Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)? I think I would be surprised to find anyone who is not. After all, not only are there the endless pages of Development Matters, practice guidance and so on, but there is also a huge amount of information on the accompanying disc, as well as the fairly regular launches of new booklets, discs and online resources. While the overall principles and the big messages feel about right, I think there is little doubt that the EYFS poses a management problem for early years practitioners.
I think that the best way for practice to evolve and improve is from the ground up, rather than in response to central Government prescription and guidance. As a head teacher I spent time thinking with colleagues about the best way for us to develop our practice at Kate Greenaway taking the EYFS into account, rather than to see the framework as requiring a total overhaul of our approach, policies and procedures. However, it is apparent that many other settings and practitioners have taken a different approach, and this has caused problems.
The online forum of Nursery World has been, at times, preoccupied with the question of whether staff are still allowed to plan topics, or whether everything must now be child-initiated. More disturbingly, the Times Educational Supplement's forum was, over the summer, full of heart-felt and often despairing accounts from teachers who had introduced a more play-based approach to learning, only to experience classroom order breaking down, equipment tipped into water trays, and children at the end of their reception year with, seemingly, little to show for three or more years of early education.
My point is not that topic planning and worksheets should continue to rule the day, but that no professional should feel bounced into taking a completely different approach to their work in this way. If we are, the outcomes are most likely to be a great deal of stress and dissatisfaction, for little benefit.
How our approach developed
Revolution in early years practice seems to mean spending one decade clearing out all the play equipment and bringing in the literacy hour, and then struggling to reintroduce play the next. That is why I would favour evolutionary change every time.
At Kate Greenaway, we spent time thinking about what was good about our approach to planning for children's development and learning, and what we could do better. We also spent time visiting other nurseries, where staff were unfailingly generous with their time and let members of our team observe practice and read through policies and procedures. In particular, we were drawn to the 'key experience' approach which has been developed at Southway Nursery School over many years.
Staff at Southway explained, and showed us, the value of presenting the same high-quality learning experiences to children every day.
At Southway we saw, for example, how children can cook every day, and reflected on the fact that at Kate Greenaway a cooking activity often required a fair bit of planning and mobilisation: who would do it, where, who had the recipe, who would buy the ingredients, and so on.
On the other hand, at Southway the cooking area is always available to children, stocked with an agreed range of ingredients, and has a stack of child-friendly cookbooks. So, a child can come any day - and indeed every day - and choose what to cook, and go right ahead and cook it.
In answer to the question of how the nursery ensured that children received a broad curriculum, staff at Southway explained that their Key Experiences plan showed how cooking covered all six areas of learning. Through careful structuring - for example, creating the visual cookbooks and arranging ingredients and equipment in a precise way - and through their approach to interacting with the children, staff ensured that whether a child cooked every day, or played in the block play area for half a term, they were having a rich and balanced early education.
However, we were determined not simply to try to translate an approach from one place to another. For a start, Kate Greenaway is very different to Southway. We are in central London, with an age range of children from six months to rising five years old. Southway at that time had only threeand four-year-olds, and in much larger numbers. Second, we had seen a range of impressive approaches to early education in a number of nurseries, and were inspired by different aspects of what we had seen.
In addition, we wanted to maintain some of our own existing good practice, evolved over time. Finally, we wanted our approach to help us make sense of the EYFS. Throughout this work, we were supported (and often challenged) by our pedagogue, Professor Tina Bruce. We wanted our work to build on her approaches to play and children's development, which have influenced us greatly.
What is a Core Experience?
As a result, we developed what we call a 'Core Experiences' approach. Core Experiences are learning opportunities presented to all our children either every day, or at least very regularly, and which are suitable for children across the whole age range.
We worked on 14 Core Experiences, ranging from block play to cooking, to trips out and gardening. Each Core Experience has an overall introduction, explaining our approach to organising the experience and presenting it to the children, and then a second section in which the Development Matters section of the EYFS is condensed so that staff can see at a glance how children's self-initiated play and activity links to all six areas of learning.
This section of the Core Experience is intended to support our team in setting up and maintaining the areas, and also to help us to think about how we can interact with children to broaden their learning and help them make progress across all areas.
In addition, we have found that the Core Experiences help us to observe in a more focused way. Whereas an observation of a child deeply involved in block play might once have picked up on problem-solving and physical development, we are now much more open to seeing how block play links to other areas like early literacy.
Once we had planned the whole set of Core Experiences, we were able to feel much more confident about two aspects of our approach to the EYFS. First of all, it was easier to navigate the huge size of Development Matters. We could start with our condensed overview to consider the broad direction and pace of a child's progress across multiple areas of development, and then turn to the full document if necessary.
Second, because each Core Experience is high-quality and cross-curricular, we could rebalance our approach to planning meetings. Instead of spending so much time thinking up new activities and filling in boxes on planning sheets, we could be confident that the basic planning was already in place. This freed up time to talk about individual children and groups of children, to think about their interests and their needs, and to plan in detail at that level. It felt like in the past a lot of effort was spent thinking about and writing up what would be in this area or that, often with little rationale.
Developing and refining pedagogy
What also became clear is that we needed to think more about our actual minute-by-minute approaches to interacting with children, supporting their thinking and teaching them new skills.
As a team, we spent time thinking about what the role of the adult is in early education, finding a way between the extremes of a completely child-initiated approach which might end up being very 'hands off', while ensuring that we did not interact so much that we interfered in and undermined children's play.
Our first attempt at summarising all this is included at the start of our Core Experiences booklet, and we are working on an action research project to explore this further. Our early results look promising. With staff feeling clearer about what learning and development is possible in each area, and what progress looks like, more attention can be paid to listening and watching carefully, and interacting in a sensitive but also challenging way.
Our approach needs much more development and refinement. Yet as work in progress, we are finding it very promising. Instead of being buffeted by central Government policy, we have found a way to steer our own development, while still taking account of the statutory sections of the EYFS, guidance and best practice.
In fact, I would argue that the Government and its agencies would do well to think a great deal more about what would enable nurseries to develop practitioners' knowledge, skill and professionalism, and put less emphasis on new initiatives and yet more guidance.
I think the future of early education lies in developing more sophisticated ways of planning the learning environment, and being more thoughtful about children's development as individuals and in groups. The Kate Greenaway team has made a start on this project for the future with the Core Experiences approach, and we hope it will be of interest to others too.
Julian Grenier is head teacher of Kate Greenaway Nursery School and Children's Centre, London
COLLABORATION, NOT SECRECY: HOW TO ACCESS OUR PLANNING
One thing we noticed when we started work on developing our approach to the curriculum was that it was difficult to get hold of many examples of other people's work. Yet when we visited nurseries, staff were invariably helpful and open - we were allowed to see everything we wanted to, given photocopies of planning and policy documents, and given frank appraisals of what was going well, or not.
It seems like many of us spend a great deal of time drawing up policies and guidelines, when we could make our lives a little easier if we collaborated more. There are many people in the early years who are good at using the internet for social networking, e-mail, searching out information and setting things up online. So, we decided to experiment with putting all our work online in a Wikia format, so that others could re-use what they wanted, collaborate, or disagree.
The Core Experiences Wikia has several advantages over a conventional policy booklet. You can go from the condensed outline of development, to the full text of Development Matters, with a single click - no need to keep shuffling through page after page.
More radically, the Wikia allows users to re-edit the document, improving things and adding to the work we have done. Lastly, anyone can copy bits of the booklet and adapt them for their own use, as long as there is no financial gain.
AN EXAMPLE OF A CORE EXPERIENCE
There are 14 Core Experiences in total in our document, all developed by building on our existing practice and considering examples of good practice observed in other nurseries. One example is gardening, which is something we think is really important at Kate Greenaway.
We thought that gardening can sometimes be a bit random. When spring comes, there might be enthusiasm to plant seeds and look after the plants. But an approach like this will not enable children to have the types of repeated experiences they need in order to build their learning over time.
By developing a gardening Core Experience, we started with the determination to offer gardening to children all year round. That way, they could experience different seasons and weather conditions, and the different approaches needed when, for example, planting and looking after Brussels sprout plants in soggy winter soil compared with the regular watering that tomato plants need in hot summer months.
Children who are keen gardeners not only learn about planting and looking after the plants - we have also thought carefully about the types of tools they need to develop their physical skills, how early literacy is supported through the need to understand instructions on seed packets and stick labels in when seedlings are planted, how gardening depends on counting and solving problems around space and measures, and so on. As a result, we can be sure that a child who spends a lot of time gardening will develop their learning across the whole of the EYFS.
The Core Experience on gardening helps practitioners to think about what sort of progress a child might make through repeated experience of gardening, and what they might introduce to extend children's skills and thinking - for example, new tools like rulers to measure; discussion and thinking about what is needed for successful growth.
REACTIONS TO THE CORE EXPERIENCES
Our first booklet outlining our approach has been received with enthusiasm. In Islington, London (our local authority), lots of nursery settings and childminders have come to discussions and received copies, which they have then put into action.
Penny Kenway, who heads Islington's Early Years Foundation Stage team, commented that 'the document's accessibility to all fulfils the key role that nursery schools and children's centres can and must play in disseminating the good practice they have developed'.
Sir Jim Rose, who led last year's independent review of the primary curriculum, has praised the booklet for 'providing a really good insight into the reality of providing a broad and rich nursery education'.
Iram Siraj-Blatchford, co-director of the EPPE Project, wrote, 'This document is a brilliant example of a group of professionals applying evidence-based principles to extending children's learning. The child is at the heart of this document. However, unlike many other documents, this work also keenly and willingly shows the power and need for the profession's crucial role in empowering children to extend their play, interests and thinking by building on the children's motivations. Any early childhood educator would benefit from reflecting on the content here.'
You can buy copies of the Core Experiences Handbook, fully illustrated with colour photographs, from Early Education's online store at www.early-education.org.uk or by phoning 020 7539 5400. The booklet costs £17.50 per copy, including packing and postage. You can also access the online version at www.coreexperiences.wikia.com
