Modern Childhood > Info & links > The Schoolification Of Early Childhood
Too much too soon
What do parents want when their child starts school? The hundreds I’ve asked usually come up with a three-point wish list. They want their offspring to learn the 3Rs. To settle happily into school, getting along with other children. And to enjoy learning, so they’ll go on to secondary school ready to take full advantage of the rest of the educational system.
Yet, despite twenty years of curriculum initiatives, British children still lag behind in international surveys of literacy and numeracy. They were bottom of the league in a UNICEF survey of childhood well-being (scoring particularly badly when asked whether they trusted their classmates). And only around half our increasingly jaded teenagers gain five good A-C grades (including English and Maths) in their GCSEs.
Why do other countries do better than us on all three counts? One huge difference is the school starting age. Most British children now start school well before they’re five, some just after their fourth birthday, and are expected to crack on with the 3Rs straight away – in England all five-year-olds are expected to read and write (using punctuation!).
Elsewhere the starting age is at least six. Indeed, in Finland, where literacy standards are the best in the world, it’s seven. In these countries, children follow a ‘kindergarten curriculum’ from the age of three, based on play (especially outdoors), stories, music, art and drama. The idea is to develop their language, attention, and social skills, creating firm foundations for successful formal education.
It’s time we recognized that too much too soon isn’t working. To give our under-sevens the best chance of growing up bright, balanced and literate we must stop trying to fast-forward their education. They need time to grow, talk, sing, listen to stories and enjoy that most vital ingredient of a good childhood – play.
Full text of an article published in The Times, 16/10/09
A longer article on this subject (Four Years Bad. Six Years Good) can be found in Childhood articles.
There are different policies on school starting age and early years education in the four countries of the UK.
England is about to reduce the starting age from five to four, although the highly regarded independent Cambridge Review has suggested delaying formal education till six, as in the ‘kindergartens’ described above. There is also an extremely bureaucratic and legally-binding framework for anyone looking after children outside the home between birth and five, called the EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage), which involves targets for reading and writing. I’m a founder member of a campaign called Open EYE, which is trying to get this changed – for more information, see www.openeyecampaign.wordpress.com.
Wales has introduced a Foundation Phase between the ages of three and six, which is broadly in line with practice in other European countries. It’s well summed up on this short video by Teachers TV. Of all the UK countries, Wales seems to me streets ahead in terms of early years and primary practice.
Scotland has a starting age of five. The Scottish Curriculum for Excellence recommends active learning for young children, but as in England there is still downward pressure from the ‘target culture’ to get started on formal learning well before six.
Northern Ireland has always started children in school at four – one of the youngest starting ages in the world. Recently, the Revised Curriculum has suggested that learning should be play-based and active for the first two years, but a traditional emphasis on formal learning has meant that in many schools the 3Rs are still seen as more important.
http://www.nicurriculum.org.uk/foundation_stage/reporting/information_for_parents.asp
In terms of the ill-effects of early schoolification for children from less advantaged homes, this letter to the Times, which I organized in 2005, was signed by professors of human communication, linguistics, neuropsychology and early education, as well as another prominent literacy specialist and the country’s foremost expert on dyslexia:
In a multi-media world where children increasingly arrive in nursery or primary school with poorly-developed speech, attention and social skills, the development of oral language is of even greater importance. Many have had few life experiences beyond watching TV, and there's much groundwork to be done before these children are able to read and enjoy books, wield pencils and understand what writing is about.
However, despite the best endeavours of early childhood specialists and government advisers, our extremely early start on formal education (the earliest in Europe) leaves little time for early years practitioners to develop children's speaking and listening through the sort of first-hand experience and child-friendly structured activities used in other European countries.
While children elsewhere follow a 'kindergarten curriculum' until they are six years old (indeed, in Sweden and Finland, the two countries that do best in international studies of literacy, until they are seven), children here are often required to start on more formal approaches to reading and writing when they are five, four and sometimes even three years old. Many therefore fall at the first fence in literacy learning and, sadly, catch-up programmes do not seem to work. We believe this is a key reason behind our country's inability to reduce the 'long tail of underachievement', especially in areas of deprivation, despite the huge investment of recent years.