Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Principles

Get the underlying essentials of high-quality provision right and
they will be the foundation for developing a curriculum, says Dr Julian Grenier

The question of a curriculum for children up to the age of three has been controversial for a long time. Back in the 1960s, the seminal Plowden Report concluded that 'the day nursery is the proper place for those children who have to be away from their homes before the age of three. An institution with a more directly educational aim is right for children of three and over'. But the same argument flared up from the opposite direction last year, when Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, sharply criticised 'those who dislike the words "education" and "teaching" when it comes to very small children'.

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