Education > Articles
Digging Around the Foundations
By Sue Palmer and Ros Bayley
published in the Times Educational Supplement in 2005
The literacy view (by Sue)
If it weren’t so terrifying, it’d be funny. The DfES, in its infinite ignorance, is busy conflating child development and target-setting. The Early Years Foundation Stage framework – a detailed curriculum for children between 0 and 5, currently up for consultation on the web – segues effortlessly from cooing and gurgling at a few months old to writing sentences (‘some of which are correctly punctuated’) at five.
The bureaucrats at DfES have recognised that children’s development in the early years has a huge knock-on effect on their education. And being bureaucrats, they’ve tried to sort this out in the only way they know how. By systematising the preschool years in the same way they’ve been systematising education for the better part of a decade.
If their new framework becomes law, and childcare and education are henceforth seen as synonymous, we’ll sentence tiny children to the sort of target-driven insanity that now infects every aspect of primary education. Developmental milestones will become objectives, tick-lists will take over the nursery, and children will be graded from birth – pass or fail, win or lose… Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta...
As an independent literacy consultant, I’ve watched in horror as the government’s targets agenda turned many primary schools into test-factories. Politicians may boast that 11 year olds achieve higher scores in reading and writing than a decade ago, but everyone in education knows that children aren’t getting more literate – it’s just that teachers are getting better at teaching to the test. Indeed, children today are distinctly less literate (they read less than ever), motivated and well-behaved than they were before all this nonsense started. We’ve moved so far towards objectives-based teaching that we’ve forgotten that real learning (especially at primary school – and even more especially in the early years) is a holistic process.
A narrow, standards-driven approach is at its most destructive in the early stages of education. Early years teachers I meet are often in despair at having to push children to achieve ‘literacy objectives’ that are developmentally inappropriate – they know it will do more harm than good. And government statistics back them up: despite the early-start frenzy, around 30% of children still fail to reach a Level 2B in the Key Stage 1 tests for reading, and nearly 40% in writing. If children don’t get a 2b at seven, the chances of an ‘average’ score at 11 are low – unless, of course, Key Stage 2 teachers devote their time to coaching, boosting and teaching to the test, in order to save the politicians’ skins.
It’s time primary teachers fought back, and the best way to start is to listen to the arguments of the early years lobby. These people understand little children and how they learn – and every early years expert I’ve ever met believes that formal literacy teaching should not start until Key Stage 1. Eminent professors in linguistics and child development support them. (Indeed, last week I interviewed a neuroscientist employed by government to review scientific research on early learning and – although she points out there’s as yet no concrete evidence one way or the other on early start policies – she intends keeping her own summer-born son back a year, so he doesn’t enter reception till he’s nearly six.)
The trouble is, there’s a long-standing gulf between early years professionals and Key Stage 2 people – we come at education from different perspectives, with different value systems. As a Key Stage 2 person myself, until a few years ago I privately believed most early years teachers were pink fluffy idealists, stuck in an old-fashioned ‘child-centred’ dream world. But collaborating on a book about early language and literacy learning meant that I had to confront my prejudices.
It was tricky entering an unfamiliar sector of education, learning to listen to new arguments, and discovering (or perhaps rediscovering) what ‘child-initiated learning’ really means. If it hadn’t been for the patience and persistence of two foundation stage colleagues, Ros Bayley and Lynn Broadbent, I’d still be in a fog – the unhappy, confused fog caused by a decade’s quest for standards at the expense of children’s learning.
So I believe that, if we’re ever to stop the nonsense of the number-crunching, blinker-wearing, target-setting zealots at DfES, it’s essential for Key Stage 2 people (especially the ‘literacy lobby’) to work closely with colleagues from Foundation and Key Stage 1. That means really listening to each other, in schools, in local authorities, in colleges and universities. We have to sort out for ourselves the difference between child development and education, between what comes naturally to children and what society needs to impose, between facilitation and teaching. Only then will we be able to mount an effective offensive against the increasing madness issuing from DfES.
The early years view (by Ros)
In some ways, Sue Palmer and I couldn’t be more different. For years we’ve moved in different circles and viewed education from different perspectives. Although our mutual desire to change things for the better brought us together, please believe me that this was not a partnership made in heaven! We may have been united in a belief that the ‘too much too soon’ culture of this country is damaging children, but agreeing upon what should be done about it was no easy ride.
But then, why should we be surprised about this? When we met, I didn’t understand where Sue was coming from, and she didn’t understand my perspective. Partnerships need to be nurtured. Trust and respect have to be built. Partners need to learn the art of listening, and they need time to acknowledge and deal with the conflicts and prejudices that divide them. So how come the DfES can’t (or don’t want to) see this?
The major stumbling block in terms of children’s progress is the guidance on Communication, Language and Literacy. When learning goals for this strand of the foundation curriculum were devised back in 1999, the literacy lobby was very strong – they had the personal backing of David Blunkett and the muscle of his enforcer, Michael Barber. In desperation to reach agreement and ensure the long promised guidance was released, early years experts were persuaded to accept some decidedly ‘aspirational’ goals.
History has proved them wrong. As a result of this decision – and despite the valiant efforts of many excellent foundation stage practitioners – many children, forced to aim too high too soon, simply fail. And then they give up. As Homer Simpson so memorably put it: ‘Kids, you’ve tried your hardest and you failed miserably. The lesson is: don’t try.’
It’s bad enough that professional, hard working teachers now blame themselves when children fail to reach the ‘aspirational’ targets. But the far greater evil is that many children – especially boys – now fail in the literacy stakes before they’ve even begun. And please don’t turn round and accuse Sue, me or my early years colleagues of low expectations. All we ask is that the goals are developmentally appropriate.
In order to understand what such goals might be, you need to understand young children. Many Key Stage 2 people out there still don’t know that the early learning goals they’re forcing on their children are wildly inappropriate. And, put bluntly, they don’t know that they don’t know. (Incidentally, literacy colleagues – before you take a gun to my head, I’m happy to admit that there are many things about literacy that I don’t know I don’t know…as Sue regularly reminds me).
At the moment there’s real confusion about what is right for the youngest children in our society, and unless professionals work together to achieve clarity, the forces of ignorance will move into the space. So practitioners across the foundation and primary sectors need to understand how children are best taught at different stages – and why.
Sue and I have discovered how difficult it is to break down long-established barriers – everyone has prejudices to overcome. But we must overcome them and talk, as professionals, to each other about the needs of the children in our care. There’s no time for territory-staking – we have to be ground-breaking. For my own part, I’ve probably been guilty of being too compliant – but all that’s changing. In the face of this assault on children, I’m turning into a tough old bird – but not so tough, I hope, that I’ve stopped listening to colleagues in other parts of the profession.
It’s not easy to listen in a culture where everyone’s so exhausted by constant change that they don’t have time to think. But it’s never been more important to create time to reflect. So many children now grow up reluctant to read (and unable to think) that we must be doing something wrong. We have to shrug off the defensiveness that comes from many years of watching our backs, enter into debate and establish new understandings to move the profession forward.
And then, once we’ve begun talking and listening to each other – and re-establishing our professional self respect – we can also start talking and listening to parents. We have to rebuild trust between the two groups of people who inevitably have children’s best interests at heart. The government’s policy of ‘exhaust, divide and rule’ mustn’t be allowed to damage further generations of children.