Photographs at Southlands Kindergarten, Newcastle under Lyme, by Andrew Fox.
All early years practitioners need to be familiar with the Early Years Foundation Stage in time for its introduction in September. What is important to remember in the countdown to implementation is that the EYFS represents continuity, rather than wholesale change. And so, preparations can be seen as an opportunity to check if current practice is working well, rather than as a race to meet stringent new requirements. This is particularly important to bear in mind when it comes to planning for children's learning.
Let's be clear, the EYFS does not require settings to compile new documentation for planning or observation. Nor does Ofsted specify types of planning, pro-formas or other paperwork. The EYFS guidance offers suggestions on planning - as in the CD-Rom materials linked with Enabling Environments card 3.1 - but none are compulsory.
What is required is that early years providers plan according to the principles of the new framework, which has a strong focus on leading through alert observation of what children actually choose to do.
And come inspection, what matters is that early years practitioners are able to 'talk planning' with the inspector. That means being clear about what you do and why.
WHAT 'PLANNING' MEANS
In the single set of Welfare Requirements, the overall statement about Organisation says, 'Providers must plan and organise their systems to ensure that every child receives an enjoyable and challenging learning and development experience that is tailored to meet their individual needs' (Statutory Framework, p37). But what do words like 'plan' mean in practice?
Relaxed learning that promotes choice and decision-making by children depends on a working definition of 'planning' that is flexible, paper-light and closely linked with observation (often very informal) of what babies and young children currently choose to do.
The commitment to 'planning' needs to mean that practitioners are creating possibilities for children and offering opportunities for learning. Unfortunately, in recent years too many early years practitioners have been pushed to believe that 'planning' means lots of paperwork and high direction by adults, who have already decided what is going to happen today.
Young children cannot be active in their own learning if they are directed into predetermined activities, sometimes planned months in advance. Inflexible written plans are also usually linked with 'learning outcomes or intentions' that would still be educated guesses, even if they were written yesterday about individual children whom you know very well.
This misinformation about 'planning' also leads good practitioners, especially those who work with under-threes or two-year-olds, to say that they 'don't do much (or any) planning'. However, such practitioners are often very thoughtful about the resources and experiences that they provide for children.
I watch them being sensitive to babies and young children through their interaction and fine-tuned judgements about timing. Their practice is an excellent example of observation-led, developmentally appropriate short-term planning. This kind of practitioner behaviour is what is meant in the EYFS about being responsive to the current interests, developmental skills and preferred ways of learning for individual children.
PLANNING AND THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
Good practice means that 'planning' has to include adult attention to an accessible learning environment - the continuous provision, indoors and outdoors.
The EYFS has highlighted what was already regarded as good early years practice by identifying the theme of Enabling Environments (look especially at Principles into Practice card 3.3). Sensible planning considers storage, organisation of space, and resources, so that babies, toddlers and young children can make genuine choices - and increasingly help to tidy up resources as well.
Good practice is to be alert to how young children use the learning environment, and then to make any adjustments on the basis of your informal observations. It is not child-friendly if you regularly change their environment, without any discussion with the children, in order to fit your topic plans.
Resources certainly should not be removed just because adults feel that some children play 'too much' in one particular area. Observant practitioners think of additional resources or play activities that could build from children's current enthusiasm.
Planning has to be led by a learning environment that enables young children to make decisions and follow their own preferences for much of their play and involvement in the daily routines. Children cannot develop as young learners if they regularly face a situation in which all the play resources have already been selected and laid out by practitioners. It is possible to make the indoor spaces and the garden welcoming without making all the choices for children in advance.
PLANNING FOR THE WISE USE OF TIME
The term 'planning' has to include adult reflection about time and timing. Babies and children benefit from routines that provide a sense of emotional security and increasingly enable children to anticipate what will happen next.
Sensible planning includes time management, so that a day or session is not overloaded with a list of have-to-do activities. Appropriate planning across early childhood also shows full respect for children's personal care routines and their motivation to be an active helper in the ordinary domestic routines of the day.
Children need generous time to evolve their own play, exploring the available resources. Special experiences for the day - adult-initiated and possibly adult-led at the outset - have to be offered as possibilities over a reasonable period of time. It is not good-quality early years practice if children are required to leave their own absorbing activity to join a practitioner-led activity at a time chosen by that adult.
This working definition of planning creates adult-led disruption and makes it hard for children to concentrate. The approach also makes it more likely that practitioners overlook what and how young children are learning through their self-chosen play and conversation.
Such an approach will cause problems, because there is a strong focus in the EYFS on weighting observations towards child-initiated experiences. This balance explicitly includes documentation for the Profile at the end of the stage.
PLANNING FOR THE WISE USE OF PEOPLE
Thoughtful planning includes attention to the role of the adult: as a friendly companion to children for play and conversation, as well as someone who will take good care and keep children safe.
In group settings, the people-planning needs to cover how you organise it so that children get generous attention, sometimes in their key person group. Planning is also needed to ensure that in full-day provision, babies and children get out and about through ordinary trips in the local neighbourhood.
Planning with a team inevitably means that everyone has to share a commitment to make adults easily available to babies and children - a friendly human play resource. An unbalanced approach to planning often leads to adults being closely involved when they are organising their own focused or structured activities. Then the adults tend to step back, or busy themselves with other tasks, over the period that is defined as 'free play'.
Once such a view of planning takes a firm hold, practitioners can be puzzled as what to do when they are not leading the play. The result is often that children would welcome less adult direction during the focused activities, and more friendly adult presence in the 'free play' times.
FLEXIBLE WRITTEN PLANS
Young children need thoughtful adults who are able to look ahead and make useful plans about what may happen and in what way. This aspect of planning will probably be written down. Forward plans can be a way to offer interesting new experiences and areas of knowledge to young children, so long as plans are viewed and used as a working document.
A topic approach is not, and never has been, compulsory for early years practice. Additionally, the approach will not work with under-threes. Very young children's knowledge and understanding of their own world is not yet at the point where topics make any sense to them.
A broad theme can work as a focus for some adult-led/initiated experiences when adults have been thoughtful about their choice, provided they consider certain issues:
- Is a proposed topic likely to make sense to young children? Will there be enough connections with what they already understand and know?
- Is a topic the best way to approach this area of learning? Most abstract concepts like size, colour and other ideas are far better approached through adult responsiveness to what has interested individual children today through hands-on, authentic experiences of the world around them.
- It is also important to be aware that plenty of learning value will happen 'outside' the current topic.
Written plans have to be drawn up by, or with the full participation of, practitioners who know the children. It is not good practice for team leaders, nor for someone in the upper hierarchy of a nursery chain, to write plans as orders that are then handed out to the face-to-face practitioners. When a team leader, or anyone else, holds tight to the written plans, then face-to-face practitioners can feel uneasy about making the crucial short-term planning decisions. Observation-led planning is effectively impossible.
Young children need practitioners who are not so in thrall to their own written plans (or intimidated by the person who wrote those plans) that the adults will not diverge from what is on the paper or laminated planner for today.
It is never good early years practice to trudge on with the planned activity, regardless of uninterested little faces in front of you. It certainly is not good practice if exciting events like the discovery of a frog in the garden are put on hold, or curtailed, because an adult-planned activity is supposed to happen now.
If children want to look at, draw or do research on frogs, then this activity overrules any adult-led alternative plan. The adult plan can happen tomorrow. Young children's enthusiasm will not survive regular experiences of 'not now - come away'.
In early years practice, there has to be a fine-tuning for next week, tomorrow, this afternoon and even the next ten minutes.
- Resources that have intrigued a baby or several toddlers or children need to remain available or to re-emerge tomorrow.
- An interesting topic focus or project, started by an adult, has to leave scope for what has seized children's interest, the questions they want to ask and the information they want to find out.
- Any useful written forward plans are open to change in the light of what has happened today. It is wise to have open space on paper plans, or a 'what actually happened' notebook to accompany any laminated planner.
Sometimes, the right decision will be to abandon your written plan completely for the day or the next week, because an idea from a child, or small group, has enthused everyone. It will be most surprising if a large proportion of the learning possibilities, in your plan, are not achieved through the child-initiated project to, say, re-enact a recent family wedding or create a wall mural of the exciting thunderstorm.
Any kind of documentation should be responsive to a child-initiated project. The 'learning story' or 'journey' approach is ideal because the story of learning and any photographs or written explanation follow in children's footsteps. (See the resource on the EYFS CD-Rom linked with Enabling Environments 3.1 - Observation, Assessment and Planning.)
THE IMPACT OF OBSERVATIONS
ADULT-LED AND CHILD-INITIATED EXPERIENCES
A strong focus on play runs through the EYFS and is summed up in the Welfare Requirements about organisation. 'Providers must ensure that there is a balance of adult-led and freely chosen or child-initiated activities, delivered through indoor and outdoor play' (Statutory Framework for the EYFS, p37). The wording of this sentence encounters potential problems with meaning, because the EYFS pack does not offer definitions of these key phrases.
The EYFS materials have shifted the terminology to 'adult-led' from the previously more common 'adult-initiated'. These two phrases do not have the same meaning, but are potentially less troublesome than 'child-initiated'. The addition of the words 'freely chosen' should have been enough, except that a primary school definition of 'child-initiated' has slid unannounced into some early years thinking and writing.
In my dictionary, the word 'initiate' is defined as to 'begin, commence, enter upon, to introduce, set going, originate'. However, some otherwise good resource materials now include suggestions with a great deal of adult pre-planning and direction under the 'child-initiated' heading.
The ideas are less adult-directed than those under the heading of 'adult-led', but it is impossible to see how children have originated the experiences. Practitioners are encouraged to introduce resources or set going a line of questioning or exploration. So, these suggestions are actually about 'adult-initiated' experiences: the heading that has disappeared.
Fortunately, the EYFS team at the Department of Children, Schools and Families do not share this view. Their reply to my e-mail query in summer 2007 was that, '"Child-initiated" or "freely chosen" activities would be those where a child selects the resources they will use from those that are available and decides how they will use those resources - examples might include a child deciding to play shops in the home corner, a child experimenting with filling and emptying containers in the water tray, or a child using bricks to create a roadway for the toy cars. Practitioners may involve themselves in these activities where appropriate, but they are initiated by the child.' This working definition was officially confirmed by Ann Langston (a regional Foundation Stage advisor) in her article for Nursery World (see box). Child-initiated activities are self-chosen and adults need to respect children's choices and their purposes.
GOOD PLANNING TOLERATES UNCERTAINTY
A child-friendly approach to planning has to acknowledge that uncertainty is an integral part of genuine play for children. Playful experiences are rarely determined all in advance.
Ann Langston introduced the meaningful idea that it is perfectly legitimate that children take ownership of an adult-initiated activity. It is not appropriate to insist that 'purposeful', 'productive' or 'good-quality' play is only achieved if adult intentions matter most of all.
- There needs to be a to-and-fro between adults and children in enjoyable play and conversations.
- Helpful practitioners are aware of the vocabulary that it may be useful to introduce - through a meaningful adult comment on what is happening or an open-ended question. But no way can you help children if such suggestions are followed in a checklist fashion.
- Nobody can plan for what children are to think. You can plan for interesting experiences, when the outcome or answer is not obvious, and allow time for children to explore.
FURTHER READING
- Dowling, Marion, Exploring young children's thinking through their self-chosen activities, 2008 DVD and booklet, Early Education
- Featherstone, Sally (ed), Like bees, not butterflies: child-initiated learning in the early years (in press for 2008) Featherstone Education
- Lindon, Jennie, Understanding Children's Play (2001), Nelson Thornes
- Lindon, Jennie, What does it mean to be ...? A set of four books focusing on two-, three-, four- and five-year olds (revised edition in press 2008), Step Forward Publishing
RELATED ARTICLES
- Marion Dowling's series on children's thinking, 21 February, 20 March and 17 April 2008. The final part will be published on 15 May
- Ann Langston, 'All about ... the language of the EYFS', 1 November 2007
- Jennie Lindon, 'Right from the start', Nursery Business, spring 2005, published with Nursery World on 17 March 2005
- Jane Drake's 'Around the nursery' series on how to resource and support continuous provision, Nursery World, 4 October, 1 November and 6 December 2007, 4 January, 1 February, 6 March and 3 April 2008. Resourcing role play will be published on 1 May.
