Here Comes the Sun- Again

For the last few years, as the winter solstice approaches, I have written a reflective blog. It seems the seasonal thing to do as we face the longest night of the year and mark the season in which we slowly begin our journey back from the darkness into the light. Of course, communities in our cold little island have done this for millennia, but while our distant ancestors celebrated the continual fertility of evergreens and the restorative powers of fire in heat and light, as the solstice rolls around yet again, for us, it’s time for the annual infants and juniors nativity play. I was surprised to read Toby Young’s recent take on this in The Spectator: ‘I never cease to wonder at all the parents up on their feet filming the entire performance...are they really going to afflict this on the grandparents’ because I am a grandparent who loves being ‘afflicted’ to such an extent that I always do my very best to attend in person. 

What I love most of all about children’s nativity plays (besides seeing my own wonderful grandchildren of course) is the glorious, mash-up celebration drawing upon both old and new cultural narratives; a continuation of what human beings in Britain have been doing since they arrived here, whether they called their winter festival Yule, Samhain or Christmas.  This year, my 5 year old grandson’s Reception/Year 1 nativity was constructed in the style of Strictly Come Dancing, with the donkey, the inn keeper’s wife and Caesar as the judges and the other characters typically found in the nativity play as the contestants. The angels were ballet dancers, the stars did a sort of hand-jive, the inn keepers did a tango, and the camels flossed. The flossing camels were my own personal preference for the glitter ball. The audience were invited to cheer the kind, generous judges (the donkey and the inn-keeper’s wife) and boo the nasty judge (Caesar). And at the end, Mary and Joseph brought the baby Jesus to watch, reminding us that that the festival that marks the returning of the light was always rooted in the concept of new life, and new beginnings.

While we are all located in our life journeys by generation, ethnicity, gender and many other individual differences, what we can all share in the annual mid-winter festival is the celebration of new beginnings in the returning of the light. And, like many grandparents I suspect, this always triggers a reflection for me on how swiftly another year has passed, and how quickly my second generation of ‘little ones’ are growing up; a reminder to treasure these all too brief years of childhood.

Every so often, other incidents occur that remind me of how quickly the years have passed. During a picnic in the park this summer, when I told my grandsons and some of their friends to ‘be careful’ a deep voice behind me said ‘I have always been very careful since your granny told me to be, boys’. I was immediately transported to a summer day long ago when this father-of-three climbed a lamppost near my house and I found him hanging on at the top, being called a ‘thug’ by a neighbour. We both laughed then, remembering my comment to the adult that he was a daft kid, not a thug, and the ‘now what has that taught you’ telling off I gave him when he managed to scramble down. These are the homely incidents of which real human lives are made, not bungling politicians in Westminster or Washington, professional rivalries, social media spats or any pattern of electrons in the internet.  

Someone recently asked me, do we mourn for our children when they are grown and gone to forge their own lives? It’s a question that I have contemplated many times over the past decade. My initial experience of absent children was walking around silent, tidy bedrooms while the young people they belonged to were away at university. I used to think of this as rather like being Mrs Darling in Peter Pan, with children who had flown away, but would be back soon. Then as summer came around, the ‘boings’ from the basketball hoop in the back garden would sound again, alongside now deeper voices from young men playing there as they had for so many summers, walking in and out to get beers from the fridge rather than Cokes. Then as university days retreated into the past, the back garden fell silent and the bedrooms were turned into offices as my children began to travel the globe. This was not so much of a period of mourning, more a wistful lull...
 
Last year I read an article written by a mother who, after she took her son to university for his first year, had a repeating dream that she did just this, but came home to find that he was a baby in his cot again. It wasn’t an online article, and there was no contact information for the author, but had I been able to do so, I would have replied well, that’s exactly how happens, but it will be another baby who looks a bit like your son, and you will have to wait just a little while longer for that. And now, a child’s bed and boxes of toys can yet again be found in one of our bedrooms. This summer, I found my eldest, 8 year old grandson looking thoughtfully at the rusty basketball hoop on the back wall of our house. ‘Granny, have you got a basketball?’ he asked.

So round the cycle we go again, and the fact that our winter festival can be so effectively tracked into the distant past seems to me to be a comfortable illustration of the continuity between generations across millennia. And this year, as midnight chimes on the 21^st December and yet again, we move slowly back into the light, I will again be contemplating the long line of ancestors who took time out from the joys and sorrows of the human existence that we all share to celebrate this perennial event within the culture of time and place in which they were located. I will also be looking forward with hope to the future solstices my grandsons will see, up to the dawn of the twenty-second century and beyond, with the celebrations of time and place reminding them too that, for another year, Here Comes the Sun.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Early Years Professional Status: Past and Future

At the beginning of the twenty first century, a number of reports (for example Laming 2003 and Ofsted reports of some day-care settings, e.g., Ward 2005) indicated that the UK was were seriously failing the very young in English society, resulting in the production of The Every Child Matters (2003) agenda. 

In October 2005, the Early Education Advisory Group in England proposed that there should be a new early years leading practitioner role that, while encompassing many of the features of the existing nursery teacher role, also embraced social and most importantly, emotional development at a more informed level, developing the complex blend of skills and knowledge to lead a multi-agency child care and education team in the new Sure Start Children’s Centres, which had begun to provide a complex range services for children aged birth to five years and their families. Many high profile early years research projects, in particular, the British-based Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) project (2003 Online) produced findings indicating that outcomes for children, particularly those from a background of disadvantage, were improved when practice in the setting was lead by a graduate. It was therefore additionally agreed that these new Early Years leaders should be trained at university level, most particularly becoming experts in child development theory and practice relating to working with parents and families, particularly those with children under three.
 
The role of Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) developed from this basis, under the administration of the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC), a QUANGO created in 2005 by the New Labour government. The EYPS project was an attempt to support the most effective concepts and structures of Early Years practice in England, and to move these forward under a new band of leaders who would further develop these for the twenty-first century. The concept of the ‘pedagogue’, which has a long record of success in Scandinavian nations, had a strong influence upon the model drawn up for the Early Years Professional (EYP). The initial requirements for the EYP were stated as follows:

• An in depth understanding of child development from birth to twelve;
• A focus on how children develop and learn; the role of the adult in supporting learning -  about natural science, the arts (dance, music, visual, drama and literature), mathematics, music; 
• Observing, assessing, evaluating and planning learning opportunities, for individual children and groups of children; 
• Working effectively with the most vulnerable children, including children with special educational needs and disabilities;
• Working with parents; working within a multi-agency team, with an understanding of the contribution of other professional disciplines; 
• The ability to listen, to reflect, to critically analyse and to apply in practice, with an emphasis on practitioners as evidence based practitioner researchers; 
• An understanding of the broader social and economic issues that impact on children and families 

(Early Education Advisory Group 2005, Online)

The focus on the wider age range, which had been based upon the notion of children’s centres providing out-of school care for children up to twelve was dropped during the later planning stage of the project in favour of a more concentrated focus on the pre-school birth to five stage. EYPS was eventually shaped into a graduate leadership role for the full range of Early Years settings in England. The resulting training programme was piloted by the CWDC in 2006, and its first full year of national operation commenced in January 2007. 

The stated New Labour government (1997-2010) target was that there was to be at least one Early Years Professional (EYP) leading practice in all Children’s Centres offering daycare by 2010 (two in areas of disadvantage), and at least one EYP in every full day care setting by 2015. EYPS was introduced as a qualification that was to be equivalent to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), but different in nature. However, in practice, when teachers and EYPs began to operate within the same environments some role confusion arose. In particular, the focus for QTS (Early Years) is children between the ages of three and seven years, while EYPS had been designed to focus on children aged between birth and five years; this made for a difficult overlap. Teacher training also emphasises the delivery of specified learning outcomes to children, while EYPS training focused upon a child-led agenda, which required far more theoretical child development content. One of the early solutions to this impasse, introduced by Children’s Centre managers, was to employ teachers under the proviso that they would take an in-service programme to gain EYPS. As time went by those of us who trained EYPs found that they began to be employed under the proviso that they would also take an in-service programme to additionally gain QTS (Early Years). Unfortunately, such grassroots solutions, which worked out reasonably well on a setting-to-setting basis only added to the confusion at the policy-making level, which viewed the developing situation as increasing training costs.

While the EYP role was modeled upon the Scandinavian pedagogue, the British Sure Start project (1998) was modelled upon the US Head Start initiative, which began in 1965 (Head Start 2010). Sure Start was introduced in the 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review, with the New Labour Government’s announcement that it would set up 250 Sure Start Local Programmes in disadvantaged areas around the country. In 2000, the number of Sure Start projects expanded to 524. In what was designated ‘Phase One’ of the Children's Centres programme (2004-06), 800 existing settings were given the status of ‘Children's Centres’. In ‘Phase Two’ (2006- 08), funding was made available to open many more Children’s Centres, taking the overall numbers to 2,500. Most of these additional settings were newly created. By 2010, at the end of ‘Phase Three’, it was intended that there should be 3,500 Centres nationwide (Children, Schools and Families Committee 2010, Online). 

The New Labour government did not however mention the EYP role in this 2010 report, stating instead that ‘The involvement of early years qualified teachers is essential to the ambitions of Children's Centres to provide the highest quality early years experiences… the requirement for early years qualified teacher posts should be increased to achieve this if necessary’. Two months later, they were voted out of office and a new Conservative-Liberal Coalition took over, proposing in their manifesto:

We will take Sure Start back to its original purpose of early intervention, increase its focus on the neediest families, and better involve organisations with a track record of supporting families. We will investigate ways of ensuring that providers are paid in part by the results they achieve. We will refocus funding from Sure Start peripatetic outreach services, and from the Department of Health budget, to pay for 4,200 extra Sure Start health visitors 

(Cabinet Office 2010, p.19).

As such, those 4600 individuals (CWDC figures, March 2010) who qualified as EYPs across the nation over 2006-2010 were only been ignored by the outgoing government that created and funded the status, but were also subsequently side-lined by the incoming Coalition government, who stated an intention to revert to a purely health-oriented model of services for young children and their families. The Coalition government intended to take an entirely new route, funding the training of a nearly identical number of new health visitors to the number of EYPs currently available whose expensive training had already been funded by the state. By 2017, following two subsequent elections, 350 Sure Start Centres, that is 10% of those opened at great expense over the early 2000s, had closed down (Walker 2017).

In 2013, Michael Gove’s Department for Education discontinued Early Years Professional Status, revising it into Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS), altering the skills outcomes to become less about understanding child development and more about managing teaching and learning, with a heavy focus on early literacy (including phonics) and numeracy. This created an even greater overlap with QTS (Early Years) and caused great consternation amongst the early years community (Gaunt 2010). Applicants for EYTS were also required to have the same qualifications and undertake the same skills tests as applicants for QTS (Early Years); however EYTS did not bestow Qualified Teacher Status, with EYTs subsequently having a less obvious career development trajectory and being employed on a lower pay scale than Nursery Teachers. By the end of the 2016 academic year, EYTS training programmes were closing down all over the country due to lack of applicants. Many universities reported that their EYTS graduates were going directly onto early years QTS programmes.

I began employment with a team training Early Years Professionals in January 2007, and left in September 2013. By this time it was clear to me that the creation of a graduate early years expert to lead holistic practice with young children and their families, particularly those living within situations of disadvantage, had been a brief illusion. I had always felt that, within the English care and education system, the role had been poorly framed from the start, and that the EYP should have been conceptualised as a graduate professional to slot into the existing gap: to work with children from birth to three and their families. However, I was hopeful of a future where there would be growing recognition, as we find in other nations, that the early years developmental period stretches from birth to seven, and that we would eventually train EYPs across this age range, possibly with an option to specialise in birth to three or three to seven. In reality, this never came to pass and in the England of 2018, this prospect seems as far from realisation as it did at the end of the 20th century. 

But it is still possible that a change of government may change the early years landscape. There is still also the potential for the brief English EYPS project to share its experience with other English-speaking nations. Scotland in particular may be an ideal location for such a project, with its booming Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) aware nation project and its growing synergy with the Nordic awareness of human developmental issues; the culture from which the role of the pedagogue originates.

References

Cabinet Office (2010) The Coalition: Our Programme for Government. Available online at: <http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/files/2010/05/coalition-programme.pdf> Accessed 1st July 2010.

Children, Schools and Families Committee (2010) Fifth Parliamentary Report- Sure Start Children's Centres. Available at: <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmchilsch/130/13002.htm>  Accessed 24th July 2010.

Crown, H. (2016) Providers cut EYT courses due to low demand. Nursery World. Available at: https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/news/1157040/providers-cut-eyt-courses-due-to-low-demand Accessed 8th October 2017

DCSF (2010) The History of Sure Start. Available at: <http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/earlyyears/surestart/surestartchildrenscentres/history/history/> Accessed 31^st July 2010. 

DfES (2003) Every Child Matters, Green Paper. The Stationary Office. London.

Early Education Advisory Group (EEAG ) (2005) Annex 3, Paper 05/5/9, Item M available at: <http://www.tda.gov.uk/upload/resources/doc/b/boardoct05_early_years_teachers_c.doc> Accessed 2^nd April 2008

Gaunt, C. (2013) Anger at proposals to replace EYPs with EYTs. Nursery World. Available at: https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/news/1097569/anger-proposals-replace-eyps-eyts Accessed 8th October 2017.

Laming, W. (2003) The Victoria Climbe Report. Available at: <http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Society/documents/2003/01/28/climbiereport.pdf> Accessed 26^th July 2010.

Android Nation?

As the summer approaches, it is time for me to turn away from blogging and towards more extended academic writing. So I thought I would put together an overall reflection on some of the issues that I have been exploring in this ‘sandbox’ blog and other blogging sites over the past academic year. Those that stand out most prominently are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and a lack of understanding of child development in public policy making, which in the past year, has given rise to the OFSTED document Bold Beginnings and the DFE plans to ‘baseline’ test 48 month old human beings.

The more I contemplate these points, the more I see them as related symptoms of something that is becoming increasingly being lost in western society; a conception of ourselves as ‘real’ human beings rather than as manufactured androids; as organic creatures who have evolved to undertake a long developmental process which involves complex physical, social and emotional processes alongside and interacting with the development of intellectual skills.

I have written some extensively referenced blogs on various facets of this topic, but here I am simply going to ask the overall question: why does our current government insist upon wasting increasingly scare public funds on developing academic tests for children who have only been alive for a very short period of time, while so many families live in impoverished conditions which impact upon their physical and mental health, and create conditions in which recent research indicates that children’s stress coping mechanisms are likely to be poorly calibrated, predisposing them to poor mental and physical health in later life?

It seems to me I have asked this question over and over again in various texts over the last few years, and never received a satisfactory answer. The most prominent response; a proposal that such tests are necessary to make adults ‘accountable’ is dysfunctional on several different levels, most importantly because the children are simply too neuronally young for any accurate projections to be made relating to their future competencies, but possibly of even greater concern, because if a government distrusts the adults involved in children’s care and education to such a great extent, there must be something very wrong with the social cohesion of such a society.

When I first received my PhD, I envisioned a very different professional environment to the one I have experienced over the past decade. Reception, the school year in which most of my research observations had taken place, had recently been taken out of the National Curriculum, and placed under a new, more developmentally informed set of guidelines created for the care and education of children aged 3-5 called the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (2000). The care and education for children aged birth to three was governed by a set of guidelines entitled Birth to Three Matters, which had been drawn from an extensive state funded literature review of early childhood development. By the end of the decade, the two sets of guidelines were combined in The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) (2007), a child-led, play-based statutory framework for practice with children birth to five. The government had also put funding aside for up-skilling the early years workforce, and for a new graduate role in early years practice, the Early Years Professional who was to be trained in the facilitation of play-based learning.

The Children’s Plan, published in December 2007, set out the aspirations of the Brown New Labour Government for the further development of children’s services in England from 2008-2020, which included the provision of play areas and a comprehensive review of the primary curriculum, including the consideration of a more gradual transition from play-based learning to a more formal curriculum for 6-7 year olds. There was also a pledge to eradicate child poverty by 2020; but in reality in 2018, child poverty levels are higher than they were in the 2000s, with children as the members of contemporary British society most likely to be poor.

A decade later, the most obvious question is- so what happened?  A worldwide recession and a change of government, yes, that much is obvious. The decision to leave the European Union has also had a destabilising effect on British society in general. But when did we start to construct our youngest, most vulnerable children, and the adults who care for and educate them in such a very different way, and over such a very short period of time? When did we begin, as a society, to actually believe that it was more important to use public money to formally test tiny children than to enhance their daily lives and optimise their physical and emotional development? Why did this happen? These are troubling questions for troubling times, and I am going to give them a lot of consideration over this coming summer.

Baseline Analytica?

The more I see of the revelations emerging from the relationship between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and the political involvement on both sides of the Atlantic in this data omnishambles, the more concerned I become about the amount and types of data that are currently being harvested from children. As a nation that has signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, we are committed to doing all we can to ensure that our national policies comply with the articles of the Convention, including article 3: Adults have the responsibility to act in children's best interests and article 36: Children have the right to be protected from all types of exploitation. So, are we exercising these responsibilities with respect to our current data gathering activities with young people under eighteen?

The UK Information Commissioner’s office sets out the issues that must be considered before databasing information relating to children; for example that children cannot provide consent for their data to be taken or to be used, that there should be transparency about how the data collected is going to be used, that this should be made clear to the person with parental responsibility for the child, and that the parent should give formal consent to the data collection exercise. These conditions are familiar to researchers, as they are rooted in the principles first set out by the Nuremberg Code, devised by World War II allied nations in response to medical experiment atrocities enacted on concentration camp inmates.

When considered in this light, the English Department for Education’s current plans to undertake a mass data collection exercise with children in their first term at school via the means of an electronic tablet- based test descriptively labelled ‘Baseline’ is problematic from a wide variety of perspectives.

Firstly, there are no plans to provide clear information to parents about where and how the data is to be stored, how long it will be stored for and how precisely it is to be used, who will have access to it, or to obtain their formal consent for the harvesting of data from their child. Moreover, the DFE have already given two conflicting explanations to these questions. In Primary Assessment in England, published in September 2017 they state on p.15:

[Baseline Assessment’s] purpose will be to establish pupils’ prior attainment as the starting point for calculating progress measures when pupils reach the end of key stage 2. The new reception baseline will... be used seven years later to make the progress measure at the end of primary school. As now, this information will be published at school and local authority level on performance tables to inform parental choice.

However, in April 2018, they informed the TES:

The baseline assessment is not an accountability measure and won't be published. It is purely to assess children's starting point so that we can see how well schools help children to make progress during their time at primary school.

The DFE have not therefore provided a clear, logical rationale for running baseline testing. There are also additional major questions about this planned assessment initiative; for example it is obvious to developmental psychologists and neurobiologists that due to neuronal immaturity, it is impossible to reliably test children of the relevant age in the way that is proposed. There is also a 20% developmental difference between 4 and 5 year olds at the beginning of the school year, the same as between 8 and 10 years olds, however the DFE intend to ask all children the same questions in the same ways in the first half term of the reception year; this is poorly developmentally informed, and therefore highly illogical. And finally, turning to the prospect of teacher/ school/ head teacher accountability, this too is an illogical aim, because statistics indicate that the majority of primary schools do not retain the same head teacher during during the period that one cohort of children move through from R to Y6 and England’s problem with teacher retention has been a matter for public concern since the beginning of the 2010s. The number and level of inconsistencies in the rationale given for baseline testing does not therefore instil confidence.

Finally, baseline plans should be viewed in the context of plans to database information on primary school children at almost yearly intervals; baseline in reception, phonics in Y1, times tables in Y4 and formal end of key stage tests in Y2 and Y6. The inevitable result will be a huge pool of databased information extracted from the majority of children in the country (99% according to the National Education Union) before they even enter secondary school. One of the key problems of creating such a Pandora’s Box is succinctly voiced by David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, who  proposes that at worst, analyses derived from any big data set can be 'complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense'.  But this warning is unlikely to ameliorate temptations for future governments (whose political orientations we cannot predict) who come into the possession of such an extensive database on their population. Has this ever been considered, or discussed by Parliament? We have seen in the Facebook/ Cambridge Analytica situation how sophisticated analytics can be powerfully applied to even a poor and incomplete data set when it has been collected from a very large sample.

The Facebook/ Cambridge Analytica scandal has been a wake-up call for many, for example the swift rise of the #DeleteFacebook campaign. But while we are mulling over our own data issues, we should not be sleepwalked by the current government into the collection and potentially permanent mass storage of children’s data on a national scale. The campaign Defend Digital Me comments that currently ‘parents have lost control of their child’s digital footprint forever, by the child’s fifth birthday, thanks to local and national, policy and practice’. England is currently the only nation in the world with such ambitious plans to database so much information on the youngest members of its population, children who have no ability to give informed consent to such an exercise, or opt out from the process. Their parents do however have such a choice. Further information on this point is available on the More Than a Score website.