early years

‘Good news; bad news’ on the educational front this term. Good news: extra funding to ensure that more 3 and 4 year olds can access 30 hours of provision a week. Bad news: the pot of £50m will create only 9,000 places across a possible 200 settings, initially in just six areas of ‘social mobility’. Even worse news: in my humble opinion, it’s all too little and too late. By which I do not mean that the government’s response is untimely: I mean that additional educational provision for children at the age of 4 or even 3 is rather too late for those most at risk from the impact of poverty.

It’s simple. For children to do well at school, to gain good qualifications and to succeed as socially and economically competent adults, we need to support them before they arrive at school. One of the most predictive factors in a child’s likelihood of educational success is the quality of their first 1001 days of life: from bump to birth to beyond. Skills development during the first three years of a child’s life happen at an accelerated rate – lots going on, lots to learn.

Children who routinely share books at home are far more likely to come to school with ‘age-related’ reading behaviours; children who don’t, quite obviously, won’t. Nor will they come with all the other skills supported by simple, book-sharing routines: a range of vocabulary; social and emotional skills developed by empathising with characters in a book; the ability to listen and respond, to consider and articulate their own opinions (‘How do you think Max felt when he saw his supper was still hot?’ ‘Which one of the wild things did you like the look of most?’). All of this undercover learning, from the rich brain-growing loam of a simple 15 minute story, gives our toddlers the best chance to succeed once they arrive at ‘big’ school. Imagine the even greater benefits if said child toddles off with their grown-up to the local library once a week and chooses some of these books for him/herself: independence of choice; articulation of selection; physical development in negotiating the different textures of pavement/path/library steps; chances to interact with other children. So much learning from a simple library visit with the benefits of a book to share too.

But it is not all about books: physical development is also key to life-long learning. Toddlers who are physically active have brains far better developed for learning than those who have been kept inert but safe, inside, coddled in a world of iPads and Kiddie-vision. Brains that have enjoyed a visit to the park and had to work out how to climb the steps of the slide without falling off; how to use arms/legs as props/stabilisers to ensure that rolling down a grassy bank is a brilliant, rather than bruising, experience; how to jump safely across the gap in the little park wall, where the bin used to be, to demonstrate super-heroic powers worthy of Spiderman – all these brains will be ready to access more structured learning required when they arrive at school at 3 or 4. If their early experiences, both inside and outside, have not helped the synaptic development of their neural pathways then they will be playing catch-up to close the gaps from the minute they put on their first school jumper.

I am much exercised by this topic of pre-school-school this week, as we celebrate the first anniversary of the Children’s Centre at school, working with parents in our neighbourhood to support their children’s learning from bump to birth. We also welcomed our second cohort of two year olds into the nursery. There we read books together, we went to the library, and came back via the park – parents, toddlers, babies and all. For more than half of the group this was the first time they had undertaken such an epic outing (the library is an eight-minute walk away; the park a scant five-minute stroll). Our families are not neglectful, but they are cautious; they are not forgetful about reading, but need to know that sharing a book with a child who cannot yet read is not a ‘silly thing to do’; they are not anti-open air activities but they need to understand that rolling down a grassy slope is not necessarily dangerous and dirty but actually fodder for the brain.

The sort of ordinary activities that many children and families consider to be part of family life are, quite simply, extraordinary for others. These are the families with gaps to be closed from the outset and who require more than the option (where it exists) of extra hours of provision at the age of 3. As a headteacher who is passionate about the underlying principles of CPRT, I believe it is our moral and educational duty to support these children before school, if we are to avoid handing out a multiplicity of labels stating ‘well below age-related’ when they arrive in nursery. As a Leeds headteacher, I am fortunate to work for a local authority which actively promotes the importance of ‘babies, brains and bonding’ as part of a city-wide Best Start plan for our families. A core part of the training for practitioners from a range of sectors is research around infant brain development, with the stark reminder that we must create opportunities for our babies and toddlers to learn.

N.B. If somebody at the back just muttered ‘Surestart’ please could they come and wait outside my office at lunchtime? ‘Use it or lose it’ indeed…

Sarah Rutty is Head Teacher of Bankside Primary School in Leeds, part-time Adviser for Leeds City Council Children’s Services, a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance, and Co-ordinator of CPRT’s Leeds/West Yorkshire network. Read her previous blogs here.

Last autumn hundreds of thousands of four-year-old children, as diverse as any group pulled from the population, were each assigned a single number score which purported to predict their future progress in learning. They had been baselined.

They arrived in reception classes from school nurseries, from private or voluntary nurseries, from childminders, and from homes where they had no previous experience of early years provision. They came from families awash with books, talk and outings, from families struggling with the economic and emotional pressures of life, and from troubled backgrounds and foster care. Some were hale and hearty while others had a range of health conditions or special needs. Some were fluent in English and some spoke other languages with little or no English. And some were nearly a year older than the youngest, 25 percent of their life at that age. Yet with no quarter given for such differences, they were labelled with a simple number score within six weeks of arriving at school.

In the face of widespread and vehement opposition (including from CPRT’s directors) DfE had decided on baseline assessment not to support children’s learning, but as a primary school accountability measure for judging schools when these children reach Year 6. Unsurprisingly, recent press reports indicate that lack of comparability between the three approved schemes may mean the baseline policy will be scrapped – possibly in favour of a simple ‘readiness check’. Frying pans and fires come to mind.

The fact is, there is no simple measure that can accurately predict the trajectory of a group of such young children. This is not to deny a central role for assessment. Teachers assess children on arrival in a formative process of understanding who they are, what they know and understand, how they feel and what makes them tick, in the service of teaching them more effectively.

As CPRT has frequently pointed out in its evidence to government assessment reviews and consultations, the confusion of assessment with accountability results in a simplistic number score which ignores the range and complexity of individual learning and development, over-emphasises the core areas of literacy and maths required by the DfE, and places a significant additional burden on teachers in those important early weeks of forming relationships and establishing the life of a class.

Recent research by the Institute of Education into the implementation of baseline assessment confirms that teachers found the process added to their workloads, yet only 7.7 percent thought it was an ‘accurate and fair way to assess children’ and 6.7 percent agreed it was ‘a good way to assess how primary schools perform’.

What is the harm? Aside from the waste of millions of pounds of public money going to the private baseline providers, there is concern about the impact of the resulting expectations on children who receive a low score within their first weeks in school, and who may start out at age four wearing an ‘invisible dunce’s cap’. CPRT drew attention to this risk in its response to the accountability consultation, saying ‘Notions of fixed ability would be exacerbated by a baseline assessment in reception that claimed to reliably predict future attainment.’ For children whose life circumstances place them at risk of low achievement in school, being placed in groups for the ‘slower’ children and subjected to an intense diet of literacy and numeracy designed to help them ‘catch up’ will deny them the rich experiences that should be at the heart of their early years in school to provide them with the foundation they need.

Better Without Baseline echoes CPR’s statement on assessment in its 2010 list of policy priorities for the Coalition government. CPR urged ministers to:

Stop treating testing and assessment as synonymous … The issue is not whether children should be assessed or schools should be accountable – they should – but how and in relation to what.

Unfortunately policy makers are seduced by the illusion of scientific measurement of progress, using children’s scores to judge the quality of schools. Yet there are more valid ways to approach accountability. Arguing for a more comprehensive framework, Wynne Harlen said in her excellent research report for CPRT:

What is clearly needed is a better match between the standards we aim for and the ones we actually measure (measuring what we value, not valuing what we measure). And it is important to recognise that value judgements are unavoidable in setting standards based on ‘what ought to be’ rather than ‘what is’.

Baseline assessment is not a statutory requirement, and this year some 2000 schools decided not to opt in; that remains a principled option for the future. We can hope that government will think again, and remove the pressure on schools to buy one of the current schemes. What is needed is not a quick substitute of another inappropriate scheme such as a ‘readiness check’, but a full and detailed review of assessment and accountability from the early years onward, where education professionals come together to discuss and define what matters. The aim should be to design a system of measurement that is respected, useful and truly supports accountability not only for public investment but most importantly to the learners we serve.

Nancy Stewart is Deputy Chair of TACTYC, the Association for Professional Development in Early Years.

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