UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To
be published as HC 600-i
HOUSE OF COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE THE
CHILDREN,
SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES COMMITTEE
EARLY
YEARS FOUNDATION STAGE
BERNADETTE DUFFY, ANNA FIRTH, PROFESSOR TED MELHUISH
and SUE PALMER
GRAHAM KENNISH, ANNE NELSON, SYLVIE SKLAN and
MORAG STUART
Evidence heard in Public
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Questions 1 - 76
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Children,
Schools and Families Committee
on
Wednesday 21 May 2008
Members present:
Mr. Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Annette Brooke
Mr. Douglas Carswell
Mr. David Chaytor
Paul Holmes
Fiona Mactaggart
Examination
of Witnesses
Witnesses: Bernadette Duffy, Head, Thomas Coram
Early Childhood Centre, Anna Firth,
Open EYE, Professor Ted Melhuish, Professor
of Human Development, Birkbeck, University of London, and Sue Palmer, Educational Consultant.
Q<1> <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.
Q<2> <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 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 programme: 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.
Q<3> <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.
This is a crisis of perception about what is 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 all I can do is talk about the evidence that I
have seen-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, 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
EPPI-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.
Q<4> <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 and 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.
Q<5> <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 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.
Q<6> <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 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 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.
Q<7> <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.
Q<8> <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.
Q<9> <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 is 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.
Q<10> <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.
Q<11><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.
Q<12> <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.
Q<13> <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.
Q<14> <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 what we think
it is-it is words and stimulation, not formal learning.
Q<15> <Mr. Carswell:> I have a couple of questions. The first
is for Ted. It says here that you did an impact assessment about the Sure Start
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 Sure Start 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 Sure
Start programme. So some of those families will be using lots of the Sure Start
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 Sure Start. So that self-selection element was taken into account
in the analysis. We also statistically control for social class, parent
education, income level and so on.
Q<16> <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 Sure
Start 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 Sure Start programmes
were very diverse, some having some good effects, some having mediocre effects
and some having negative effects. With
the EPPE evidence showing that the children centre approach was working-
Q<17> <Mr. Carswell:> Big government centralism did not
work, so it needed more big government localism.
<Professor
Melhuish:> No.
Big government centralism was initially to hand 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 work force, 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 Sure Start children's centres were about. They were introduced in 2005, as a result of
the early Sure Start evidence and the EPPE evidence.
Sure
Start 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 work force, 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.
Q<18> <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.
Q<19> <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.
Q<20> <Paul Holmes:> Could I quickly ask another question? Ted and Sue, you were both saying that,
within the first year or two, it was obvious that a lot of Sure Start was not
working. Head Start, which inspired
Sure Start, was evaluated over 10, 15 or 20 years. How could you decide after one or two years that Sure Start was
not working?
<Professor
Melhuish:> All that we could do is to look at the
outcomes-for example, in our last report-for children aged three who have been
born into a fully functioning Sure Start programme, comparing the development
of those children over their first three years with other children. That is how we can do it. You are right that we cannot tell the longer
term consequences until the children are teenagers and beyond.
To
reiterate one point, Head Start, which is often put forward as the inspiration
for Sure Start, is a totally different programme-utterly different. Head Start is a part-time, pre-school
programme, along the lines of our nursery schools, delivered to disadvantaged
children in the States. It is not from
birth upwards. People often assume that
there is a similarity; but in fact, it is a totally different programme
altogether.
Q<21> <Paul Holmes:> Is not Head Start a bit more about the
socialisation of children?
<Professor
Melhuish:> Head Start usually has an emphasis on both
intellectual and social development. It
offers learning experiences that might be called educational, as well as
developing the social skills of the child.
Equal weight is given to both of those in the best Head Start
programmes. Often, they are based upon
a high school curriculum, which is quite well known.
<Chairman:> This issue is going to come on, but we
are time-limited. I ask my colleagues
for quite short questions, and for quite short responses. This is a very valuable session, which we
want to get the most out of, but we are time-limited. We are moving on to the statutory status of the EYFS. We have already started into that, helped by
Sue.
Q<22> <Annette Brooke:> First, why should there not be a
process of exemptions for settings that can put a good case to the local
authority, the Government or whatever, not just a straightforward exception, so
that anyone can opt out, but a route through which settings could exempt
themselves? How would that undermine
the advantages of having a framework? I
shall start with Bernadette.
<Bernadette
Duffy:> I am not an expert on exemptions, and I have
not given much thought to the particular criteria you would use if exempting a
setting, rather than a parent saying-perhaps on religious grounds-that certain
things were inappropriate. What one
would need to be very careful about how tightly drawn it was. One of your colleagues talked about the
parents of some children wanting exemption from something that would actually
be positive for them. You would need to
think very carefully about how it was worded and how it was agreed, but I am
not an expert on exemptions and how to define them tightly.
<Annette Brooke:> Anna, I
ask for brief comments on this.
<Anna
Firth:> I agree entirely with the thrust of your
question. There would not be a problem
if settings were allowed to exempt themselves on a principled basis, from an Open
EYE perspective, because Open EYE has said very strongly that it is the
learning development requirements that we are against. We are not against the welfare requirements,
which a setting that exempted itself would still have to comply with. I cannot see a problem. What parents are concerned about is that
their children are in a safe environment, in as rich an environment as
possible, with qualified people who know about children and are doing
appropriate things with their children.
<Professor
Melhuish:> If settings had the qualities that Anna
described, I would have no worries at all, because, basically, well qualified
staff effectively become self-regulating about the quality of the environments
that they provide for children. I
suspect that, if you were to have exemptions, that might affect children that,
say, go to Montessori or Steiner schools and so on-less than 1% of the total
population. Those children would do
very well at the end of the early years foundation stage, because by and large,
their parents are such that they provide all the sorts of experiences that they
might otherwise miss out on through the exemption.
<Sue
Palmer:> We are talking as though the only settings
are nursery schools. What I would
choose for my child, if I were not looking after them myself, or what I would
recommend anyone else to choose, certainly in the first two years, would
actually be a child minder. I am afraid
that child minders are on their own.
Many of them do not want to work within the EYFS at the moment and do
not see how they can get through legal exemptions and all the rest of it. It scares the living daylights out of them,
so they are just stopping. We are
losing child minders in droves at the moment.
Many of the very best ones-the ones who really love being with children
and who could not explain why they are good at it, because they are just good
with children-do not like the bureaucratisation and the fact that they have to
fill in a lot of forms.
Again,
Bernadette is quite right; in a wonderfully run setting such as Thomas Coram,
of course you will be able to do it all according to the best child care
practice, because you are very experienced and very knowledgeable. However, many of these great child minders
are not experienced or knowledgeable; they do it by instinct, because they are
good with kids. Those child minders are
the ones that I fear we are going to lose, and the ones that are left will feel
that they have to fill in forms rather than look after children, because that
is the impression that this sort of legal framework gives.
Q<23> <Chairman:> There are quite a lot of pretty desperate
child-minding settings, are there not?
<Sue
Palmer:> There may well be some pretty desperate
ones. However, I think that a legal
framework of this kind is more likely to damage the good child minders than to
make the bad ones better.
Q<24> <Annette Brooke:>
I have attended a meeting with the Minister for Children and, indeed, with
Bernadette. The Minister said over and
again that there were no incompatibilities with the Steiner schools. Anna was an independent witness. Equally, I asked a question about child
minders on Monday, to which the Minister replied that the decline in their
number has nothing to do with the EYFS.
The Minister said that the EYFS is only what good child minders are
doing already-a flexible, play-based approach to children's development.
So
what is the problem? Is there a
communication gap, which could have very serious implications? On the one hand, it is said that this is
just a play-based framework, which everyone is using; on the other hand, it is
said that it is something that could take children down a route that some of
you have suggested could have adverse consequences. So why have we got this big gap and how on earth can the
arguments be put forward? I will start
with Sue on that.
<Sue
Palmer:> We have seen exactly the same sort of thing
happen in primary schools over the last 10 years, as the advice became more and
more prescriptive. The more prescriptive
you are, the more you are target-based and the more the practice gets skewed,
albeit unintentionally. Nobody wanted
us to have a narrowing of the curriculum and all the rest of it. However, it was because people interpret
this sort of prescriptive information in ways that perhaps were not
intended. That is why it seems to me so
important that it is made very clear that these are guidelines and that they
are not statutory, because once the advice becomes more prescriptive and more
statutory, the more these misinterpretations happen, particularly with people
who are not necessarily particularly highly professional or well trained.
Q<25> <Chairman:> Ted, does it have to be statutory?
<Professor
Melhuish:> I am not convinced that everything should be
statutory, no. I feel that we need
strong guidelines. Annette's summation
of the situation is fairly accurate; the situation is not as arduous as we
might think of it as being for practitioners.
With
regard to child minders, you really need to consult the National Childminding
Association on that point. It is a
point to bear in mind, because child minders are a very large part of the child
care work force for the zero to threes.
However, we need clear guidelines that lay out what is expected in
provision. Ofsted has a role to play in
seeing that those guidelines are fulfilled to some extent. The borderline is about how detailed the
statutory requirement is; that is where the crunch comes.
Q<26> <Annette Brooke:> Can I specifically ask Anna a question? I will ask the question of another witness
later. In your view, Anna, why is there
an incompatibility between the Steiner philosophy and the EYFS? What is the difference between you and the
Minister, when the Minister tells me that they are quite compatible?
<Anna
Firth:> It is very easy. There are 69 early goals.
In a Steiner setting, children do not have to comply with any early
learning goals until the age of seven.
That is when formal learning begins.
There are none of these goals and that is the difference.
Q<27> <Chairman:> Can I make it clear, Anna, that you are not
speaking for Steiner, are you? You were
not asked to be a Steiner witness; this is your opinion.
<Anna
Firth:> No, as Mrs. Brooke said, she is asking my
view and that is all I can give.
I
should like to mention child minders. I
have been deluged with e-mails and calls from battered, disillusioned child
minders. I want to bring that matter to
the attention of the Committee, and I have three examples that you might be
interested in. One lady, who has run a
small, mornings-only nursery for 10 years, is feeling increasingly oppressed by
Government interference and writes, "I will be giving up in September. Everything that I have come to understand
about child development makes it impossible for me to carry on pretending to
follow the EYFS." Another letter reads,
"Child minders feel that they are losing their identity of a stable home
environment. It also seems that play is
not enough any more, and must be measured using observation and planning under
the EYFS. We do not feel that we should
quantify learning, as we are not teachers and we do not want to be
mini-nurseries or classrooms." Finally,
"I am a child minder who, like the child minder in the programme, will probably
be giving up at the end of August, purely due to the introduction of the
EYFS." And so it goes on.
Observation
is a big problem. I have listened to
Bernadette saying that, in the settings that she has been involved with,
observation is not a big issue.
However, in every setting that I have spoken to-I have not done a huge
survey, but I have been round the town where I live-the early years
practitioners, many of whom are very good, say that you would not believe the
paperwork. They showed me lever-arch
files full of paperwork and told me that the essential piece of equipment
needed to be a nursery school teacher is now a portable digital camera.
<Chairman:> Bernadette, do
you want to come back on that?
<Bernadette
Duffy:> We work with child minders at the Thomas
Coram centre, and those who we work with welcome the EYFS. However, there is one proviso. Our child minders are an integral part of
the children's centre. They are well
supported and have opportunities to study and opportunities for election on a
week-by-week basis. One of the reasons
that a lot of child minders are leaving is that it is an isolated
occupation. Unless we take the centre's
obligation to support child minders seriously, we will lose even more-not
through the EYFS, but because it is isolated.
We know that, historically, people leave child minding because of the
isolation or because their family circumstances change. Our child minders are pleased with the
measure, but they are well supported.
There
is gap in perception. As Sue was saying
kindly, we at Thomas Coram are very lucky.
We have a well qualified staff group-people with expertise-and we have
all had good training. Therefore, we
read the EYFS in that context. The
anxiety is that there are people who have not got that training, as Ted was
saying. The issue in this country is
not the EYFS; it is training. We think
that it is fine for young people with no qualifications to come at the age of
16 and work with young children. If
they were their own children, we would put them in a young parent programme,
but there seems to be no conflict in public funding to say that it is fine for
them to work with other people's children.
The
bigger issue is one of qualifications.
There is a big issue about qualified teachers, and we must ensure that
qualified teachers, such as myself and Sue, are placed in more earlier
settings, so that there is that sort of expertise working alongside other
colleagues.
Q<28> <Chairman:> Should it be statutory?
<Bernadette
Duffy:> Should the document be statutory? At the moment, given where we are, we
probably need more in the statutory document than we would need if we had a
well qualified work force. I want to
protect children, not those in Steiner and Montessori schools, but those who
are sitting at desks aged three doing worksheets.
<Chairman:> Sue, I have to
move on. If we have time at the end, I
will come back to you.
Q<29> <Fiona Mactaggart:> I am interested in whether the
document helps and supports parents or undermines them. There seems to be a real difference between
the witnesses. Anna feels that it
undermines the parent-I think, I do not want to mischaracterise you. Bernadette, I heard what you said about the
unique child, or someone who has suddenly realised the importance of praise for
her child.
<Bernadette
Duffy:> Yes.
<Fiona Mactaggart:>
I am hearing two people who do not have great differences in terms of the
ambitions that they have for children, but who regard the document as having a
very different impact on empowering parents.
I am trying to think why. Can
either of you help me?
<Anna
Firth:> Can I come in? From a parental point of view, I do not see the document as
something that undermines parents, but as something that undermines children. I am not aware of great parental involvement
in the implementation of the document.
<Sue
Palmer:> I personally think that the more we
prescribe, the more we de-professionalise people. We are saying that they cannot make decisions. That happened in teaching with
over-prescription. People felt
disempowered and deskilled, and that undermined their professionalism. The document is twofold. On the one hand, it is saying that skilled
professionals do not make decisions, because it is all written down and matters
are just ticked. On the other hand, it
gives the impression that it is about bringing up children, and I think that it
deskills parents. They think that it
must be something that they do in the children's centre, not something that
they can do. It undermines the feeling
of what care has always meant throughout the ages, which is why child minders
have suddenly thought that they cannot do it any more, because it is all about
writing things down, targets and stuff that the professionals understand.
There
is a double whammy. On the one hand, it
is as though people are being told exactly how to do it, because they have not
been trained, while on the other hand, it is suggesting that younger children
who really need care, which is given by love, attention and talk, need
something that is a bit more professional.
It is getting people on both sides and deskilling everybody who works
with young kids. The big difference is
for those at home in domestic circumstances.
Their reaction to the child and how they are bringing up the child is
personal. In a nursery, matters must be
systemised in a sense.
The
problem is with the two things hitting: the personal and the systemised. In the countries where they seem to have got
it best, the fact that formal education does not start until the age of seven
means that personal and the systemised approaches can be made more of a
gradation. The child can finally be
moved into an entirely systemised process by the age of seven. But we are hitting the far too young-the
children of only three or four years old.
With
the personal care coming up and the systemising coming down, we are getting a
crunch at a far too young an age. If we
have more time and are thinking of starting formal education at seven, it would
be easier to make the transition between the personal eye contact and loving
care of the home-or child minder who takes over the domestic role-and the
systemised, "we shall sit down and be formal in school" process. We would have more time to develop children's
attention skills, their personal and social skills and their language
skills. All those skills have been
found in Scandinavian countries to be really sound foundations for learning,
rather than what is happening now, which concerns unqualified child minders who
do not know a thing and who have to get writing the letters.
Q<30> <Fiona Mactaggart:> I understand that. As for what the document mostly says, let us
be honest. Reasonable concern is
expressed in about three lines. For
example, almost any child-probably your son-can read the word "McDonald's" and
knows that the word starts with a capital letter. He might not know that it is called a capital letter, but he
knows that it starts with a big M. Some
of the outcomes are just there in almost every child, and I fear that we are
escalating them into something more than they are. However, I share the unease about some of the detail, but we have
focused on three sentence in the whole document, most of which is about
learning to wash hands after going to the loo.
That is a basic early learning goal that we would all want every three
and four-year old child to have.
<Sue Palmer:>
That is the problem. You have to
develop milestones and early learning goals.
Q<31> <Fiona Mactaggart:> I understand that, but the point is
that I frequently see the things that are set out not happening with child
minders, in playgroups, and in nurseries-let us be clear about that. Let us not be romantic that the option is
between sitting there, forming your letters in a laborious set of lines-I have
no truck with that-or fantastic free play, where adults are scaffolding
children's learning, really attracting them, saying to them, "Oh look!" Actually, most of what goes on is somewhere
between those two things. As politicians,
our job is to try to make most of what goes on as good as it can be.
There are various ways of doing that,
one of which involves training the work force.
Compared with countries that have much less direction in early years, we
have a less well trained work force, so we cannot currently take that
route. The route that we are trying to
take is that of guidance to encourage good practice. From what you have said, Sue, you think that large chunks of the
guidance, although not all of it, reflect good practice. I am interested in whether through such
guidance-I am not saying that it is perfect-we can help to deal with the gap
that we see developing at 22 months between children in homes where the
vocabulary is not highly developed and parents do not have much time, and
children in homes where parents have more time, a better developed vocabulary
and are using rich adjectives with their children and so on. I am passionate about how we bridge that
inequality, and at the moment we are not doing it.
<Chairman:> So what is the
question?
Q<32> <Fiona Mactaggart:> The question is how we do it. Is this going to help at all?
<Bernadette
Duffy:> Yes, the guidance will help, because it puts
in place what we know about how children learn-through play, active exploration
and adult to child interactions that are sustained and shared-so it includes a
lot of positive things to close the gap that you have identified. Certainly, our experience from early
education and at Thomas Coram is that using that approach closes the gap
between the children who come in at a disadvantage and those who do not. That is a strong recommendation for the
approach.
<Professor
Melhuish:> I agree.
The gap that you are talking about happens below 22 months; it basically
starts as soon as there are environments where people just do not talk to the
child and treat it as something to be fed and changed occasionally.
<Sue
Palmer:> I would say that as long as the flawed
literacy goals are part of the guidance, we will not by any means close the
gap, because even though those are only a few things, they have a profound
effect in that they put the focus at the end of the goals on formal
achievement, rather than the development of children's oral language skills,
their ability to attend and their social skills. Up to the age of 6 or 7, the development of oral language,
listening discriminatively, being able to get along with the other children in
the room and paying attention and settling in class are key. As long as we are trying to get the formal
skills achieved by the age of five, people will not attend to those key
foundations.
Q<33> <Chairman:> Sue, there was quite an interchange going on
earlier, but I heard you say emphatically, "Those three lines skew it all."
<Sue
Palmer:> They skew it all.
Q<34> <Fiona Mactaggart:> But do you think that the learning of
numbers 1 to 9 does?
<Sue
Palmer:> No, I don't actually because numeracy is much
more natural than literacy. Literacy is
totally unnatural to people.
<Chairman:> We are getting
towards that time. Anna, I want to go
to you.
<Anna
Firth:> I agree entirely with what Sue has said. The trouble is that if you have seven or six
or however many excellent things that you should be concentrating on, but you
have three difficult ones at the end, the inexperienced person thinks that they
have got to get to those three difficult ones and forgets about the others-that
is point No. 1. Point No. 2 is that
although I am not an expert on disadvantaged children and would not pretend
that I am, disadvantaged children probably do not need more programmable toys
and ICT in the nursery; they need people talking to them. Take the computers out of the nursery.
<Professor
Melhuish:> I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with
the comments around me. What you are saying about oral skills is very true in
the sense that they are the foundation for lots of later things. However, the simple fact is that the child
who is developed in those oral skills will be the same child who is showing
good pre-literacy skills at five.
<Sue
Palmer:> No.
<Professor
Melhuish:> They will.
That has been shown over and over again.
<Chairman:> I want Sue to
behave herself and Ted to finish his point.
<Professor
Melhuish:> My view is that, by and large, what is in the
early years foundation stage is 95% or 96% welcome.
<Chairman:> But Sue is
saying that as well.
<Professor
Melhuish:> There are a few details that need to be
tidied up.
<Chairman:> Are you not
saying that, Sue?
<Sue
Palmer:> Our researchers have analysed foundation
profiles recently and found that children's achievement in literacy at seven
correlates not with their formal achievements, but with their personal, social,
emotional and communication skills.
<Chairman:> You are
breaking up a bit. Ted, you come in.
<Professor
Melhuish:> What Sue suggests is wrong. There is a strong correlation between
children's social and communicative skills early on and their later education,
but the same children also show good pre-literacy skills.
<Sue
Palmer:> But the ones who show good pre-literacy
skills and do not have the personal and social skills will not achieve at
seven.
<Professor
Melhuish:> That is not true.
<Sue
Palmer:> That is the difference. The ones who are not socially, emotionally
and communicatively doing well at five, but who have been trained to write
letters and to bark at print do not do well at seven. Those tend to be the poor children in disadvantaged areas.
<Professor
Melhuish:> No.
That is not true.
<Chairman:> We have not
had a suicide at Hansard before now,
but I can see one coming on.
<Professor
Melhuish:> If you do not have social and communication
skills you will suffer in all sorts of ways, but it is also the case that
disadvantaged children do not get barked at to produce their letters. The primary problem for disadvantaged kids
is that they have not developed oral and social skills early on and they have
not been given the opportunity for pre-literacy and pre-numeracy experiences. They are missing out in all sorts of ways.
<Anna
Firth:> Can I add something?
<Chairman:> If it is
brief.
<Anna
Firth:> We have heard a lot of opinion, but we now
have some data on this subject. I am
sure that you know about this, but the National Assessment Agency foundation
stage profile research shows that the literacy goals that we are complaining
about correlate with poor outcomes at key stage 1. The positive goals that we are talking about for socialisation
and personal and emotional development correlate with very good outcomes at key
stage 1 in reading, writing and maths.
<Chairman:> Can you
comment on that, Ted?
<Professor
Melhuish:> I would like to look at the detail of that
evidence, because I have not seen it, but it conflicts with the EPPE evidence
and with the national child development survey.
<Chairman:> I want to ask
one last thing. Fiona, do you want to
ask one last quick question?
<Fiona Mactaggart:>
I am okay.
Q<35> <Chairman:> When you said, "those three lines skew it all,"
which three lines did you mean?
<Sue
Palmer:> I meant the language and literature goals,
particularly those for writing. Being
able to form letters is very different from recognising the "M" of
McDonald's. It is a complex,
small-scale motor task. Being able to
write letters and sentences is asking very young children to do something
awfully difficult. Practitioners are
getting children started at three to achieve the goals. In most European countries, particularly the
ones that do well in literacy, practitioners do not start children doing that
until the children are seven. It is
skewing it right out.
Q<36> <Fiona Mactaggart:> I am trying to work out where the
lines are. I am looking at the bottom
of page 13 where it says, "Read a range of familiar and common words and simple
sentences independently." What is the
other part?
<Anna
Firth:> The last three are, "Attempt writing for
different purposes", "Write their own names and other things, such as labels
and captions, and begin to form simple sentences, sometimes using punctuation"
and "Use a pencil and hold it effectively to form recognisable letters, most of
which are correctly formed."
Q<37> <Chairman:> Would you like to omit or change any of those
goals?
<Bernadette
Duffy:> The view of the British Association of Early
Childhood Education is that some of the CLL goals, particularly those referring
to writing and punctuation, are probably pitched too high for this age
group. Our concerns are not about the
goals that relate to a love of reading or to children having an opportunity to
have their favourite "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" book, but about the ones that
relate to writing, because of the physical skills involved. I have just come back from China, where I
saw very good handwriting, but that is because children use chopsticks. If we want to improve handwriting in this
country, we would be better off introducing chopsticks as a strategy, rather
than that goal.
Q<38> <Chairman:> Anna, are those the ones that you want to get
rid of?
<Anna
Firth:> Yes, absolutely.
<Chairman:> Do you agree?
<Anna
Firth:> The last three, on page 13, going up the
page, including "Read a range of familiar and common words and simple sentences
independently" and "Use their phonic knowledge to write simple regular words
and make phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words." My son's teacher has told me that the one
before that, "Link sounds to letters, naming and sounding the letters of the
alphabet" is also too big a step. The
linking and the naming and sounding are two different things.
Q<39> <Chairman:> Ted, is there anything that you would like to
take out or modify?
<Professor
Melhuish:> No.
The last three are the ones that are causing the problem, so I suggest
that we might offer them as options for parents' choice, so that they can
choose if they want those in there or not.
<Chairman:> Sue?
<Sue
Palmer:> I agree with that. I am a great believer in phonics and am not knocking it, but if
you think about the phonics requirement for 30 to 50 months, you will realise
that that starts before children are three, which is far too advanced. They are asking children to look at the
beginnings of words and emphasise the initial sounds, but we simply do not want
parents to think that children should be starting on phonics when they are two,
so that is seriously wrong.
<Chairman:> Thank you
all. This has been a fantastic
session. You have been what I would
describe as nicely anarchic, but very informative. Please stay in touch with the Committee, because we want the
report to be as good as it possibly can be.
If you think that we have not asked the right questions or have asked
too few, feel free to contact us and remedy that. We have enjoyed your evidence, and it has been a lively session,
so thank you.
Examination
of Witnesses
Witnesses: Graham Kennish, Open EYE, Anne Nelson, Chief Executive, Early
Education, Sylvie Sklan, Steiner
Waldorf Schools Fellowship, and Morag
Stuart, Professor in the Psychology of Reading, Institute of Education,
University of London.
Q<40> <Chairman:> I welcome the next set of witnesses, Graham
Kennish, Sylvia Sklan, Professor Morag Stuart and Anne Nelson. Some of you are familiar with this setting
and the Committee and some are not, so I welcome you all. You have been sitting behind the previous
set of witnesses and therefore know how lively the first session has been, and
we are keen to build on that. I want to
get right into the questioning, but would you start by saying quickly why you
are here and what you think of the discussion that we have just had?
<Graham
Kennish:> I have a background in education throughout
all the years, with a Steiner emphasis, and am here to represent Open EYE. The discussion was most refreshing. One of the most refreshing things about it
was that those who differed, however strongly, were able to communicate clearly
with those who were listening. I found
the interchange between yourselves and within the group a refreshing
experience, with people actually listening to one another. That has been
absolutely and severely lacking in the exchanges that Open EYE has experienced
with the Government over Ministers' replies to questions.
We
have received endless standard, computerised letters. There is a gulf in communication, which I saw in the video of
your speaking to Ofsted last week-it was as though you were speaking different
languages with the same words. We need
to expose that gulf, because so many people flood into Open EYE's website, and
we are just desperate to communicate some realities, which are not being heard
by the people who are in power. What is
happening on the ground is different.
<Sylvie
Sklan:> I am Sylvie Sklan. I am from the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, the member
organisation for all the Steiner early years settings and the Steiner schools
in this country. I am here to represent
how the EYFS impacts on them.
<Morag
Stuart:> I am Morag Stuart. I am from the Institute of Education. I am probably here because I was a member of the advisory group
for the Rose review.
<Chairman:> We like having
you here.
<Morag
Stuart:> The Rose review recommended that by the age
of about five children are ready to start learning phonics.
<Anne
Nelson:> I am chief executive of the British
Association for Early Childhood Education.
It is a membership organisation that promotes quality in early
years. Our remit is from birth to
eight, so we go beyond that of EYFS. I
found the discussion stimulating, and it was good to see people listening to
each other. I have several points to
make that you have not covered yet, but I shall wait to see whether they come
up in questions.
I
found it most fascinating at the beginning to touch on work force issues. One document, although it is enshrined in
law, cannot compensate for the lack of a qualified work force, which has to be
one of the greatest challenges. If you
do not understand child development and do not have a strong initial
qualification, you cannot use whatever document is put in front of you. That is one of my greatest concerns among
the issues that came before you during the last discussion.
<Chairman:> Those of you
who know the history of the previous Education and Skills Committee will know
that the skills, the pay and the training of the early years work force has
been an obsession of ours for a long time.
We will be looking at that in another inquiry quite soon.
Q<41> <Mr. Chaytor:> I turn first to Morag. Children in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark
and Iceland start school at the age of seven.
Are they all unable to read and write?
<Morag
Stuart:> I am not an expert in what children in those
countries know when they start school.
However, I know that one early study of the effects of phonological
awareness on learning to read, which was carried out in Sweden, was criticised
on the ground that many of the children had already learned to read before
taking part in the study.
Q<42> <Mr. Chaytor:> I wish to test the assertion made previously
that there is a false dichotomy between those who think that there should be a
more intensive use of formal language training in the foundation stage and
those who think that the foundation stage should focus on social personal
development and that formal training should start later. What is your view of that false dichotomy? Is it clear cut that children who have a
greater emphasis placed on their social development in the earlier years learn
to read and write better but later?
<Morag
Stuart:> From my point of view as a researcher into
early reading development, the factors that influence the ease of acquisition
of decoding skills-the ability to read the words on the page-are awareness of
sounds in words and a knowledge of letters.
Those two things make a crucial difference to the ease with which
children master reading words.
Q<43> <Mr. Chaytor:> To what extent
is that a formal process? Is a formal
process required, as against its emerging through structured play?
<Morag
Stuart:> I find the distinction between formal and
structured learning very difficult. You
can teach phonics to five-year-olds in playful, developmentally appropriate
ways, but you must teach them.
<Mr. Chaytor:> It will not
just happen by itself.
<Morag
Stuart:> No.
Children get experiences in their families that lead them to discover
things. Families do not formally teach
them, and people in early years settings can teach them in playful ways.
Q<44> <Mr. Chaytor:> Could I ask Graham for his observations on
the same issue? What is the best way in
the Steiner view?
<Graham
Kennish:> Sylvie can answer on the Steiner view.
<Sylvie
Sklan:> That is all right-Graham has taught in
Steiner schools.
Q<45> <Mr. Chaytor:> Graham, do you act as a consultant to schools
in the USA as well?
<Graham
Kennish:> Yes, but not in early years. I represent Open EYE, and I have a Steiner
background, but I would not wish to answer the question.
<Sylvie
Sklan:> In the Steiner early years curriculum, we do
not introduce any formal learning at all.
There is a long track record of international experience, and the
outcomes are successful. We advocate
later learning in our curriculum.
I
am not here to comment on how any legislative framework or statutory
requirements affect the standard model.
Rather, I believe that there is a commitment to diversity, which implies
a commitment to acknowledging that there is more than one valid way of doing
things. Any requirement would therefore
need to be considered in terms of whether it cuts across a different way of
doing things. If it does, there would
need to be a mechanism to allow exception.
Our feeling about the framework is that it has not provided for
exception for different models.
Q<46> <Mr. Chaytor:> We were told in an earlier session that there
are 5,000 places in Steiner settings, and 2.4 million child care places in the
country. Is the Steiner philosophy
equally applicable to the 2,395,000 who are not currently in Steiner schools?
<Sylvie
Sklan:> The point is not only about Steiner, but all
other ways in which to approach learning goals. If they are statutory, I would ask you please to accept that
there needs to be a mechanism to allow different approaches-not just the
Steiner approach.
<Graham
Kennish:> I would like to add something to that. In David's two comments, I feel that he is
seeking to see whether it is a minority viewpoint. As Anna mentioned, a huge number of parents and child minders who
contacted Open EYE were looking for a second home that would give their child
self-confidence, warmth and happiness, which is not a word that one finds in
the early years documentation. Happiness,
support, warmth, self-confidence and self-worth are perhaps the keys to helping
disadvantaged children, who usually lack those things. We should not try to marginalise things-the
net needs to be set much wider than specific philosophies such as Steiner,
Montessori, Froebel or any others.
There is a huge wish out there among parents for their children to be
kept in a situation that is like being in a home, without goals.
Q<47> <Mr. Chaytor:> The early years foundation stage is about
learning goals, but that does not mean that it is the only guidance provided to
early years settings. The Every Child
Matters approach and the five outcomes were very clear on the importance of
well-being and child safety.
<Graham
Kennish:> Absolutely-safety and welfare requirements
are essential. However, if the
approach-which it is perfectly pertinent to suggest-is fuelled and pressured
with targets that are statutorily required, you set forth a whole system of
processes and pressures that prevent real interaction and quality interaction
between the carer and the child. That
happens very strongly with an unskilled work force who are unskilled because
they follow the book.
On
the relationship with the children, even in the Government's DVDs-I do not know
whether you have seen them all, but I have-one illustration of how to operate
the early years programme includes a short scene in which the practitioners don
small tiaras to show the children that they are now being assessed. The children then know that their carers
will not come and interact with them and that they are expected to perform what
they are doing under the eyes and the clipboards of their assessors, who now
wear tiaras to show them that they are being assessed. On the question whether that is good or bad,
I obviously have my views. If a parent
does not wish such a travesty-sorry, I will share my views-of what the
relationship will be, that makes the case completely for giving them freedom of
choice within the necessary legal framework governing the welfare and safety of
children.
Q<48> <Mr. Chaytor:> You characterise the foundation stage
requirements as targets, but they are described as goals. There is quite a fundamental distinction
between a goal and a target.
<Graham
Kennish:> Yes.
Is it all right for me to address that as well? I am rather taking up the space. That point highlights something that I could
illustrate with 15 examples-obviously, I will not go through them-of how,
within the early years literature and communications with Ministers, there is a
huge gulf, which was illustrated last week in your session with Ofsted, between
the rhetoric and the descriptions of what should happen on the one hand and the
reality on the ground on the other.
Let
me give you one illustration. The
Government's own literature says-letters come back to Ofsted all the time about
this-that there is equal emphasis on all these different requirements. I am sorry, but there is not equal emphasis. If you do a little mathematical sum, you
will find that 55% of the emphasis of the profiles is on literacy and numeracy,
8% is on emotional development, 8% is on physical development and 8% on social
development-that is not equality. It is
interesting that when the first results of the foundation stage came through
from 2007-I could fish out the paper to show you-they proclaimed an advance of
1% in the profile scores for literacy and numeracy, with 4% for a little part
of that. Wonderful! What is not mentioned is a 1% fall in the
scores on emotional development. It
fascinates me that the 1% score on emotional development is left aside, but the
1% score on numeracy and literacy is held up as progress.
Q<49> <Fiona Mactaggart:> Professor Stuart, you told us that you
had done some research on phonics and how children learn. I saw a report on work that had been done on
the differences between children from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds and
those from more advantaged backgrounds in terms of progress in reading and
phonological awareness. Could you tell
us something about that?
<Morag
Stuart:> Probably not, actually. Which report are you referring to?
<Fiona Mactaggart:>
Dockrell, Stuart and King, "Supporting early oral language skills", in Literacy Today.
<Morag
Stuart:> That was not about phonics or phonological
development; we were looking at oral language development in a deprived
inner-city population. We did an
intervention study that was designed to accelerate children's oral
language-their vocabulary and their ability to construct sentences and narrate
events. It was not to do with
phonological awareness at all. We did
that study as a consequence of the study that I did on introducing phonics to
five-year-olds in the same London borough.
I was shocked by the levels of language that children came into school
with at the age of five, so we went back and tried to improve their language
levels.
Q<50> <Fiona Mactaggart:>
As I understood the first study, it suggested that children with
stronger oral skills were much more able to develop-sorry, I took a short cut
there, and you properly and professorially stopped me and said, "Actually, this
is about oracy." However, as I
understood the first study, it said that strong oracy enabled children to develop
these reading-based skills. Will you tell
me the whole story?
<Morag
Stuart:> That
would take some time
<Fiona Mactaggart:> In a nutshell.
<Morag
Stuart:>
Okay. There is absolutely no
doubt that oral language skills, such as vocabulary, an ability to construct
sentences properly and an ability to retell narratives contribute hugely to
reading and mostly to reading comprehension.
Phonological skills and awareness, and letter knowledge, contribute to
an ability to decode and read words on a page.
Phonological awareness is thought by some to relate to the size of a
child's vocabulary-so there is also a link between vocabulary and the
likelihood that a child will become aware of sounds. The larger your vocabulary, the more similar words you have in it
and the more finely grained your representation of sound patterns becomes. They are all interlinked. All aspects of oral language development
contribute to literacy development.
They are all important, which is why the Rose review suggests that
phonics teaching should take place against the background of a broad and rich
language curriculum.
Q<51> <Fiona Mactaggart:>
Do you think that the early years foundation stage document does that?
<Morag
Stuart:> I
think that there is lots of emphasis on oral language development, on
communicating with babies from an early age and on the ways in which different
ways of communicating facilitate language development.
Q<52> <Fiona Mactaggart:>
Anne, we have not heard your point of view on phonics teaching and
whether that bit of this foundation stage curriculum is right.
<Anne
Nelson:> I
would like to set it in the context of this being the first time that we have
had a curriculum starting from birth.
As I know it, the curriculum in England was developed at secondary level
and brought down to primary with the introduction of the national
curriculum. Reception was tacked on the
end and early years was forgotten about.
Then we got our curriculum guidance and so on. Now it is an important thing.
We
are talking about something that comes between the two different systems that
we have had before. The primary
national literacy strategy did not cover speaking and listening when it was
established. That came down into reception. No one was at all concerned about
nursery-they should have been, but they were not. Those things have remained, which is the reason for these
inappropriate goals. Instead, we should
look again at the matter, coming up from birth. The development of oral skills is strong, but then we have these
other goals, which we mentioned before, left over from the interlink with the
literacy strategy. If we looked at it
properly coming up, we would have the emphasis about which Morag has spoken.
Q<53> <Fiona Mactaggart:>
There are real differences among all the witnesses we have heard from
today. I have heard very strongly from
all of them, however, that the emphasis on oracy, speaking and listening must
be at the centre of early years education of quality. I think that everybody agrees with that. Let us look at one more thing. Would any of you say that there are
circumstances in which letters and sounds can be introduced to four-year-olds
in a way that is pleasurable and advances their learning?
<Morag
Stuart:> I
think that the letter and sounds programme that has just been introduced in
schools does it beautifully. The
evidence that is accruing from early assessments of implementing the programme
suggests that children are enjoying what they are learning and that they are
achieving. The Ofsted and National
Foundation for Educational Research reports both talk about the increase in
teacher confidence; teachers know what they are supposed to be doing and why
they are supposed to be doing it. The reports also talk about the delight and
joy that children are having in their achievements and about how much they are
enjoying the lessons.
The
programme does it beautifully. It does not start at two or three; it starts in
what was traditionally the reception year-when children become four. It starts
with a beautiful phase 1, in which there is no mention whatever of letters and
there are all sorts of rich activities around oral language, developing
children's awareness of sounds in the environment, developing children's
listening skills and all those things. Children are doing beautiful activities.
It is not until the final term of the reception year that they start to learn
to relate letters to sounds, and they do that through games. They are enjoying
their games and they are learning. The evidence from the early reading project,
which the communication, language and literacy development team have been
putting into place, is that children who have taken part in the project are
beginning to meet more of the foundation stage profile targets for language and
literacy.
Q<54><Fiona Mactaggart:> You are telling us, Morag, that there
are resources that can bridge the road into primary education. I have heard
from others that there is too much of a risk that what goes on next will suck
down into the early years curriculum. I do not think that anyone intends that.
What could stop it?
<Morag
Stuart:> What could stop it sucking down?
<Fiona Mactaggart:>
Yes. I do not know if all of the panel would agree, but I think that what you
describe sounds very attractive to those people who want education that starts
with the child. From other witnesses, we have heard that the problem is not the
well-designed things that, through games and poems, start introducing children
to sounds and the letters connected with the sounds. The problem is more that
what happens later on-formal handwriting, sentence construction and so on-gets
sucked into the early years curriculum in an inappropriate and, some would
suggest, damaging way. How can we stop that?
<Morag
Stuart:> By training staff. Staff have to understand the
purpose and place of what they are required to do.
<Anne
Nelson:> I go around the country, talk with
members and train practitioners in the EYFS, and there are two barriers. One is
that reception has not been placed firmly in the EYFS. There are various
factors. The ratios, for instance, are subject to another law and could not be
changed. A reception class needs only be staffed by one teacher for 30
children. You cannot do the sort of work that we are talking about and match a
curriculum to individual children's needs, if there is one person to 30
children. The Department say that there are usually other people there, but I
met a reception teacher the other week who told me that their school has three
reception classes with one teaching assistant between the three of them. That
is not appropriate. The baseline is one to 30, and we hope that that will
change, because it makes it more formal and does not help needs to be met.
The
other issue is the outcomes duty, which takes us back to the foundation stage
profile again. When it was initiated, we were told that it would never be used
for national data. Local authorities are now required to have targets. They are
targets for the local authority, not the school or the children, but, of
course, pressure comes down on the children, which militates against the best
practice that the EYFS promotes.
<Sylvie
Sklan:> That is interesting to hear, and we
acknowledge that there are learned views about how things could be improved in
the EYFS in terms of curriculum-I must say that I have never understood it to
be a curriculum. However, that still
brings me back to the same point. We
acknowledge that there is a valid discussion that will perhaps review some of
the difficulties in the framework-it is otherwise an excellent framework-but it
has not addressed my point. I know that
minority interest provision is only small, but it is still a very big principle
that any statutory framework must allow for difference.
Q<55> <Chairman:> I thought Steiner had already come to an
accommodation with the Department.
<Sylvie
Sklan:> It has been very difficult. We have a letter from the Minister that
relates to an interim arrangement whereby it is acknowledged that the learning
and development goals that cut across our curriculum will not be counted
against us. At the end of the day,
there is a statutory requirement that we believe it should be possible to
disapply or from which there should be an exemption for whole settings. I acknowledge and respect what you are
saying, but it does not relate to our point, which is please allow for
difference.
<Chairman:> Graham, do you
want to come back on that?
<Graham
Kennish:> Yes.
I agree with more or less everything that has been said, but because I
do not have the same early years experience as a practitioner, I come at it
from a completely different viewpoint, which is perhaps more in keeping with
that of politicians who do not have direct experience.
It
is vital to understand the nature of a target.
At your meeting with the chief inspector of schools last week, she said,
almost in an aside, "I am a passionate believer in...targets". That has two possible connotations that are
completely different. A target that is
imposed on somebody-particularly, of course, on a child, although we are
talking about the work force-is completely different from the other kind of
target. We know that a target that is
imposed on us impacts enormously on our whole value system of self-confidence,
self-evaluation and everything else. A
target that is an inner goal, an aspiration or something we strive towards can
be inspiring. When Morag was answering
the question, I was saying to myself, "Well, yes, in the hands of a good
practitioner, an aspiration can become something that fulfils the child and that
the child grows towards with love and enthusiasm." However, if it has to be imposed as a target that they must push
towards through an unskilled work force, it becomes a totally different thing,
so the word "target" has completely different meanings according to who is
hearing it.
<Chairman:> Thank you,
Graham.
<Graham
Kennish:> May I add something? Once the target is legislated for, that
imposes a certain meaning that infects everybody, and only the best
professional with the most experience can possibly withstand the impact of what
that legality imposes on them.
<Chairman:> Graham, we
take that point.
Q<56> <Annette Brooke:> In a lot of the debate that has been
going on in the various specialist journals, there have been accusations that
Open EYE has confused what is statutory-the learning roles-and what is
guidance. I would like clarification on
that. Presumably there is no objection
to the guidance per se, so where has the perception come from that Open EYE has
got it all wrong?
<Graham
Kennish:> Open EYE certainly wishes to change the
statutory learning and development requirements into guidance. That is one of the key points of Open
EYE. If there were guidance but no
legislation to impose it, it would be possible for professionals to inspire
their practitioners and share the kinds of difference that have emerged before
you in this Committee. Sharing would be
possible, if the legislation were not there.
In
relation to confusing terms or issues, one of the frustrations for Open EYE and
for people who have written to Open EYE-we have received an endless number of
communications-is the complete confusion among people in the Department. They talk about play, when they do not
actually mean play. They will talk about targets, when they are actually
talking about well-being, or the other way round. They will talk about the
unique child, when they are actually talking about developmental milestones,
goals and targets. They will talk about professional judgment, when in fact
that professional judgment is being taken away and the professions are being
disempowered.
<Annette Brooke:> I think
that you are straying from my question.
<Graham
Kennish:> I am sorry if I am straying, but there are so
many confusions that allow one to interpret the situation in two different
ways.
Q<57> <Annette Brooke:> I just wanted to be absolutely clear
that Open EYE's main objections were to the statutory elements.
<Graham
Kennish:> Our main objections are to the statutory
learning and development requirements, but not to the statutory elements of
welfare and all the other essential things. Open EYE feels that the recent ICT
guidance is hugely important for this Committee to consider, perhaps in a
separate investigation, in the light of Susan Greenfield's and Aric Sigman's
research, which shows that screen and ICT requirements are affecting brain
development. We did not know about passive smoking 10 years ago, but we are in
a similar situation. We must research
the matter, and we hope that the Committee will do that.
<Chairman:> Thank you very
much for that. We move to assessment and inspection, led by Paul.
Q<58> <Paul Holmes:> Only a few days ago, the Committee published
a report on testing and assessment from five to 19 that was very critical of
the combined impact of high-stakes testing, league tables and Ofsted
inspections on five-to-19 education. From September, Ofsted will inspect nought
to five under the new framework of 69 learning outcomes. How can we prevent
those Ofsted inspections from being as negative in the nought-to-five range as
our report said they are in the five-to-19 range? Anne, you were an Ofsted
inspector; perhaps we can start with you.
<Anne
Nelson:> I am not an active Ofsted inspector. I have
been one, and I trained quite a few of the Ofsted child care inspectors on
EYFS, so I have an insight into their views. Obviously, we do not know how it
is going to be, because we have not seen the framework yet. Pilots have been
taking place, but the framework is not there.
From
early education, we welcome the use of the same approach for all settings and a
shared framework. Previously, we have had different frameworks, different
outcomes, a different emphasis for the actual inspection and, of course,
different inspectors. It looks as though we are moving towards something-that
is the Government's wish-that will take away the difference in criteria and
grades. "Outstanding" in a school has been very different from "outstanding" in
a setting, which is not helpful to parents.
I
think that there will be a lot of challenges to the PVI sector and the child
minder, because from what I understand, the approach will be very much on the
basis of self-evaluation, which is the same as school inspections. Previously,
the private and voluntary sector have had self-evaluations just one page long.
The pilot version that I have seen is a lot longer than that, so
self-evaluation skills will need to be supported for them to achieve within
that inspection. My feedback from people who do training is that that is
presenting enormous challenges to child minders. It is that bit about "fit for
everybody". For someone sitting at home working on their own, whatever their
intentions about what they provide for children, doing a self-evaluation is
difficult. Bernadette's discussion on the role of children's centres in
supporting child minders is absolutely crucial. Otherwise, we will lose them,
and the choice will not be there for parents.
We
are concerned that all inspectors should be trained in EYFS. We know that that
has happened with the child care inspectors. They must also have the
pedagogical background and knowledge to make the judgments that they will need
to make, and they should spend time not just on the data, but on seeing the
relationships with children and all the things that EYFS suggests. Certainly in
schools, the length of inspection time has become shorter and shorter, and that
is the bit that has lost out.
Q<59> <Paul Holmes:> One of the criticisms of Ofsted across the
board is that it has a lot of non-specialist inspectors who go into schools not
knowing enough about what they are inspecting. You are saying that it is
absolutely essential that at that level they should all be trained and have
that background?
<Anne
Nelson:> They need to be trained and experienced. It
is one of the most difficult areas.
When I have inspected a primary school, the most difficult area is the
early years. That is common knowledge. In the shorter inspections in schools in
which you have only one or two inspectors, it is quite likely that there will
be no experience in early years.
Q<60> <Paul Holmes:> The DCSF has
said that an Ofsted inspection will not have a negative impact on the way in
which people work in the early years.
When we did our report on five to 19, it told us that there was not a
negative impact. However, we said that
there was. Therefore, how do we avoid
the Ofsted inspections having a negative impact? We heard in an earlier session that the inspectors are looking at
three key things, such as writing sentences, punctuation and so on. How do we stop the inspections from
distorting everything because they are focusing on those things?
<Sylvie Sklan:>
Certainly, where you have a different model, it presents problems that we have
to tackle in a very practical way. The
criteria by which they will be inspecting an early years centre does not apply
to the learning and development requirements, because the setting, on
principle, is not involved in that. We
are concerned that we get that right, otherwise we will have a whole series of
settings that are teaching a different curriculum or failing on quite a range
of outcomes. If a proper mechanism were
in place, it would not just be left to our ability to find a way through; the system
would clearly be in place. As it is at
the moment, we will have to work with the inspectors, and those discussions
have started. In that way, they will
know what to expect in a different setting.
Q<61> <Chairman:> But in Steiner, you do not object to
inspection on principle?
<Sylvie
Sklan:> Oh, no, absolutely not.
<Chairman:> Do you,
Graham? I understood that Open EYE did
not believe that the independent sector should be inspected.
<Graham
Kennish:> I do not go along with that at all. I would say that the whole issue of
inspection by Ofsted is linked entirely to the targets. We come back to the targets. Ofsted arrives and every setting knows that
it is under the test whether or not it is fulfilling the targets. That pressure, which goes down to the
children, will be quite clear and obvious.
It is totally obvious to me; I cannot imagine how it is not obvious to
those who are proposing this scheme.
Last week, in a conversation in which Annette was trying to probe the
chief inspector about the training of inspectors, she was trying to pursue the
difference-I do not know whether or not she succeeded; I felt that she did
not-between training inspectors for inspecting early years provision and having
early years inspectors who had been practitioners themselves and knew exactly
what young children were all about. Let
me give you a quick analogy. I would
not want a mechanical engineer who has been given some training in electricity
to inspect an electrical installation.
I would not feel safe at all.
That is an horrendous analogy, but it is effectively what is being
proposed. It is not just the training
for inspection that they need, but also the inner experience of practice.
<Chairman:> Graham, we
remember last Wednesday well.
Q<62> <Paul Holmes:> Last Wednesday, the chief inspector said that
Ofsted inspectors are aware of the different types of school and that they are
not applying the same criteria everywhere.
I reminded the chief inspector that Summerhill school had been failed by
Ofsted. The school ended up taking
Ofsted to court with judicial review to avoid being closed down. Are you confident at Steiner schools that
Ofsted will take into account the variation in style and approach?
<Sylvie
Sklan:> At this stage, I do not know whether we can
say that we are confident, because we have not got there yet. We have to put in place all the systems to
ensure that such accidents do not occur-by that I mean inspectors using the
wrong criteria on which to judge schools.
As I said, it would be good to have a much more robust and objective
system in place that is linked to the guidance of the framework to ensure that
it is not all down to good faith and working with the inspectors who are about
to visit.
Q<63> <Paul Holmes:> Finally, one of the big things that we
identified in the recent report on assessment and testing was the difference
between assessment for learning-of the child-and assessment for testing the
school, to see how it is achieving, effectively. From five to 19, it has become distorted, in that you are using
the test results and the assessment to judge the school and to say, "That's
good; that's bad; you're failing, and you're excellent," rather than looking at
the pupils' progress. Even more at this
stage, nought to five, how do we avoid that distortion? If Ofsted are coming in and are going to
say, "That's good; that's bad; you pass; you fail," how do we make sure that
the assessment of the child at two, three or four is about assessing the child
for learning, to see where they have got to, and where we move on to next,
rather than ticking boxes, so that Ofsted will give the setting a good report?
<Chairman:> That is a good
question and a long question, but, Morag, I shall ask you for quite a quick
answer.
<Morag
Stuart:> The quick answer would be that the only way-I
keep coming back to staff training-is that staff have to understand child
development. They have to understand
the range of behaviours that can be observed at given ages and the desirable
outcomes that a typically developing child ought to be able to achieve. It is staff knowledge and understanding of
child development that will allow them to do that.
Q<64> <Paul Holmes (Chesterfield) (LD):> Ofsted staff?
<Morag
Stuart:> Practitioner staff and Ofsted staff.
<Anne
Nelson:> Just to give an example of the opposite to
the question you are asking about the negative impact of Ofsted, our nursery
schools were inspected last year. They
would mainly be inspected by a practitioner who is also an Ofsted inspector. The nursery schools came out as 95% good or
outstanding. That knowledge base-the
experience which is there-correlates with a thorough understanding of that and
a good self-evaluation process. It is a
very good example of Ofsted working, I think.
But again, the head teacher and the staff would be fully qualified.
Q<65> <Paul Holmes:> But Ofsted also, every month, judges 60 day
care settings and 80 child minders as inadequate, so people who work in those
settings must be thinking, "What boxes have I got to tick to please
Ofsted?"
<Anne
Nelson:> And it dominates their lives. When I am training them they say, "Why do
you do so much written planning?" and I say, "In case Ofsted come in
tomorrow." It is a heavy pressure on
them.
Q<66> <Annette Brooke:> Can I just pick up on child
minding, which takes us into the next
session? Anne has mentioned the
importance of training. As far as I can
see, child minding has become a profession-much to be welcomed-with the encouragement
of qualifications. What exactly-or how
big, I suppose-is the hurdle going into the early years foundation stage? The sort of things that have been presented
to me are that, obviously, child minders are not really in a position to access
local authority courses during the day.
They have to pay extra money for courses. It is all very difficult for them. Yet I think things went fairly smoothly in terms of the NVQs and
so on. So Anne, there might not be the
wonderful child centre on the doorstep, which can support a child minder, but
what about those hundreds and hundreds of people in that valuable part of the
work force?
<Anne
Nelson:> They do access courses and of course, as you
say, training. They have to do it at a
time when the children are not there, which means Saturdays. You can talk within that about equality and
the work force, although in early years, we have never had a great deal of
funding to release people in the day time for training. So there are some issues.
I
think that what they seem most concerned about-I do not pretend to speak for
them as an organisation, although increasingly we do have more child minders in
our membership-is the writing down of reports on the children all the time and
that the legislation is mainly about learning.
I have just been training in observation and the issue is that they
interpret observation as a written observation on every child for every moment
of the day, whereas if you are properly trained in observation, a lot of what
you observe is here, in your head, and you write down the significant things
within that.
I
think that more is expected of them than ever before, but when you publish
something like EYFS, myths grow up and people get worried and scared. They would need reassurance from their local
authorities about what is manageable.
We saw the same in out-of-school care, with people threatening that, if
they had to do the EYFS, they would not have children under five in their
out-of-school care. That has been
clarified for them, so I think that there is a great need for the Government,
local authorities and organisations like ours to try to get that in perspective
for people. Doing so is a challenge,
and I would not underestimate it.
Q<67> <Annette Brooke:> Would you rank that as urgent, given
the rapid fall in the number of child minders over the past year?
<Anne
Nelson:> It is urgent, not just because we do not want
to lose those people and that choice for parents, but because child minders are
a big part of the market for local authorities in providing a sufficiency of
child care. This is urgent from the perspective
of local authorities, too. However, it
is urgent mainly because we do not want to lose the perspective and choice for
parents.
Q<68> <Chairman:> Anne, could it be that the marginal child
minder is being pushed out of the market, rather than that anything unpleasant
is going on? We do not want the
marginal and not very good providers.
In my area, as children's centres have developed, the whole pre-school
market has changed quite dramatically.
<Anne
Nelson:> I hope that EYFS has done enough to set some
standards, so that if child minders or group settings are not up to quality,
they will go out of the market. Perhaps
that sometimes happens through lack of knowledge. Child minding cannot be an easy way to earn a living, because you
do not know when you will get children or how many you will get and you do not
get any breaks in the day. It is quite
a challenge to work like that. Working
with young children is exhausting.
I
share the hint that, if people are not up to scratch, they should not be in the
market. I think that the expectation of
standards is important. However, when I
work with settings or individuals, those who are not all right think that they
are all right and those who are all right continually question their practice
and raise their aspirations. There must
be something external to help them see what their quality is.
Q<69> <Chairman:> So there is some value in Ofsted.
<Anne
Nelson:> I think that there is some value in Ofsted.
<Chairman:> I have dragged
it out of you, Anne.
<Anne
Nelson:> Well, it must be recognised that Ofsted
provides merely a snapshot-as you are well aware-and it is not a stick to beat
people with. Ofsted can inspect only
against the standards set by the Government.
The value comes in what you do afterwards.
<Chairman:> We are running
out of time. Annette, do you want to
say anything about work force issues?
Q<70> <Annette Brooke:> Yes, perhaps I could try to pull it
all together. A view has been put this
morning that the early years foundation stage is critical to pulling up
standards for all. That is a fair
point. Equally, there are issues about
qualifications and the experience of the work force. My question is a bit chicken and egg, but is the issue whether we
should be putting the early years foundation stage in the hands of the
under-qualified work force, or will the existence of the framework add to the
quality of the work force? Have we got
the timing right on the two issues of the quality and the work force?
<Anne
Nelson:> Over the past few years in early years, we
have developed quantity. Now we are
focusing quite hard on quality. As well
as EYFS, there is a Government early years quality programme. You cannot have that quality without well
qualified staff. It is quite clear that
that is a prerequisite. The
Scandinavian countries that we heard about earlier have a much higher level of
qualification than this country.
The
principles and the commitments in the document are very laudable, but there is
a danger in the way that the learning and development grids have been
proposed. They could be misused by
those who do not have the right child development knowledge. That is a major concern for us. To throw another aspect in, there is
confusion about the role of the early years professional. The Government's view is that that person
will lead the learning, certainly in the PVI sectors, and that teachers will
still lead the learning in the state maintained sector.
However,
being an EYP is not a qualification, but a status. In some cases, for instance, people have taken the EYP route
immediately after their degrees. In my
experience as a teacher and practitioner, you have got to have some experience
before you can lead others in the learning.
I am pretty sure that that will not help in the challenge of raising the
qualification, which Annette mentioned, so I think that we have to go for
qualifications to make it better.
Q<71> <Annette Brooke:> Is that slowing down the
implementation of the statutory requirements?
<Chairman:> You only get
two questions to each person.
<Anne
Nelson:> I do not think that you can slow it
down. I want to get those two points
across.
<Morag
Stuart:> I think that training does improve
quality. Certainly, the training that
the CLLD team has put into the early reading development project has raised the
expectations of teachers, the achievements of children and the confidence of
both. As I have said, I think that all
early years practitioners should have a good understanding of child
development.
Q<72> <Chairman:> Morag, if you know that there are problems in
early years that cost a lot of resource to sort out and that it is very
expensive to totally change the quality of your work force, by paying and
training them better, is not the early years foundation really a different way
of trying to achieve that, but with much less resource?
<Morag
Stuart:> Do you mean putting a programme in place?
<Chairman:> Yes.
<Morag
Stuart:> I do not think that it will work if you do
not have the training.
Q<73> <Chairman:> So, do you have to do both?
<Morag
Stuart:> Absolutely.
Q<74> <Chairman:> Is there a sign that the Government are doing
both?
<Morag
Stuart:> I think that some encouraging things are
going on, but not enough.
<Chairman:> Annette, do
you have anything else to ask?
<Annette Brooke:> No, I
think that you drew out what I am trying to get people to comment on.
<Chairman:> Does anyone
else want to come in on that last one, on the chicken and egg?
<Graham
Kennish:> No training programme can deliver anything;
the people who deliver it and who form the relationship with the practitioners
form the training. Teaching is a
process of relationship, and no programme will do anything because it is the
relationship between people that does things.
It is the relationship between the carers and the children that inspires
their self-confidence and self-worth.
All other aspects of learning follow from that process, and all good
teaching, at whatever age, inspires the qualities that that unique child has at
that time. A teacher's timing is to
time what is needed at a certain moment.
It is a very subtle process, which gets less subtle as you go up. Although you have to take a set of exams at
16, as you come down, lower and lower, the subtlety and power of that process
reaches down into the element of play.
That aspect of play is the most subtle, creative and dynamic aspect, and
until practitioners have really understood the nature of play, for instance, it
is not something that you can put into a programme.
Q<75> <Chairman:> But, Graham, when I heard your colleague,
Anna, speak earlier, I got the impression that one of the things that Open EYE
is worried about is that, although you are able to squeeze out the person who
is good at that, they are unqualified.
<Graham
Kennish:> Absolutely, but there are two things
there. If you have someone who is
unqualified, disaffected and not particularly interested in children, you have
a double negative whammy. It is
certainly true that someone who has a real love for and interest in the
children around them will probably, unconsciously and intuitively, give a great
deal of support to a child's emotional development.
Q<76> <Chairman:> But surely Open EYE does not believe that you
should train them for that.
<Graham
Kennish:> Absolutely not, there should be a training,
but the danger with training is that you become over-professionalised. It is rather similar to the dilemma that we
faced in the last session, where one had to confess that the experts disagreed
vigorously with one another, as we heard them do. Within the training of professionalism, it is very important to
realise that professionals and experts disagree, and there needs to be that
fructification of the alternative view points that professionals bring, so that
they can allow a creative process. We
can never say that we now know what a child is all about, because we clearly
have a lot to learn about what children are really about and what the nature of
play is and all of those things. If we
said to parents that we know what that is, we disempower them and others who
would seek to be innovative. That
disempowerment comes from the statutory imposition of goals and targets.
<Chairman:> Graham, thank
you very much. This has been an
excellent panel and we learnt a lot. I
know that you will keep in touch, so that we can make the inquiry as good as it
can be.
<Graham
Kennish:> Thank you very much for offering us this
space.
<Chairman:> Thank you.