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.