The new edition of Listening to Young Children, the influential resource now co-authored by Penny Lancaster and Perpetua Kirby, could not be more timely. As the Government plans to introduce league tables in England based on the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile - kicking off a parent-led petition in protest (www.gopetition.com/petition/41774.html) - this celebration of skilled work with competent young children is a reminder that listening to each unique child is a duty that fosters children's development and values their right to express their views in any legislative context.
It is also a robust practice which, Penny Lancaster says, must remain in place regardless of the external pressures or targets that may exist. 'Listening to young children can happen whatever background you are in,' she says. 'I was involved in setting up educational projects in areas of armed conflict and, even in these immensely stressful environments, listening was always considered key to effective service delivery.'
The reason, she says, is that listening to young children is about 'how you relate to people, about respect for each other and a view of childhood that says children have a valid opinion which adults need to understand'. Any increase in the focus on targets for five-year-olds would be no excuse, then, for 'throwing listening out of the window'.
A copy of Listening to Young Children will set you back £175, but its value as an accessible and long-lived training resource for staff teams makes it a worthy investment. The text describes children's right under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to express their views on matters that affect them and how this is fostered by good reflective practice in the EYFS. A new accompanying DVD features interviews with practitioners and footage of their work, narrated and informed by Penny Lancaster. It demonstrates how any practitioner can begin listening to children in ways that are easy to achieve and which build confidence for moving on to the next level.
GUIDANCE
But Listening to Young Children is now just one showcase for the increasingly rich practice in early years settings across the country. Training based on Penny Lancaster's work, on the Mosaic Approach to research with young children (Clark and Moss 2001) and on Judy Miller's (2009) approach to involving children in everyday decisions, among others, has spawned a growing body of guidance and support for settings and services that promote children's participation in decision-making.
The Young Children's Voices Network (YCVN) is a key hub for participative work with young children. Based at the National Children's Bureau, it supports local authorities in developing good practice for listening to young children, so that children's views may inform policy and improve early childhood services.
This is not at all distant from setting-based practice, as YCVN project manager Lucy Williams explains. 'Although our purpose is to assist authorities in terms of strategic planning for embedding a listening culture, we have to work at grassroots level because relationships for young children in their settings with people that they trust are at the heart of successful listening work.' This 'grassroots' impact is demonstrated by the way that listening to young children has spread organically across one local authority since its involvement in the project.
When Southend set up a local YCVN in 2008, it launched with a steering group of just 12 widely-distributed pilot settings. Rather than devise an over-arching strategy for all, the group decided that each setting would develop its own project for listening and responding to children, enabling them to work within children's established relationships. The benefits of this approach was confirmed when one project - a set of 'sequence boards' developed by Little Acorns Pre-school that helped a child with severe speech and language difficulties to take some control over what happened during the day - was validated by the Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children and Young People's Services (C4EO) as an intervention which demonstrably improved outcomes.
'From listening in specific projects, the steering group settings then started embedding the approaches they had developed,' says Southend's senior development officer for early years, Lesley Yelland. 'Then we put on an exhibition for all Southend childcare providers to showcase the work so far and, from there, listening to young children has snowballed.'
A commitment to 'Mainstream the "Voice of the Child" into all childcare providers and children's centres' now features in the Southend Children and Young People's plan for 2010-13. Participative work with young children is rolling out to all other provision.
'The steering group settings are evenly spread out across the borough,' says Ms Yelland, 'so they can now provide a buddying system. They hold cluster meetings with other nearby providers and this is proving helpful in developing new listening practice and sharing great ideas.'
PARTICIPATION OFFICERS
Lesley Yelland has made the spread of listening to young children a personal priority within her wider duties as an early years development officer in Southend. But, in a handful of authorities that take children's participation especially seriously, an individual is able to focus exclusively on the issue.
One such authority is Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where early years participation officer Louise Cameron is charged with promoting ways of listening to young children in all the city's settings. With eight years' experience as a parent participation worker in a Sure Start children's centre, she has no early years background - and feels that this is crucial.
'The fact that I'm an outsider means that I respond entirely from a participation perspective and can challenge professional reasons that practitioners and managers sometimes give for being unable to listen to children,' she says.
The role of early years participation officer is endorsed by Listening to Young Children co-author Perpetua Kirby. 'Listening to young children is a revolutionary approach, and it's incredibly helpful to have someone whose job it is to champion that approach and to make it easier for practitioners who want to take it on,' she says.
Based in the Newcastle Participation Unit, Louise Cameron works to extend, embed and evaluate the authority's Listening to Young Children Strategy in early years settings. She doesn't work directly with children, 'because I don't think it's appropriate for someone they don't know to parachute in and start asking questions'. But she acts as a kind of cheerleader-in-chief for practitioners, enabling them to do participative work.
As part of this, the Participation Unit recently published Stop, Look and Listen to Us, a 'toolkit for involving children in choices and change' that was co-written with two nursery heads and a Sure Start teacher.
Its particular strength for early years practitioners in Newcastle is that it features a range of listening work with young children that is going on now in the city's settings. Some of it, especially children's deep involvement in redesigning the outdoor area at Monkchester Road Nursery School, shows advanced participatory practice that enables children to contribute in many ways.
But other examples demonstrate first steps in listening work, such as a nursery that enabled children to choose their own creative resources for making music and a toddler group that enabled young children free expression in a messy painting exercise. These make it clear that this approach is possible for all settings.
Louise Cameron explains the need to showcase different levels of engagement in listening to children. 'In Newcastle we have participation across a spectrum. Regardless of whether you are just starting or if listening is embedded, we're all on the journey together. A setting that has embedded young children's participation can still learn from one that is listening for the very first time.'
The range of examples included in Listening to Young Children shows a similar appreciation for the need for practitioners to keep on learning.
'I hope the new edition lays an emphasis that we should not rest on our laurels, that we must continually reflect on our listening practice even as it becomes more mainstream,' says Penny Lancaster. 'And I hope it will challenge our relationships with children so that it becomes normal that we should ask them to participate in making decisions. Children should be part of every decision we make.'
CASE STUDY: MONKCHESTER ROAD NURSERY SCHOOL, NEWCASTLE
Perpetua Kirby says that the Listening to Young Children team found a few examples of children being involved in a setting's strategic planning. 'These are usually about helping to inform the design of a physical space or purchasing equipment and are very tangible and practical areas where young children can have a clear input.'
She expresses delight that they have included an example of children being involved in staff recruitment and hopes others will be inspired by it.
This promise for young children's participation is already being developed at Monkchester Road Nursery School in Newcastle. Head of centre Anne Humble, a co-author on the Newcastle toolkit Stop, Look and Listen To Us, describes how one simple strategy called a 'wishing net' gives children the chance to ask for literally anything that would improve the nursery for them. 'They can each draw their wish or paint it - most tell it to an adult - then all wishes are hung in the net. These enable us to understand the children's experiences and find solutions for how we can improve them.'
When one child wished for 'the king costume', practitioners realised there was no reason why this should be only available at Christmas. When another child asked for fish, they became aware that he, and perhaps others, had not noticed the fish bowl already in the classroom, and asked questions about why that might be.
If the children ask for things that are impossible, the staff find creative ways to respond rather than ignore the wishes. 'One child wished the nursery had a pet alligator,' laughs Ms Humble. 'We couldn't make that happen, but we did arrange a visit from a group who brought in reptiles for the children to see.'
A crucial stage of the children's involvement in planning is the feedback process, as Ms Humble explains. 'Every time we do a wishing net, or any other consultation, we make a book so the children can look back, see what they asked for and how we responded to it. It's vital for them to revisit whether and how we act on what they say.'
This brings the process back to the importance of strong and meaningful relationships for the success of young children's participation. 'Relationships are at the heart of everything, and are partly why we make the books to represent the impact of what children tell us,' says Ms Humble. 'It's a question of trust and seeing that people do what they say they will do.'
CASE STUDY: PAISLEY PRE-FIVE CENTRE
In November last year, I visited Paisley Pre-five Centre near Glasgow, where young children are involved in all aspects of planning, from small choices during the day to long-term strategic decision-making.
This was evident from the moment I arrived. The entrance was decorated with pictorial representations of the setting's vision statement, which enables the children to see and understand the aims and objectives to which they contributed. Also in the entrance area was a display showing how ongoing consultation with families and children was shaping the setting's priorities for the future.
Meanwhile, in the office, all the documentation evaluating progress and achievement measured the centre's effectiveness against how well the children were engaged in the learning they directed.
Head of centre Bernadette Macpherson described how, in addition to constant informal chat within strong relationships, the children engage in regular semi-formal consultations which provide the basis for thematic planning across a whole month. I am grateful to practitioner Rhoda McIntyre and five of the Paisley children for letting me sit in on one of these meetings.
There are eight areas of learning in Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence. Across two or three consulting sessions, the children construct a mind-map of what they would like to learn in each area of the curriculum. In the 40-minute meeting I attended, Rhoda and the children established what they wanted to learn in four curriculum areas. The most illuminating factor was not so much what they agreed but Rhoda's skill in enabling the children to take the initiative.
Using what was clearly a standardised approach in these meetings, Rhoda introduced tactile objects to the children - a dry autumn leaf, a picture of a baby - to engage their thinking, and involved them in drawing the mind-map. Even so, she had to work quite hard to draw ideas from young children who, by November, were still relatively new to the process. As a result, she was largely responsible for the early ideas that were generated.
But as the children gained confidence, their contributions started to come thick and fast until, in discussing a third area of learning, Rhoda's suggestions for how they would celebrate the arrival of one child's baby brother were turned upside-down and the children took complete control. She welcomed this, and it was the children's ideas, not Rhoda's, that were entered on the mind map.
Key elements of success were that the children knew they could leave the meeting at any time, did not have to sit still, were physically involved in the activity and were supported by a second practitioner who was able to reinforce Rhoda's enthusiasm for the children's ideas and engage any who were tiring of the process.
It was an exciting experience, and even more so, given the positive impact for the children of the setting's whole approach.
Bernadette Macpherson says, 'The growth in the children's self-confidence and sense that they are valued is incredibly rewarding. But that's not all; listening to the children is also having a significant impact on their learning. These are children identified as least likely to achieve - and yet we now have evidence that they are achieving high standards.
Pat Gordon-Smith is a writer and advocate for children's rights. See her blog at http://patsky.blogspot.com
LEGISLATION
Legislation that makes listening to young children a statutory duty:
Children Act 2004, which led to:
- - Every Child Matters outcomes framework, especially 'Make a positive contribution'
- - Ofsted Inspection Framework
- - Childcare Act 2006
- - Early Years Foundation Stage
LISTEN IN
Let's Listen is an easy-to-use resource which helps any practitioner or setting to work out how much they listen to children's views and whether listening practice is consistent.
Published by the Young Children's Voices Network, its five profile and planning tables help practitioners to locate how far they are enabling children to participate in decision-making within the EYFS. It is an excellent tool for moving forward, regardless of whether practitioners are at the beginning of the listening journey or have long been involving young children.
Download Let's Listen at: http://www.participationworks.org.uk/resources/lets-listen-young-childrens-voices-profiling-and-planning-to-enable-their-participation-in
REFERENCES
- - Clark, A & Moss, P (2001) Listening to Young Children: the Mosaic Approach. London: National Children's Bureau
- - Miller, J (2009) Never Too Young: how young children can take responsibility and make decisions. London: Save the Children
