Nurturing the brain: play, development and learning

Play is essential to healthy brain development and learning in early childhood. Human brains evolved to “boot” principally through social interaction and exploration.

Early childhood education and care should be grounded in how young children’s brains naturally develop rather than rely upon teaching methods designed for older children and adults. Heavy reliance upon direct instruction for children under six conflicts with the developmental processes of the young brain potentially, hinders learning.

In the Beginning…

Human brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in highly social environments where cooperation was essential for survival. Play is therefore not a trivial activity but an evolutionary adaptation that supports learning and development. As Jerome Bruner (1976, p. 67) observed, young animals have extended childhoods because they need time to play, suggesting that play has an important biological purpose rather than being merely recreational.

Modern neuroscience helps explain why play is so important. During infancy and early childhood, the brain rapidly forms billions of neural connections, creating increasingly complex networks through experience. Neurons connect through synapses, and repeated experiences strengthen these pathways, making thinking faster and more efficient. This process, which can be colloquially described as the brain being "booted up," occurs most rapidly during the first six years of life, but continues throughout life, as we learn new skills and ideas. 

Simplified diagram of a neuron, with synapse. 

Building Brains

Young children build knowledge gradually by connecting new experiences with existing mental frameworks, or schemas. For example, a young child first learns the concept of a domestic cat, later groups cats with other pets, then understands the broader category of feline animals, and eventually forms more abstract associations. This growing network of knowledge allows children to process information more efficiently over time.

Working memory (Baddeley 2010) develops alongside these neural networks. It enables children to combine prior knowledge with new information to understand conversations, events, and learning experiences. Because working memory depends heavily on existing knowledge structures, meaningful experiences are essential for supporting later learning, most particularly infants and young children, whose neural networks are in such an early stage of development.

Executive function (Scorza et al. 2016, p.314) and self-regulation, which develop gradually throughout early and middle childhood. Executive function allows individuals to concentrate, resist distractions, plan, solve problems, and regulate emotions and behaviour. These abilities underpin successful academic learning and healthy social relationships.

The Role of Play

Research suggests that unstructured social play makes a significant contribution to developing executive function (e.g., Colliver et al 2022). Studies have found that children who spend more time engaged in active social or imaginative play demonstrate stronger problem-solving skills and better self-regulation later in childhood (Espy 2004; Ellis et al. 2009). Rather than being separate from learning, play actively builds the cognitive systems needed for future formal education.

When children experience developmentally appropriate, play-rich environments, they come to associate learning with enjoyment and curiosity. Singh (2014, online) quotes a teacher who comments ‘[young children] feel especially good if they discover something, if they construct knowledge themselves.’

By contrast, expecting very young children to memorise isolated facts without meaningful experiences can create frustration, anxiety, and negative attitudes towards learning.

Babies and young children learning

Babies are born with a preference for their mother's voice and begin learning through warm, responsive interactions with caregivers. Activities such as smiling, vocal exchanges, cuddling, and games like peek-a-boo teach infants the basic structure of human communication. These "serve and return" interactions, where caregiver and child respond to each other's signals, build essential neural connections that support language, social understanding, and emotional security.

As children mature, they extend these interactive skills beyond caregivers to siblings, peers, and other familiar adults. Through increasingly sophisticated conversations and shared play, they continue strengthening the neural systems that underpin communication and thinking.

Language development occupies a central place in this process. Human language is one of the most complex communication systems in nature, and mastering it requires many years of active practice. Children develop language not simply by being told the meanings of words but by using language meaningfully during play, conversations, storytelling, and social interaction.

Collaborative play is particularly valuable because children naturally create narratives, negotiate roles, solve conflicts, and experiment with ideas while talking to one another. These experiences allow them to practise using language creatively and flexibly, laying the foundations for later abstract thinking.

Research has shown that children who learn through collaborative exploration develop deeper and more flexible understanding than those who receive direct instruction alone Gopnik (2011). Without a teacher dictating every step, children search for information independently, test ideas, and consider multiple possibilities.

Neuroscience supports these findings. Curiosity activates brain systems associated with memory, making information learned during states of high interest more likely to be remembered. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked to pleasure and motivation, is released when children successfully explore and discover new ideas. This positive emotional experience strengthens learning and encourages further curiosity, creating an upward spiral of engagement and confidence.

The destructive role of stress

By contrast, cortisol, the hormone associated with stress and the body's fight-or-flight response plays a negative role in the development of the infant brain (Jarvis 2020). Warm, responsive caregiving helps keep children's stress levels low, whereas neglect, insensitive interactions, or unrealistic educational expectations increase cortisol levels.

When infants experience chronic stress due to insufficient nurturing interactions, their stress-response systems become overactive. This heightened state of alertness can impair executive function and reduce children's ability to regulate emotions and behaviour. If these children are later expected to learn through abstract verbal instruction that exceeds their developmental stage, the resulting stress may further interfere with learning rather than promoting it.

Long before the advent of modern neurobiology, Susan Isaacs (1952) offered copious observational evidence to indicate that children require emotional security before they feel able to explore, experiment, and learn confidently. With the addition of modern biological evidence, it becomes increasingly clear that psychological safety underpins the foundation of intellectual development.

So, what do infants and young children need?

During infancy and toddlerhood, children need warm, attentive caregivers who engage in frequent serve-and-return interactions and gradually encourage child-led play. By preschool age, learning should continue primarily through independent and collaborative play, supported by adults who extend children's thinking without dominating it.

Teachers should provide rich opportunities for conversation, exploration, imagination, and social interaction rather than focusing on direct teaching of abstract facts. Their role is to facilitate children's curiosity, guide exploration, and build upon children's interests in ways that match their developmental stage.

Primary and secondary abilities

It is clear that "primary" abilities, such as language, social understanding, emotional regulation, and communication, which humans naturally acquire through interaction must be prioritised in infancy and early childhood, so that "secondary" abilities such as reading, mathematics, and scientific reasoning, can be more effectively taught in later schooling.

Human beings did not evolve in a way that allows them to learn like computers, storing isolated pieces of information, and their “program” cannot be “hacked” to make this so. Human brains develop through rich social experiences, practical exploration, play, language, and emotionally supportive relationships, which build the neural architecture, executive function, self-regulation, curiosity, and confidence that prepare children for formal education.

Educators must recognise that strong foundations emerge from developmentally appropriate, playful experiences. By respecting how children's brains naturally develop, adults provide the best preparation for lifelong learning, emotional wellbeing, and academic success. We must ‘draw upon primary abilities, and systematically teach secondary abilities’ (Geary 2015, online).

A more detailed version of this article can be accessed here.

 

 

 

Once Upon a (Modern) Time…

 

Once upon a time, there was a grandmother who was sad. She had been born into a happy Kingdom, not long after a great war that had vanquished evil, and a beautiful young Queen had ascended to the throne. People who were poor, sick or old were cared for and children attended schools where teachers were free to enthuse and inspire them. But these days were over, and the Kingdom had fallen onto hard times.

Of course, there were some unkind and even wicked people in the Kingdom into which the grandmother had been born; even the Queen and her knights were not perfect, because that is the way that people are. But in general, the country was peaceful and cheerful, and when the grandmother was a little girl, laws were created to try to make sure people would be treated fairly, be well looked after and live in peace and friendship with the kingdoms across the sea.

But as the grandmother grew into a young woman, a witch ascended to sit at the Queen’s high table. She cast a spell to change the ‘heart and soul’ of the Kingdom, focusing the people upon money and possessions rather than upon the health and happiness of one another. The services that had been owned by the people were broken up and sold, and rich people began to make money from them.

All of this happened very gradually, so it took a long time for people to notice. A wicked warlock, who was in league with the witch, cast a spell over news and entertainment in the Kingdom to divert the people’s attention from what was happening in their land. Gradually, they became mesmerized by the cavorting of rich, vain and heartless people, and even entered competitions to become the focus of such ‘entertainments.’

As the years went by, the young Queen became a very old Queen, who was sad about the bad behaviour of some of her family. And although, by this time the witch was dead and the wicked warlock was very old, he had moved several of his dark knights into powerful positions in the government of the land, where they spread mistrust and division.

One of the dark knights became the most powerful man in the Kingdom by summoning a boggart to cast a spell over the people to make them believe the kingdoms across the sea had plotted against them. Another took over the children’s education, so they could be programmed to serve money rather than people, and in doing this, he took away most of what made them happy. The dark knights lied to the people, they lied to each other, and they lied to the old Queen, who lived all alone in a high castle. The Kingdom was becoming a lonely, unhappy country.

And then a great plague swept across the world. Many people in the country got sick, and some of them died. The dark knights were thrown into disarray. They asked the healers for help but sent them away when they were implored to refocus on what was best for the people rather than the money.

And so, the Kingdom plunged into a crazy situation where the people were locked up until the healers could cope with the numbers of sick, allowed out when the numbers of sick people reduced, then locked up again when more and more people got sick. Because, the knights said, this was the way they would be able to make the most amount of money.

The healers asked in vain for the knights to tell the people to wear masks, work at home as much as possible and keep a sensible distance from each other, so life could continue on a more even keel. But that was refused because, the knights said, it might interfere with the amount of money they were making.

Then one day, the people found out that while they had been locked up and not allowed to see people they loved even when they were sick and dying, the dark knights had been laughing at them and having parties in their castles, flouting the laws they had enforced on everyone else.

The grandmother’s little grandson knew his grandmother was sad because she had lost people she loved, and one day he said to her ‘that big knight shouldn’t be in charge.’

This surprised the grandmother because she didn’t know her grandson knew anything about the big knight. ‘Why do you think that?’ she asked.

‘Because he’s a liar’ the little boy replied ‘I saw him on TV. I might be only eight but I’m not stupid. Anyone can see that.’

The grandmother looked thoughtful. ‘Yes… he has no clothes.’

The child looked at her with a raised eyebrow. ‘Of course he’s got clothes, uck. But he tells lies, lots of them, big ones. It’s obvious. Duh.’

And so, the grandmother told her friends, who told their friends, who told their friends… and finally the spell was broken. Because the innocent eyes of an eight-year-old child had seen clearly what their stress-befuddled adult eyes could not.

And even if they didn’t live completely happily ever after, at least they weren’t living in a warped fairy tale anymore.

(With acknowledgements and apologies to Hans Christian Anderson)

Message in a Bottle

 

At 21.55 on Wednesday 1st December, I posted this tweet.

I had been idly browsing the BBC news website and seen a reference to the Daily Mirror article about a Christmas party held in Downing Street the week before Christmas 2020. And then the date jumped out at me: 18th December 2020, the day my brother died in hospital.

Seven weeks later our very elderly mother, who was in the last stages of Alzheimers, died in her care home. She had not seen any member of her family in real life for approximately a year at that point. We had carried out many FaceTime visits, but they did not allow her infant great-grandchildren to properly interact with their ‘Old Nana.’ This was always the element of visits most likely to raise a smile from her, despite the fact she had been unable to speak in sentences for the previous two years.

Angered that the UK government were partying as people, including my own relatives, had died with only kind strangers physically present, as relatives were prevented from being in attendance due to lockdown rules at that time, I tapped out a hasty tweet and posted it. Little did I know the response that I would get.

… A hundred billon bottles washed up on the shore

As soon as the tweet uploaded to Twitter, the icons underneath began ticking over like a timer. This continued all through the night, sped up the following day, and continued over that night and into the following day. It only began to slow down in the late evening of 3rd December. And even now, on the evening of 4th December, likes, retweets and replies continue to trickle in.

I began to feel like the man in the old song, who casually casts his message upon the sea in a bottle, and receives ‘a hundred billion bottles’ returned by people in the same situation as him.

The vast majority of tweeters offered their condolences. There were less than 20 spiteful replies, principally from bot and troll accounts, which I instantly blocked. Above all, tweeters told me their own stories of bereavement, loneliness and isolation over the various lockdowns of 2020-21. I will not quote any of them here, to respect the privacy of those posting, but here is a summary of points raised:

*Relatives in hospital in which no visiting was allowed, who died without seeing any member of their family again

*Relatives who were very elderly or terminally ill spending their last Christmas without being able to see any member of their family other than on FaceTime or through a window

*People unable to attend the funerals of their relatives other by watching on webcam, which had also been my own experience, due to living 250 miles away from their location

*NHS workers nursing Covid patients who had to spend Christmas alone, due to fears of infecting vulnerable members of their own families

*And, most frequently repeated: ‘I wasn’t able to hug any of my relatives when we were mourning the death of someone in our family who died.’

One of the tweeters posting to my thread commented they were only able to say goodbye to their relative on What’sApp. Another said the last message received on What’sApp from a much-loved cousin was ‘no visitors.’ One, although not reporting a bereavement, commented poignantly that she had only been able to see her granddaughter through glass during the first year of her life and consequently, the child still responded to her as though she was a stranger.

Finally, a few students and students’ parents offered their condolences and reported that although their story did not match the tragedy of many others in the thread, they had been fined for holding parties with people with whom they shared halls of residence, due to the rule of numbers in the lockdown legislation.

Inside the Westminster Bubble

The number of deaths registered in the UK over the week ending 18th December 2020 was 13011. The number of covid deaths on 18th December was 403. Neither of my relatives had covid; my brother died from cancer and my mother from extreme old age and Alzheimer’s. However, everyone in the UK who was seriously ill/died over that period was subject to the same lockdown restrictions; rules which the vast majority of the UK population obeyed.

The fact that we now know that parties were in full swing in Downing Street, with the Daily Mirror proposes, 40 or 50 people ‘crammed cheek by jowl’ is a trigger to the bereaved to relive the last days, hours and minutes of their dead relative or friend, experiencing additional pain and disillusionment in the realisation that the government were not obeying their own rules, which had deprived their dying relatives of comfort. The Independent adds that ‘party games’ were played, and additionally, that ‘Downing Street staff repeatedly held banned lockdown parties’ over the 2020 Christmas period to which ‘the PM would turn a blind eye.’

The Manchester Evening News quote the Prime Minister as commenting on 18th December that, over Christmas 2020, people should keep all Christmas celebrations ‘short, small and don’t see too many people.’ Earlier that day, he had tweeted that same advice. And then apparently allowed a party involving 40 or 50 people living in different households to go ahead in No 10 Downing Street that evening.

The Government insist that ‘rules were followed.’ But how that could be the case is unclear. On the BBC News website, there is a short reference to a legal loophole that puts government offices outside emergency legislation, so that Ministers have the flexibility to react swiftly to an emergency without breaking the law. But surely, it would be clear to an eight-year-old child that the desire to have a party is hardly an emergency.

The whole situation has been neatly summed up by Ros Atkins of the BBC, and his report can be viewed here.

So, how can relatives of people who died during the winter of 2020-21 process these revelations and move on? My tweet was also accessed by representatives of the Mass Media, and I was asked by some of them to explain my feelings to the general public, which I initially did on GMTV.

Down the mass media rabbit hole

I’ve been asked ‘how I feel’ by many people, friends and strangers, over the past three days. I think ‘bemused’ best sums it up. My tweet was spontaneously posted in response to an immediate feeling of disgust, that on the day my brother died with none of his family present- because we were obeying the law- the office of the Prime Minister had been irresponsible and disrespectful enough to throw a Christmas Party that broke that same law. The prospect that they may now be attempting to rely on a legal technicality to wriggle out of responsibility for their actions only makes it worse.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve also been a participant in two interviews where Tory supporters were on the panel, one a sitting MP. One argument they used to protect the government was that they didn’t agree with the lockdown legislation, intimating that people who did obey it were mugs. But the Prime Minister is quick to evoke the two World Wars of the twentieth century when he wants to hold forth about solidarity in adversity. What would have happened if the majority of the population had taken that approach then?

They also proposed that if the Prime Minister said the law had been obeyed despite not issuing an denial that parties were held in Downing Street over the lockdown period(s), then the people must accept that, and that he shouldn’t be questioned further. Why? I was not aware that the British Prime Minister was now the equivalent of an absolute monarch. And if the stories the papers are running are not true, why isn’t Downing Street categorically denying them, and threatening libel action?

Another argument put forward was that if the Prime Minister was not at the party, it shouldn’t be a problem. But this wasn’t a case of a group of young people illicitly partying in an older relative’s house while s/he wasn’t there. 10 Downing Street is the office and official residence of the British Prime Minister, one of the premier seats of the UK government, and the Prime Minister is in overall charge of what goes on within its walls. So, why doesn’t the buck stop with him, whether he was there or not, as it would with a Head Teacher if staff or pupils had broken the law in this way on school premises?

Sadly, I didn’t get the chance to follow up any of these questions. I have never been a Conservative voter, but I have always seen them as a party that emphasises tradition, respect, law and order. But perhaps this changed when Boris Johnson took over the leadership? It would have been helpful to explore that question with his representatives, too. But I didn’t get the chance.

I’ve also been shocked by contacts from other media outlets, to whom I did not eventually grant an interview, requesting huge amounts of personal information in order to run a story from a ‘reality’ perspective, focusing on individuals weeping and demanding personal apologies from the Prime Minister. When I explained that my perspective on the situation was not my own feelings, but the volume of response on the twitter thread; the hurt and anger so eloquently expressed by a huge number of respondents, their interest waned.

Most of all, I have been overwhelmed with the sadness, dignity and kindness of over a thousand strangers who posted a message about their own loss and sympathising with mine. I have tried to respond to everyone who posted a message about a death of a family member or friend, and I apologise to anyone I inadvertently left out. While engaging with so much tragedy was harrowing, the courage and public spiritedness expressed within the replies both touched and energised me. It is a testimony to the fundamental decency of a majority of British people, and for that reason, I would urge people to access the thread and read through it.

So, what now?

Honestly, I don’t know. I believe that people mourn and grieve in different ways and find their own strategies to get through such difficult times. My own ‘therapy’ over 2020 was to finish a novel I had begun sometime earlier, which deals with family, love, loss and redemption, published in July 2021. I have since moved onto constructing a sequel.

I personally wish the Prime Minister would resign. As a psychologist, it concerns me that the British people cannot feel safe while he is able to treat them with such disrespect and duplicity, and that this will negatively impact on national stability during a time in which there are many so very many other issues that add to public insecurity. But if he does not have the decency to step down now, the next step will have to be decided by the Conservative Party and ultimately, through the ballot box. In the end, history will judge.

I hope we begin to see more high quality investigative journalism in the style of Ros Atkins, asking abstract, salient questions to which responsible answers are demanded from public servants, including elected politicians. I hope we see less of journalists setting up reality circuses where all issues are personalised thence trivialised, contributing to the ongoing gaslighting of the population.

And I think for me personally, a good start would be a media and social media break. I will be taking this for at least the next week, during which time I hope responsible investigative journalism, and the efforts of opposition politicians will continue to be brought to bear upon the government, in pursuit of resolution.

Early Years Education: Building a Foundation for Meaning

  

‘Brains are built, over time, from the bottom up’ (Harvard Center on the Developing Child ND, online).

'Over the course of the reception year, teachers should plan what it is they want children to learn... teachers’ judgements will largely be based on whether children are learning what has been taught' (The Early Years Foundation Stage 2022, p.8).

Everyone knows that to build a sturdy house, it has to rest on sturdy foundations. The question is, what does a creating a 'sturdy foundation' look like, when building a brain? Does it consist of flexible, practical experiences that are shared with peers and adults, enriched by language which draws each individual child into understanding? Or does it consist of a programme in which the agenda has already been firmly decided by the adult?

Children under six have spent only 72 months in the world; they therefore have a very limited pool of existing knowledge to draw upon to try to make sense of incoming information. Therefore, 'beginning at the end’ with highly fixed objectives about what adults require them to learn is problematic, because they are at such an early stage of building their cognitive architecture. 

The content of the teaching environment acts as the cement; if it is flexible enough for the child to be able to stick the 'knowledge' bricks to the foundation below, then what is added to the construction will be durable. But if the cement is weak, the bricks that the teacher attempts to lay will inevitably become unstable, and compromise the stability of the eventual 'house.'

Children are born with far more neurons than they will eventually retain in adulthood; however the connections or 'synapses' between these are much less dense. The early development of the brain involves an extensive neuronal connection programme as children interact with their environment and strengthen those synapses that are well used, whilst those that are rarely used shrivel and may eventually die.

 
The first picture above illustrates how a synaptic connection may initially appear, and the second how it develops as it is continually used over a long period of time, like a path that is well used by people walking across a patch of land.

As time goes by, the brain creates complex interconnections between synapses, rather like a road network. Consider a country lane that might be connected to a few other roads along its length, and then a motorway which is intricately interconnected to many other roads for hundreds of miles.

The developmental synaptic connection programme is a long project in human beings. As puberty arrives, the brain begins its last big project: pruning superfluous connections in the prefrontal cortex, and creating stronger/ more complex links between those that remain. This is the area of the brain which deals with impulse control and the management of social behaviour, meaning that the human brain is not fully neuronally mature until the individual is around 25 years of age. 

Some amount of plasticity remains in adult brains and new synaptic connections can be made on a lifelong basis, rather like renovations on a house. But the basic architecture is constructed in childhood and adolescence, with the foundations being staked in the first seven years of life, as the individual not only stores 'content' but slowly links concepts together in infinite networks through the intricate neuronal pathways that are built through experience within and upon the environment.

As language skills mature, these act as an accelerator, allowing people to share thoughts and eventually think more abstractly, picking their way deftly through sometimes baffling conversations... as long as meaning is shared. Developing shared meanings is a crucial element of early education, as children come into contact with a wider community, outside the family circle. Our Victorian ancestors knew this, even though they did not have access to our level of neurobiological understanding. Here, Lewis Carroll depicts an 'adult' Humpty Dumpty introducing  'child' Alice to the process.

 

The only way we are able to understand (and laugh at) the video above is because we have learned that words have more than one meaning, and when they are used incongruously in the wrong conversation, the person using them in this way looks ridiculous. This is not something that can be rote taught; it needs to be learned by taking part in rich, organic conversations across the early years of childhood.

The psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk proposes that what happens between infants and carers in one-to-one spontaneous interactions is a type of improvised symbolic 'dance', which she refers to as a 'jazz duet'. This is how children learn to take part in the vast majority of everyday conversations they will later have with others, because these will also be spontaneous rather than rehearsed; human beings have the evolved capacity for this type of deep, symbolic 'intersubjective' communication. Alongside the ability to make and use tools, it is the feature that has made us the dominant species on earth.

To give an analogy, as every jazz musician knows, in order to join in a 'jam' session meaningfully, you must initially learn how to play your instrument, and how to tune into the rhythms of others. But before this can be effectively accomplished, apprentice musicians  need a lot of scaffolded practice with experienced players in authentic situations, which gradually builds the necessary underpinning neuronal connections. 

Our current understanding of how the human brain constructs itself during the developmental period suggests that this happens via what is termed ‘embedded mental representation’- i.e. that we incrementally memorise and co-ordinate our experiences. This generates an increasing ability to organize thought, gradually resulting in the ability to manage incoming information and locate it within memory in increasingly sophisticated neural networks. This results in increasing ‘metacognition’: thinking about thinking.

As we become more expert at this we become able to use such networks to focus attention without becoming distracted by the intrusion of non-relevant thoughts. This requires ‘inhibitory behaviour’ and the younger children are, the more difficult they find this; their thoughts are far more susceptible to interference than those of adults, due to the immature networks across which they travel.

To return to the road analogy, the order in which we construct understanding requires that roads are built on footpaths and motorways are built on roads. Teaching that requires a young child to catch on to small chunks from highly complex concepts and the presumtion that they can be retained in long term memory does not draw upon the way that human brains actually work, particularly when the role that language plays is also considered.

When we further consider the neuronal immaturity of young children, the quest that is recently being undertaken by the British Government, to formulate a ‘baseline’ assessment for four year olds that could accurately predict future progress seems even more ridiculous, particularly when it is considered they intend to base future school rankings upon the data that they are gathering.

This not only suggests that many contemporary early education policies are shockingly ill-informed, but in terms of children’s natural neuronal difference from adults, also discriminatory and therefore contrary to their human rights. This could of course, eventually lead to claims for compensation for psychological damage suffered by a whole generation forced in early childhood into what had, at that time, already been identified as highly developmentally inappropriate situations. But surely, there is still just time to ensure that it does not come to this.

Bibliography

Brown, T. T., & Jernigan, T. L. (2012). Brain development during the preschool years. Neuropsychology Review, 22(4) 313–333. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-012-9214-1

Crone, A. and Ridderinkhof, R. (2011) The developing brain: From theory to neuroimaging and back. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 1 101–109

Carroll, L. (1871) Alice Through the Looking Glass. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12/pg12-images.html

DFE (2021) The Early Years Foundation Stage, 2022 handbook. London: DFE. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1024319/Early_years_foundation_stage_profile_handbook_2022.pdf 

Harvard Centre on the Developing Child (ND) Brain Architecture. Available at https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/brain-architecture/

Jarvis, P. (2020) The Myth of Early Acceleration in S. Palmer (Ed) Play is the Way. Paisley: CCWB Press.

PBS (2012) The Secret Life of the Brain: the baby’s brain. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5HUDVNbGs&feature=emb_logo 

Piaget, J. and Inhelder, B. (1969) The Psychology of the Child. Basic Books, New York.

Tierney, A. L., & Nelson, C. A. (2009). Brain Development and the Role of Experience in the Early Years. Zero to three 30 (2)

Zeedyk, M.S. (2006) From intersubjectivity to subjectivity: the transformative roles of emotional intimacy and imitation. Infant and Child Development. 15 (3).

Reggio Emilia: A Triumph for Maternalism

Maternalism in the Present 

I reached one of those sad watersheds in my life in February: my mother died. She didn’t have covid; she had Alzheimers for nearly a decade, she was ninety-two, and her passing was not unexpected. But as always, such events give rise to reflection. In 2010 as she first began to decline into her final illness, I dedicated my book ‘The Early Years Professional’s Complete Companion’ to her, commenting

‘My mother was born two days after British women finally achieved the franchise on the same basis as men: what a long way both you, and we have travelled in your lifetime.’

Optimistic words. But how far have we really travelled, as women, particularly in our role as mothers?

This is something I explored in one of my chapters in ‘Everyday Social Justice’ in 2019, from the perspective that while women engaging in paid work outside the home gradually became more normalised by socio-political changes in the last quarter of the twentieth century, they still faced a formidable level of social control, particularly in their role as mothers, feeling squeezed between the demands of paid work and family labour, whilst being relentlessly evaluated in both roles; an issue that has grown with the advent of mass online media and social media.

In 2019, Yinka Olusoga and I questioned:

‘A culture of performativity and compliance... make[ing] teachers, children and parents alike feel that they are compelled to comply with its demands...broadcast[ing], in the manner of Star Trek’s Borg collective, ‘Resistance is futile’ – a message designed to ensure mass capitulation.’

McRobbie writes of a “mediated” maternalism which has resulted in ‘previous historical affiliations between social democracy and feminism which aimed to support women as mothers [being] dismantled and discredited’ (McRobbie 2013, p.128).

“Maternalism” (Koven 1993) is a communal alliance between those who work together (including men) to support the well-being of young children, particularly those from socio-economically deprived backgrounds. Its origins track back into history; but at one point in the past, it briefly burned brightly on the national stage, before sinking back into near oblivion in the wake of the Great Depression.

Maternalism in the Past 

During the early 1920s, as the rights of women were being hotly debated in Parliament, Inverness-born Margaret McMillan, the founder-manager of an internationally celebrated nursery school, brought together an alliance of apparently powerful women- Queen Mary (1867-1963) and the first two women to serve as MPs in the House of Commons, wealthy socialite Conservative Nancy (Lady) Astor (1879-1964) and committed feminist Liberal Margaret Winteringham (1879-1955) to put the case for state-funded nursery schools on the national agenda (Jarvis and Liebovich 2016).

But despite the apparently high status of this alliance, the venture proved to be perilous, and forms the basis for the insecure status that many early years settings endure in the present. McMillan’s efforts to re-create her practice in a national network of nursery schools did not meet with success due to lack of funding forthcoming from the government, and her sense of failure blighted the final years of her life (Jarvis and Liebovich 2016)

In 1932, the year after McMillan’s death, her ex-student, Miriam Lord, Superintendent (head teacher) of Lilycroft Nursery in Bradford led a protest against Bradford Education Authority’s decision to impose a limit of one-third of a pint of milk a day upon children in their nursery schools. It is a situation that continues today, nearly a century later, in the £20 per week benefit cuts recently imposed by another Conservative government, in an era where 31% of the nation’s children are officially designated as ‘poor.’

Lord’s nursery was located in an area of great socio-economic deprivation where poverty-related childhood illnesses such as rickets were rife, and for several years she had been allocating one pint per day to each child, to use with cereals and to drink throughout the day.

She appealed to Nancy Astor, to put her case to Parliament. Astor obliged, but was over-ruled by the government when the Conservative chairman of the Bradford Elementary Schools sub-committee appealed to the wholly male leadership team of the Conservative government. Lord’s biographer, Ruth Murray (1993, p.12) commented ‘on reading through Hansard one can practically hear the groans of dismay ... whenever [Astor] raised the topic of nursery education’.

Miriam Lord was subsequently left to the mercy of Bradford politicians, who demoted her from superintendent of a nursery school to assistant mistress of a nursery class located within an infant school, a post in which she remained until her retirement in 1944 (Jarvis 2016; Murray 1993).

So, has maternalism ever won any resounding victories? For this we have to look to a different historical era, to an education system that arose from the ashes of World War II, conceived and actioned by female activists in Northern Italy, seeking a better future for their young children.

In the aftermath of war: a triumph for maternalism
Five days after the Nazi surrender in 1945, the women of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy determined to build a school for their young children between the ages of three and seven. They were members of two organised associations of women, the Union of Italian Women (UDI), an anti-fascist association founded in 1944, and the Catholic Italian Women’s Centre, created in 1945 (de Haan et al 2013).

Together with young teacher Loris Malaguzzi, the mothers of Reggio Emilia formulated a plan to create their own early years education system in which their children were not required to passively and obediently memorise and regurgitate ‘lessons;’ but to develop self-awareness, intolerance of injustice, a sense of equality and the confidence to stand up to an overbearing state or religious institution (Wortham 2013). In this way, they proposed, Italians would never be subjugated and led into disaster as they had been by Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Over several years, the mothers and teachers of Reggio Emilia worked together to produce a model of a child as strong, powerful and competent, confident to develop and explore original ideas and theories in collaboration with others, under the guidance of adults. Children aged between three and seven brought their own original questions into the classroom, from which teachers launched a programme of research around a topic agreed by the group. For example, a question like ‘how does the water get into the tap?’ would result in a range of discovery activities around plumbing, rainfall, water treatment centres and a study of the history of sanitation, amongst other potential lines of investigation.

The Reggio Emilia early years framework, which endures and has spread around the world, has no standardised testing system or fixed curriculum; teachers work by researching topics and learning about them alongside the children. The children are fully aware that adults don’t know everything, but that their greater experience enables them to act as lead researchers in project work.

Teachers’ professional evaluation is conducted on the basis of portfolios produced on the topics that they have researched with the children, which includes examples of children’s work. Adults work collegiately within the Reggio Emilia system, with additional input from parents and local communities, who are welcomed into the classroom to share existing expertise.

What now for Maternalism?

As a contributor to Scotland Upstart’s ‘Play is the Way’ manifesto (currently a candidate for a Nursery World award) and an emerging fiction writer currently in the process of publishing a novel rooted in my Scottish ancestry, I am now increasingly hopeful that a similar early years revolution may be emerging in Scotland, rising from the ashes of Brexit and Covid and fuelled by the movement towards Scottish independence.

Scotland has made plans to adopt the UNCRC into their policy for children and families, which has sadly but predictably been challenged by the UK Government, which has now all but lost the leading role it played in children’s rights in the post World War II period. A United Nations challenge to the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities report stands to have a heavy, negative impact on equality and diversity policies for children. There are also plans afoot for September 2021 to introduce a new Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum in England which emphasises rote memorisation, and an entry SAT for all England’s four-year-olds. ‘Baseline’ is a highly flawed data-gathering exercise, which will negatively impact on the youngest pupils in a year when families will still be recovering from the ravages of the pandemic. Sadly, the Westminster government has lost its way.

Scotland, by contrast has already explored the Reggio Emilia framework, and how it might be applied to a new nursery education phase for three to seven year olds. Is it possible that Scotland will provide a beacon in the British Isles, rekindling the flames that were previously extinguished by “malestream” politics? I would like to think, the journey that began for women, and for their young children, at the time of my mother’s birth is still alive in the land of our ancestors and will continue to shine the light that shows the way for those still stumbling in the dark.

What Now For Childhood?

As we now hopefully leave the era of extreme lockdowns behind us and reflect on the huge disturbance that has impacted on England’s education system, due to its excessively rigid curriculum, the time has come to reflect very honestly about issues of school, curriculum, pedagogy and ‘not school’ in children’s lives. And in a world where we will have to learn to live with Covid, we need to rethink what patterns of provision will best serve children and families’ needs, going forward. Hopefully, parents and older children’s voices will be strongly heard in such a discussion. It is after all, the parents’ tax money that is being used for state funded children’s services, and the children’s future that is at stake in terms of the way that they are cared for and educated.

I have written many referenced pieces around this topic, most recently about the nature of and history of pedagogy and issues emergent from the ways in which children’s behaviour is dealt with in schools. I’ve written a blog about some feedback I received from parents relating to their children’s engagement in learning activities on lockdown, and another about my acute concerns about the ways in which a curriculum for older children is now being used to remould the current early years framework. This is not going to be a blog of this nature. It is going to be a short commentary on a key issue for children’s services in England in a post-COVID-19 world, and an invitation to discuss.

There have been endless discussions about the nature of pedagogy dating back into antiquity. On social media, these have evolved, like many other fundamental questions about human life, into a format in which individuals take entrenched positions and use it as a topic around which to rage, and through which to evoke political rhetoric.

Perhaps then, we could take a step back and consider that ‘school’ was only a feature in a few highly privileged children’s lives prior to the industrial revolution, just over 200 years ago. This is not to say that school is not necessary in a modern rapidly advancing technological society; it most certainly is. But all our discussions about what children do from day to day seem to have become fixated upon what they do at school. This seems quite dysfunctional when we consider what human beings actually are: linguistic primates who have evolved to learn, particularly in early childhood, largely through play.

The out-of-school elements of children’s lives in the UK prior to the last two decades of the twentieth century were very different to the lives of contemporary children. Whilst the schooling of the past was frequently boring, mechanical and encased within harsh disciplinary regimes, children had another arena that they inhabited during their everyday lives which was at least as important to them as school, and sometimes more so. The vast majority of them engaged in many hours of collaborative free play in streets, wooded areas, beaches and etc around the area in which they lived, using features of the environment as ‘loose parts’. The folklore of children’s play in the past has been extensively studied, notably by Iona and Peter Opie who, during the mid-twentieth century, wrote many books about children’s free play and folklore.

But things gradually changed over the 1980s and 90s. As Upstart Scotland proposes:

‘There isn’t one simple reason that children don’t play out anymore. The build-up of road traffic, break-down of local communities and changes in parents’ working patterns are all implicated, as are the ready availability of indoor sedentary entertainment and a generally more fearful climate (probably related to occasional horrifying media stories about abduction).’

Upstart Scotland (2018, online)

The emphasis on highly adult directed behaviour and learning that grew slowly since the advent of the National Curriculum in England in 1988, and gathered speed under the post-2010 Department for Education in England also had the result of reducing breaks in the school day in which children could play in relative freedom within their school playgrounds. This is a phenomenon also seen in the United States, in response to similar initiatives.

In 2007, American educational researchers Henley, McBride, Milligan, and Nichols from Arkansas State University commented:

‘The playground at Maple Street Elementary School is quiet these days. The only movements on the swing sets are a result of a strong west wind edging the swings back and forth. The long lines that once formed for trips down the sliding boards are empty. There are no softball or kickball games nor are there any games of tag or duck-duck- goose being played…. No, Maple Street Elementary School is not closing. It is squeezing every minute of the school day to meet the mandates of the [2001] No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)... Maple Street Elementary School is a metaphor for elementary schools across the nation.... With all the diversity among Maple Street’s student body, the one commonality is that each student has affective and social needs that, according to some, are being compromised.’

The collective result has been that, even prior to Covid-19 lockdown, contemporary children in these societies are far more inclined than their ancestors to move from one adult organised activity to another, and particularly in the recent pandemic situation, spend many hours online, associating with each other in artificial, programmed environments in which a lot of human signalling in communication is missing. This is problematic for both social and physical development, and of great concern when it comes to increasing obesity amongst children.

The emergent question is therefore whether the holistic development of modern children is far more constricted by ‘exam factory’ schooling than that of children from previous generations. This is a crucial issue that is seldom raised in the endless discussions about what schooling should and should not be. Perhaps then, our most important consideration is more fundamental: the possibility that the pursuit of a healthy human life should not make school the entire focus of children’s lives, any more than it should make working life the entire focus for adults.

It may be because ‘school’ has increasingly filled the frame within which we discuss children and childhood that we are not looking at all potential answers to the increasingly polarised debate in which we find ourselves. A way out of this deadlock would be not to begin with the concept of school, but with the concept of childhood. From that point, we would gain a wider perspective from which to discuss what parts school and other pursuits might play in producing adults who have a highly fluid, problem solving approach, an ability to think ‘in the moment’, to work well both independently and in collaboration with other people, and to remain calm, courteous yet robust in competitive situations.

It is important to understand that children’s peer interaction experiences must include opportunities to develop the ability to decipher primate signalling such as facial expression and ‘body language’. We need to be mindful that many of these abilities are emergent from independent participation in collaborative free activity; they do not emerge from sitting in a classroom, closely tracking a teacher and memorising ‘facts’, or through adult social ‘training’ initiatives or harsh disciplinary interventions. One of the most important lessons we need to learn as human beings is how to flexibly collaborate, cooperate and compete with each other in fast moving, organic situations. These can only emerge from independent interactions with other human beings in childhood, in which learning how to regulate our own behaviour amongst peers plays a very important part in the development of essential social skills.

If we could fully recognise our own humanity in this way, we would be able to consider services for children and families with a greater degree of clarity. While school- and teachers- are inevitably an important piece of the jigsaw of childhood development and learning, there is far more to holistic child development. Mass schooling is only a few centuries old. And while it will continue to be a significant part of a modern childhood as preparation for a literate, numerate and technological society, it will never be able to supply everything that developing human beings need.

We need to look back to our roots as linguistic primates who heavily rely upon complex social skills to thrive in the collaborative and competitive cultures that we create. From this perspective we will be more able to realise that a childhood spent being closely directed by adults whilst sitting at a school desk and communicating with peers remotely in online environments where all but word-based signalling clues are missing simply cannot address the full spectrum of human developmental needs.

Once this point is clear within our collective consciousness, we will be more able to effectively discuss how to facilitate the best possible childhood for the nation’s youngest citizens, and through this, to nurture mentally and physically robust adults to manage their lives within a complex globally networked society.