal, one who has learning
difficulties and one who is an incredibly active, sporty little
boy, running around. Parents want to be able to send their children,
pre-school, when they feel, "This is my time, with my children",
to a setting of their own choice. Where I live, for example, we
are very lucky, because there is an open-air nursery, which is
generally the setting of choice for mothers with active little
boys. There are a lot of other nursery settings available, such
as Montessori. There is a very small, very lovely Montessori nursery
to which a lot of mothers with little girls send their children.
There are a lot of other settings. Parents want that choice. What
they do not want, and what they fear will happen, is to be told,
"Yes, you've got a choice. You can go down the high street
and, by analogy, have whatever meal you like. There is an Indian,
there is an Indonesian, there is an Italian," but to find
when they go into the restaurants that the menus are all the same.
That is what parents do not like. They do not like the thought
that there will be 69 standard goals that every child will have
to comply with. They want to be able to send their child—if
they feel that it suits their child—to a setting that does
not have to comply with any formal learning whatsoever—a
Montessori setting or a Steiner setting, for example. That is
the general point.
Q7 Mr Chaytor: What proportion of
parents in the UK send their children to Steiner or Montessori
pre-school settings?
Anna Firth: I do not know the
exact percentage.
Mr Chaytor: Do you accept that it is
pretty tiny?
Anna Firth: I believe that there
are 5,000 children in Steiner schools, but a Steiner expert is
here. The percentage may be tiny, but it is a fundamental right
of parents with children who do not need to be at school to choose
the education and learning experiences of their children. That
right is enshrined in article 2 of the European Convention on
Human Rights, which this Government have signed up to. So parents
are not asking for anything that they should not already have.
Q8 Mr Chaytor: But which of the 69
learning goals should parents be able to opt out of?
Anna Firth: Following the logic
of what I am saying, ideally they should be able to opt out of
any of those learning goals. If they want to send their child
to a Steiner nursery, logically that must follow. If one is looking
more specifically, from the point of view of harm, I would say
that the literacy goals, which we know from the experts are already
too high, must come out. The British Association for Early Childhood
Education has already written to the Ministry saying that those
goals are putting undue pressure on settings and practitioners
and that they are causing very young children to have a sense
of failure and therefore to suffer. I would defer to the experts
on the question of which goals. Looking at the list—I am
sure that you have it in front of you—it talks about the
average five-year-old using "their phonic knowledge to write
simple regular words and make phonetically plausible attempts
at more complex words". I am very proud of my little four-year-old
if he writes a single letter. It is now May, and he will have
to be assessed next month. I do not expect him to be able to make
phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words. I do not
think that that is appropriate, and the experts tell me that I
am right.
Q9 Mr Chaytor: Is there a distinction
between the inclusion of some language development objectives
and the precise level at which it is expected that five-year-olds
should perform?
Anna Firth: I would like to see
the evidence on which this very glossy, expensive brochure has
been produced. I would like to see the evidence that says that
any of those learning objectives are appropriate for that age
group. It seems, looking at the literacy tables, that the evidence
points in the other direction. Children in countries such as Finland,
where formal learning starts later, do better at 11 in both science
and reading, according to the latest PISA table. So where is the
evidence that this is good for our children? Sorry, I have slightly
diverted. Returning to the question of choice, all the demanding
literacy goals should come out. The goals include, "Read
a range of familiar and common words and simple sentences independently",
and write "labels and captions and begin to form simple sentences,
sometimes using punctuation". Those are for five-year-olds,
some of whom are actually four. I am sorry, but those are absurd
goals to expect a five-year-old to meet, and the figures back
up the point that children are not meeting those goals.
Q10 Mr Chaytor: One of the goals
is, "Use a pencil and hold it effectively to form recognisable
letters, most of which are correctly formed." Should parents
be able to opt out of the requirement that their child be able
to use a pencil?
Anna Firth: Yes. They are five.
My elder two children were extremely lucky, because they did the
early years stage in France. They went to an outside garderie
until the age of almost three. They could have stayed there until
four. They then went into the maternelle. I am not putting French
maternelles forward as bastions of excellence, because they can
be pressurised places as well, but the children were not expected
to form letters—they were doing motor co-ordination tasks,
including lots of painting. My daughter came home every week with
paintings, but my son has not come home with one. When they were
outside in the garderie, they were doing lots of painting with
big brushes, which seems more appropriate for that age group.
Can I mention one other thing that is causing a lot of concern
among parents?
Chairman: Briefly.
Anna Firth: It is gradually dawning
on mothers that, according to the practice guidance, nurseries
will have to have ICT for children as young as 22 months to experiment
with. Parents are very concerned about that in the light of the
evidence that is coming out now, particularly from the American
Association of Paediatrics, that children of that age should not
be exposed to ICT, because it is damaging for their brains. Introducing
ICT into nurseries is contrary to what we now know about brain
development. Parents want to opt out of that, because they do
not want their children in a setting with computers when their
children are still at nursery school.
Q11 Mr Chaytor: I am interested in
the sweeping generalisation about parents. You are basing your
judgment on those parents who are most inclined to send their
children to Steiner or Montessori schools.
Anna Firth: No, no, no.
Q12 Mr Chaytor: I want to explore
which parents we are talking about. For those parents who cannot
provide a stimulating environment, what would be the consequences
of their opting out of the requirement that their children should
have developing literacy skills at the age of five? What happens
when those kids get to six, seven, eight, nine, 10 or 11? Do you
not think that there is a fundamental distinction in respect of
the impact of parental choice for those children whose parents
can provide a stimulating home environment and those children
whose parents cannot?
Anna Firth: Every child in this
country should have access to a stimulating pre-school environment,
but the environment should be appropriate for that child's age.
From all the expert evidence that I have read, any formal learning
at this young age is not good for children, whether they are advantaged
or disadvantaged. We know that now, because the study from the
OECD has shown quite clearly over a long period of time that children
from a disadvantaged family and children from an advantaged family
start apart when they start formal education. One can well understand
the reasons for that, but by the end of the education process,
that gap is bigger. That, to my mind, is clear evidence that what
is happening at the moment is not narrowing the gap—it is
making the gap wider.
Q13 Mr Chaytor: So the logic of that
argument is—
Anna Firth: The logic of that
argument is that we should not be starting formal education so
early. We have now been doing this for years in this country.
Q14 Mr Chaytor: Accepting Ted's point
about the false dichotomy between the formal and informal approaches,
surely the logic of the argument is that more should be done to
ensure that the children from disadvantaged families do not start
at a disadvantage?
Anna Firth: Yes, absolutely. As
I understand it from all the evidence that I have read, what should
be happening with children from disadvantaged families is more
speech, more language and more socialisation. Then they will do
better. Even though, logically, at first blush one thinks that
one must put in "more" because those people are disadvantaged,
"the more" that we need to put in is not "the more"
that we think it is—it is words and stimulation, not formal
learning.
Q15 Mr Carswell: I have a couple
of questions. The first is for Ted. It says here that you did
an impact assessment about the SureStart programme and that you
found that children and participating families showed greater
social development. When you did that, did you take into account
the possibility that there may be an element of self-selection?
Those parents who are likely to be attracted to a SureStart programme
might not be wholly representative of the local community.
Professor Melhuish: Yes, we did
take that into account. Basically, we took random samples of families
in an area served by the SureStart programme and similar areas
not receiving SureStart programmes. So some of those families
will be using lots of the SureStart services and others will not
be using so many. Similarly in our comparison areas, we have had
random samples of families living in similar areas who were not
receiving SureStart. The random selection means that the self-selection
element was taken into account in the analysis. We also statistically
control for social class, parent education, income level and so
on.
Q16 Mr Carswell: Secondly, I should
be interested in what Anna has to say and then in anyone who wants
to jump in. I am intrigued by some of the things that you are
saying. It is human nature for politicians, experts and officials
to think that they know best and to say, "We are experts;
we have done studies, and we have evidence," and then to
take as the default question, "What more should be done?"
I do not dispute the value of early-years learning, but I am trying
to find out about the wisdom of letting experts foist their expert
way of doing things on the rest of us. When sitting on the Committee,
one learns that experts do not always know best. First, in the
debate about inclusion and special needs, experts got it wrong.
Secondly, experts do not always agree with one another. There
is a range of opinions among you. Who decides what the experts
decide? Surely, there are more effective ways of allowing people
to choose outcomes for themselves, rather than saying that the
state and the experts know best and that this is how it will be
done. I should like Anna, and then the rest of you, to share your
thoughts on this debate. Should we have central direction by experts,
or should we allow choice to drive things and perhaps even to
allow the 500 children's centres do their own thing—let
everyone to do their own thing? Perhaps we would then have a better
system.
Professor Melhuish: That is precisely
what happened with SureStart programmes in 2000, when they were
first set up, and it did not work. Evidence came forward that
it was not working and our earlier reports showed that the early
SureStart programmes were very diverse, some having some good
effects, some having mediocre effects and some having negative
effects. With the early SureStart evidence and the EPPE evidence
showing that the children centre approach was working—[2]
Q17 Mr Carswell: Big government centralism
did not work, so it needed more big government localism.
Professor Melhuish: No. In this
case, big government centralism initially handed over everything
to the community and let it decide exactly what it could do for
itself without any guidance or planning. In a situation with a
highly skilled, highly developed workforce, that might have worked,
but we were delivering a programme into an area that had previously
been a policy desert, and people did not know what to do. Some
did some good things, and some did some terrible things. What
we needed was some structure for them to work within, and that
is what SureStart children's centres were about. They were introduced
in 2005, as a result of the early SureStart evidence and the EPPE
evidence. SureStart children's centres allow adaptation to communities'
needs, but they provide guidelines on the sort of opportunities
that should be offered to children, and the sort of services that
should be offered to families. They offer a light-touch structure
to what is provided in a way that had previously not existed.
A laissez-faire attitude will work in an environment where
everyone knows what they are doing, but when a lot of people do
not know what they are doing because they have not done it before,
it does not work.
Sue Palmer: I totally agree with
Ted that that was the case and that a lot of money was wasted,
but the provision of structure and information is very useful,
as long as it remains as guidelines. The minute it becomes law,
there is a great difference in the perception of people out in
the field. It also closes down the potential for innovation. A
new thing has come out recently, which I shall be able to recommend
in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, because I think it is
brilliant for literacy—it is based on Vygotskian principles—but
I shall not be able to recommend it in England, because it will
not fit into the Early Years Foundation Stage. That is a statutory
framework, and it will close down the potential for moving seriously
forward in terms of early years practice. It uses very well structured
material based on long-established fact. It is the difference
between guidelines and statutory requirements. It is about statutory
requirements in the early years, when we are at the beginning
in terms of neuroscientific evidence that is coming through. Last
week, a book from Susan Greenfield raised new questions about
the implications for ICT. New stuff is coming through all the
time, and to close it down by creating a legal framework now seems
to be tantamount to insane.
Bernadette Duffy: I should like
to make a couple of points. First, we tried not having any regulation
or statutory guidance, and as Ted said, leaving it completely
free leads to problems. We know that countries with limited regulation
tend to have poorer quality provision. That is not because a little
group of experts sit and decide on it. The EYFS has evolved over
a number of years, building on good practice in England that goes
way back to the McMillan sisters at the beginning of the last
century. The EYFS represents a good, sound tradition in England
going back 100 years. It was developed in consultation not only
with practitioners, but with parents who had a say in what should
be in it and how it should be. With the exception of the communication,
language and literacy goals—there is complete agreement
that we could do without those—there is so much good stuff
in here that is giving sound guidance to practitioners about what
works for children: not just what we fancy doing today, but what
seems to work. There is a difference between ICT and computers.
There was a lovely example of that with the two-year-olds playing
with shells yesterday at Thomas Coram, picking them up and turning
them into a mobile phone, because that is what they see in the
world around them. I would not suggest giving mobile phones to
two-year-olds, but they are growing up in a society where ICT
is part of what they do. For example, they all know that you press
buttons and money comes out of a machine: that is also ICT. However,
the last thing that the EYFS, or any good practitioner, would
want to do is put two-year-olds in front of a computer screen
or a white board, because there is no good evidence that that
is the way in which they learn. The EYFS protects a lot of children.
At the moment, three-year-olds are sitting at desks in formal
classrooms in uniforms, filling in worksheets. We are told that
that is what parents want and it happens because it can be shown
that children can achieve the goals when they are five. As long
as practitioners can show that they are achieving the goals at
five, the way in which they do that is up to them. So some poor
practice is going on because of that. I am much happier to have
something statutory that says that the principles are about active
learning, creativity, critical thinking and sustained shared thinking.
Although I sympathise with Steiner colleagues, who may feel that
that is restricting them, for the vast majority of children that
opens up so many more opportunities than they have at the moment.
Although I understand the concerns about regulation, we still
need it until, as Ted says, we have a much better qualified workforce,
as other countries have. Even other countries in Scandinavia have
some curriculum guidance, for example, so that there is some agreement.
Overall, there are far more positive things in there that protect
children than are outweighed by the regulation side of it.
Chairman: Paul wants to ask a supplementary
question.
Q18 Paul Holmes: I should like to
ask two quick questions, if I may. Anna has been critical of the
formal structures that are implied and has emphasised the need
for more free play. In the practical setting that you run, how
do you strike the balance—or not—between formal and
free play?
Bernadette Duffy: Formal play
is a misnomer, because if you are playing it is not a formal situation.
As Ted was saying, we do not think of things in terms of formal
and informal. We are looking at the interactions between adults
and children. We know what works well with parents who know their
children well. Picking up on Sue's point in respect of Vygotskian
principles, at Thomas Coram, you would see children making mud
pies and daisy chains in the garden and turning shells into mobile
phones, but you would also see children involved in figuring out
the properties of water, including what happens when water is
frozen and, as happened yesterday, whether ice cubes defrosted
quicker if they were wrapped in newspaper or straw. Lots of good
scientific work is done, but it is active and hands-on. As people
have been saying, there is also a lot of emphasis on oracy, because
children's vocabulary at three is a good indicator of later outcomes.
There is a much emphasis on oracy and sustained, shared interacting,
which encourages children to think. There is a lot of hands-on
experience and there are no desks, no tick-sheets or worksheets
and no uniforms. A lot of children engage. Following on from Sue's
point about practitioners writing observations when they are with
the children: that is not what we do, and it is not what the EYFS
says. The EYFS emphasises active interaction with children. Observations
are something you write up later on.
Q19 Paul Holmes: So where are you
going to show Ofsted that the children are learning to construct
sentences and use some punctuation and all the rest of it?
Bernadette Duffy: We have just
done it. We have had Ofsted in over the past few days and, although
I cannot share the results with you, our children are doing very
well using the principles in the EYFS regarding active learning.
Let me think what I can share. We have strong evidence at Thomas
Coram that the EYFS approach is leading to the outcomes that we
would want for children across all six areas of learning. There
is no conflict between a play-based, active approach to children's
learning and having good outcomes for them at the end of the year
in which they are five—not when they are four.
2 Note by witness: The Government made all
SureStart programmes Children's Centres from 2005. This meant
that guidelines for Children's Centres were more highly developed,
and the latest evidence suggests that this has been a change for
the better. Back
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