If first reactions to something new are, indeed, the most telling, then I think two of the initial responses to Dame Clare Tickell's review of the EYFS are worth emphasising. First, the sector gave the review a swift and positive response. There is practically no criticism of the review to be found - only the smallest quibbles. Second, there is a profound gap between how the EYFS is understood by the early years sector and by the media.
This gap is most easily summed up by noting that even the quality press - the Times Educational Supplement, the Guardian and the Telegraph, for example - referred to the EYFS as the 'nappy curriculum'. They implied that it is a largely inappropriate curriculum for babies and toddlers. But the sector told Dame Clare, among the unprecedented 3,300 submissions to her review, that we generally like the EYFS and think it has made practice for young children more, not less, developmentally appropriate.
The EYFS was implemented in September 2008, and the review states that 'two years on, there is much to be proud of'. There is also much to be pleased about in the report. The principles of the EYFS are upheld, and overall the EYFS is judged to have improved the quality of early education and care in England. This is important, because it implies that we should continue to evolve practice, rather than change it. There has been so much change in recent years, so much work put in, often in the hardest of circumstances, through heroic feats of unpaid overtime. This is not the moment to start all over again.
I think there are many important messages to be strongly welcomed. A number of agencies, including local authority advisory teams, Ofsted and the National Strategies, have together created a climate of excessive paperwork and monitoring. The review turns back this creeping culture by clearly stating that practitioners should be spending time with children, not writing up pages of plans, notes or reports.
Few will dislike the proposal that there should be no requirement to risk-assess every trip to the shop or park, and I suspect that few will mourn those culled EYFS Profile Scale Points and Early Learning Goals, either.
OMISSIONS
The review is clear about young children's need for emotionally warm care, in safe and secure environments. However, there are no clear proposals about how this is to be managed. Perhaps this implies that the Key Person approach should remain a requirement in the EYFS. But the comparative lack of focus on how exactly care for children should be organised strikes me as an omission.
The Key Person approach puts its main emphasis on thinking about how the child is experiencing and managing the demands of being in group care. This is an important counterbalance to the language of attainment and outcomes which tends to dominate discussion at the moment.
The review's strong support for a better-qualified and more professional workforce has been widely welcomed. Yet it is interesting that the report so often chooses general terms. There are lots of references to practitioners and settings, for example, while terms like nursery nurse and teacher are rarely used. While this makes the report inclusive, it can also mask important issues.
Research, most notably the EPPE project, has consistently found that maintained nursery schools, and children's centres based around nursery schools, provide the highest quality early education and care. Yet the importance of preserving the dwindling number of nursery schools is not stated in the review.
Kathy Sylva, Professor of Educational Psychology at Oxford University and one of the directors of the EPPE project, recently noted that 'there is a direct relationship between observed quality in early childhood settings and the presence of qualified teachers on the staff'. The review does not fully grasp this nettle: if we want better quality, then research indicates we need to have more specialist early years teachers, and we need to keep our existing nursery schools and the children's centres based around them.
QUESTIONS AND SENSE
There has been considerable discussion of the proposal to move away from the current EYFS structure of six equal areas of learning and development. The review proposes three prime areas which are the foundations for children's ability to learn and develop healthily: personal, social and emotional development; communication and language; and physical development.
I suspect, however, that this will not bring about radical change - early childhood education has prioritised these areas for a long time. One might wonder how this strengthened commitment to physical development sits with the lack of requirement for settings to have an outdoor area.
The review also calls for research into the question of how children learning English as an additional language should be helped to develop it in the EYFS. I have not been able to locate any research on this question; the main findings from international research focus on the importance of children developing fluency and vocabulary in their first language, and point to the longer-term benefits of bilingualism (acknowledged in the report).
On observation and assessment, the review includes a great deal of good sense, bluntly stated. Although the EYFS does not require shelf-loads of paperwork to be kept, many practitioners are keeping volumes of detailed observations and assessments. This might be useful if we were writing biographies of the children in our care; but we are not. The only useful assessments are those that lead to actions - that put something in place for a child, or help to pinpoint a problem. The review briskly dismisses well intentioned but unhelpful notions, like the 'rule' that 80 per cent of assessments should be of child-initiated activity.
I think we need to take this discussion further. Have we developed an unbalanced approach to curriculum planning that is excessively led by individual children's interests? If so, this risks undermining a more holistic approach to thinking about what sort of experiences and equipment will benefit groups of children. When we have seen a child playing with cars, and plan more experiences for him with wheeled toys, then the risk is that we fail to widen his horizons. We fail to think about offering a broader education.
PLAYFUL TEACHING
Similarly, we need to give more thought to the role of play in children's early learning. I do not find the review consistently helpful in this respect. The recommendation that 'playing and exploring, active learning, and creating and thinking critically, are highlighted in the EYFS as three characteristics of effective teaching and learning' raises many questions for me.
I am not sure what the distinctions between 'exploring' and 'active learning' are, for example. Where play is thought of hand-in-hand with teaching, I think the report is alluding to the types of 'playful teaching' outlined in the Early Years Learning and Development Literature Review.
The Literature Review advocates 'playful teaching' in contrast to whole-class phonics teaching in the EYFS, saying that 'the best approach to phonics appears to be informal activities in a play context ... Thus, phonics instruction may be appropriate in the Foundation Stage for some, but not all, children'.
So, the research supports 'playful teaching' in some specific contexts. Research does not support a general blurring of teaching and playing. Last month, Tina Bruce wrote in Nursery World that 'play transforms first-hand, direct sensory experiences and physical movement into rich symbolic experiences'. I think the review gives little emphasis to this sort of play, which is chosen and led by children.
Finally, it is worth considering that in September this year, many reception classes will include very young four-year-olds because of the new single point of entry. The review makes a sensible recommendation that we need to look again at ratios in reception, to ensure children have enough support. It is easy to forget that, as Kathy Sylva recently said, 'international experts are surprised that we have such young children doing academic learning'.
One of those experts, Lilian Katz, Professor Emerita of early childhood education at the University of Illinois, has said that the EYFS is 'a major step in the right direction', but argued that 'available research suggests that the benefits of the formal academic instruction for four- and five-year-olds seem to be promising when tested early, but considerably less so in the long term. Indeed, there are some indications that the long-term negative effects of premature academic instruction are more noticeable for boys than for girls'. If we do not think carefully about this now, then we might find ourselves, and our children, paying for our thoughtlessness in the future.
I think the Tickell report is a thoughtful, careful and welcome piece of work that should stimulate a great deal of further thought and professional dialogue. By this, I mean both informal exploration - talking with colleagues, looking more closely at our work and how it helps or hinders children - and formal research, training and development. The review opens a new phase in a professional conversation, and we should engage with it accordingly rather than seeing it as the final word for now.
Julian Grenier is early years adviser for the Children, Schools and Families Directorate, London Borough of Tower Hamlets
REFERENCES
- - The Early Years: Foundations for life, health and learning - An Independent Report on the Early Years Foundation Stage to Her Majesty's Government by Dame Clare Tickell, www.education.gov.uk/tickellreview
- - Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE report), http://eppe.ioe.ac.uk/
- - Early Years Learning and Development - Literature Review (2009) is available to download from www.education.gov.uk.
