Baffled by Baseline

So it seems that the DFE continue to be committed to imposing Baseline assessment upon the nation's four year olds in 2020, as presumably it is one 'those changes already announced and which are working their way through the system' referred to in Damian Hinds' latest speech. 

As a contributor to the recently published More than a Score dossier on Baseline Testing and Beyond the Exam Factory: Alternatives to High Stakes Testing and as a Chartered Psychologist, I have spent many hours putting together accessible explanations about why applying high stakes assessments to young children is ill-advised. There are many different arguments at many different levels that can be made against exposing young children and their teachers to the type and level of stress that is created by high stakes testing. Several of these are outlined in my TES article Is Baseline Missing the Bigger Picture and others by my colleagues Alice Bradbury and Guy Roberts-Holmes in their blog Hyper-governance and Datafication in Early Years Education.

However, as a researcher, parent and grandparent, what baffles me the most about this situation is the manner in which the current government continue to ignore the most recent neurophysiological research into human development. As such, they seem oblivious to the problems associated with the formal testing of young children under an ‘accountability’ agenda, a lack of understanding which has led to their intention for England to become the only nation in the world to apply a high-stakes ‘baseline’ test to 4 and 5 year olds from 2020 onwards.

The early development of the brain involves a complex extensive neuronal connection programme. A useful analogy is to imagine the brain of a newborn baby as a brand new personal computer. S/he comes equipped to run certain programs in certain ways, but the programs that are present in the brain at this early stage do not contain anything beyond the beyond the manufacturer ‘freebies’; for example the instinct to suck, which disappears later in development.

Of course human brains have far more potential than a PC, and develop in a fashion that does not only allow potentially infinite storage capacity, but also the ability to link concepts together in infinite neural networks. At the beginning of life, links between neurons (synapses) are formed at a faster rate than at any other life stage. As the early neuronal connection program unfolds, children’s ability to organize thought exponentially increases. This organisation is aided not only by the continued connection of neurons, but also through the elimination of pathways that are seldom used; so called ‘blooming and pruning’. A child at five is only at the beginning of this process, and as such, can become easily confused when questioned by an unfamiliar adult in a formal setting. This became clear long before the advent of MRI scanning, when world famous psychologist Jean Piaget engaged children under six in formal conversation about unfamiliar situations and concluded that their understanding was poor, while later researchers who framed their questions more informally, within situations with which children were more familiar (for example having a ‘naughty’ glove puppet knock counters out of line rather than an adult moving them deliberately whilst questioning and re-questioning the child) found that young children had far more understanding than Piaget had proposed, if asked questions in a ‘frame’ that is familiar to them.

Why then has the DFE made it clear that they intend the proposed Baseline test to be carried out in the first half term of Reception when the age difference between the oldest and youngest children in the cohort is proportionally at its greatest (20%) and via a discrete assessment exercise, carried out in an unfamiliar classroom by a teacher to whom they have only just been introduced? The intention is to use the score generated to create a statistical program to measure the school’s ‘accountability’. Not only are there many practical issues that will make this untenable- for example a significant number of children move from one primary school to another between Reception and Year 6- the concept that 4 and 5 year olds can be reliably assessed in this way is counter to overwhelming psychological and biological evidence.

The fact of the matter however is that it is up to parents whether they will permit their children to take this test. The law in England states that a child must attend school from the term following the fifth birthday, so technically all Reception children attending during the first term (in which the DFE intend to locate the tests) attend on the basis of parental consent. Parents therefore have the most powerful voices in this debate, and in the final analysis, it is entirely up to them to consider how they will respond to the prospect of their child’s entry to primary school coinciding with the disruption and stress associated with a high stakes testing process.

Not just 'once' upon a time

As a researcher who focuses quite heavily upon narrative, I have read a lot about the importance of storytelling in human psychology and learning, and the evolved nature of language and narrative. Recent findings suggest that human beings can identify whether a song is a lullaby, dance or love song in any language through the rhythm and melody of the music. One topic that is not quite so well studied however, is how children have historically been the guardians of many of these narratives as they otherwise fade into history, and how lack of time to read and sing to children, and lack of time and space to play may be depriving us of this connection to our past.

For example, this rhyme has become familiar to generations of children:

I had a little nut tree

Nothing would it bear

But a silver nutmeg,

And a golden pear;

The King of Spain’s daughter

Came to visit me,

And all for the sake

Of my little nut tree

But how many parents singing this to their child know that ‘the King of Spain’s daughter’ it refers to was most likely Catherine of Aragon, who came to England in 1501 to marry the oldest son of King Henry VII, Prince Arthur? It is also of interest that there appears to be some quite bawdy imagery attached to this deceptively sweet little rhyme; meanings carried only to adults, in the same way that, for example, it is only adults who fully grasp the satirical nuances in the ‘arrival in Hollywood’ scene in Shrek. It would thus seem that Medieval adults were quite familiar with the process of 'double coding'- that is, a story that is narrated on different levels, carefully crafted for children of all ages and adults to enjoy by the extraction of different meanings. We see this all the time in our own ‘folk’ products, but do not tend to consider that it is an ancient human story telling device.

It is also fascinating to follow the development of a song or story as an historical artifact, for example John Tams’ development of the traditional song ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ for the Sharpe television programme, where the original ‘Queen Anne commands and we obey’ becomes ‘the King commands and we obey’ to fit the Napoleonic wars depicted in the programme. And we know that the original was such a popular song in its day that it featured in a nursery rhyme:

Oh Tom, he was a piper's son,

He learned to play when he was young;

And the only tune that he could play

Was Over the Hills and Far Away.

Over the hills and a long way off

The wind shall blow my top-knot off

This rhyme is very familiar to me, as it was one that my mother frequently sung. Many years later, in carrying out my own research, I learned that both the song and the nursery rhyme originate in Norfolk, where my mother’s family also originated. And it seems that even though she was the third generation to be born in London, the rhyme passed down through the generations for over a century since the family’s relocation.

Sometimes, there are intriguing errors that occur when stories pass from one language to another. For example, there has been a long standing argument over whether Cinderella’s glass slipper- ‘verre’ in French- was a mistranslation of ‘vair’ (fur) as it moved into its English version. The jury is still out on this point, but yet more bawdy ‘double coding’ is suggested by Dundes (1989) who comments that ‘fur slipper’ has been purported to be a sly reference to female genitalia. More recently, it has been claimed that some well known fairy tales have been passed down generations for 6000 years.

The idea of childhood as of vital importance in the preservation of a rich folk history may be a novel concept in the internationally networked early 21^st century, but it would come as no surprise to mid-20^th century childhood researchers Peter and Iona Opie, who carried out an extensive study of children’s free play in streets and playgrounds during the 1950s and 60s, either interviewing or directly observing the play of some 10,000 children across England, Scotland and Wales. In 1969, they reported ‘there is no town or city known to us where street games do not flourish’ and further suggested that generations of playing children might be the guardians of many ancient oral traditions, proposing that:

 To understand the “wanton sports” of the Elizabethan day, and the horseplay of even earlier times is to watch the contemporary child engrossed in his traditional pursuits on the metalled floor of a twentieth-century city (Opie and Opie 1969, p.ix). 

The Opies reported that some of the terms their 1950s and 1960s child participants used in their outdoor free play could be directly related back to much earlier forms of spoken English. They discovered a range of terms that children used to call ‘truce’ on playfighting or chasing which were specific to their regional location, for example ‘fainites’ in Southern England, and ‘kings’, ‘crosses’, ‘keys’ or ‘barley’ across Northern England, Wales and Scotland. Children in the area around Cornwall used ‘bars’ which would seem more closely related to the Northern than the Southern terms, suggesting an aspect of Celtic similarity between these areas that is also found through the Gaelic languages of Cornwall, Wales and Scotland (Jarvis et al 2014).

The Opies recorded that J. R. R. Tolkien (of ‘Lord of the Rings’ fame, who was an English scholar in his professional life) described how, in the fourteenth century collection of published moral stories, the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer tells us that ‘lordes mowe nat been yfeyned’, in modern English translation: ‘lords’ orders must not be declined’. This indicates that ‘fainites’ has descended from ‘fains I’, in both cases meaning ‘I decline’. ‘Barley’ is also found in fourteenth century literature, in the poem ‘Gawayne and the Grene Knight’: ‘to dele him an other barley… and yet gif him respite’ (Opie and Opie 1959, p.148). This appears to be used in a similar frame to the term ‘parley’, (from the French ‘parlez’, to speak) which was used mainly in the English vernacular to mean a halt in a battle for peace talks. This would seem to have a clear similarity to pleading for a halt in a game or to miss a turn to take a rest, or to catch one’s breath before engaging once more with the (pretend) ‘enemy’ (Jarvis et al 2014).

However, the opportunities for such free play have declined in recent years, resulting in what Upstart Scotland refers to as ‘the silence of the weans’, asking:

When was the last time you heard the shouts, squeals and laughter of young children as they ran, jumped, climbed, built dens, made mixtures and played ‘Let’s Pretend’ in their local neighbourhood?

What impact will the lack of traditional songs, rhymes, stories and the time and space for free play within our contemporary culture have upon our cultural heritage? While this is not the question that is usually asked when the issue of what our busy lives, our accountability culture and our carelessness of children’s opportunities for free play are considered, it is one worth raising. The human being is above all, a storytelling animal. What price will we pay, then, for the loss of our ancestral narratives? What will be the outcome if the current generation of children do not grasp the concept of ‘once upon a time’ as deeply as previous generations? It is after all, not just a line in children’s story books, but an idea so powerful for human beings that it can be found in most of their languages. These are certainly questions worth considering now, before it is too late.

References

Dundes A (1989) Folklore Matters. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Jarvis, P., Newman, S. and George, J. (2014) Play, Learning for Life: in pursuit of well being through play, pp.270-298 in Avril Brock, Pam Jarvis and Yinka Olusoga (Eds) Perspectives on Play: Learning for Life. Abingdon, Routledge.

Opie, I. and Opie P. (1969) Children’s Games in Street and Playground, London, Oxford University Press.

Calm down, dear?

In her response to the criticism levelled at early years teachers, practitioners and researchers in the wake of their objections to some of the content of the OFSTED report Bold Beginnings, author Sue Cowley comments: 

The undercurrent of criticism seems to emanate from those who have not worked with the under 5’s and I’m sorry to say that the majority of it comes from male colleagues...lying just beneath the surface of the language being used on Twitter seems to be the idea that the women who make up 98% of the early years sector should just calm the hell down.

Examples of critical tweets she provides include ‘it’s the politicised “why oh why won’t someone think of the children” hyperbole that grates’. This evokes a recurring line from the popular cartoon The Simpsons, which is regularly used to parody a hysterical female response to a crisis.

This debate would be familiar to those who worked in early years education and care a century ago. In the early 20^th century, a ‘social maternalism’ (Brebony 2009) emerged from the ranks of middle class female charity workers, who, from the middle of the 19^th century, had been mobilised to work with families amongst the working class urban poverty that was emergent from industrialisation. Maternalism (Koven 1993) can be basically categorised as a focus on the well-being of young children, particularly those from socio-economically deprived backgrounds, and interestingly, it underpinned initiatives that tended to bind women together across traditional social class and party political differences. For example, fiery socialist prophet Margaret McMillan (1860-1931), stiff, aristocratic 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 serious, committed feminist Liberal Margaret Winteringham (1879-1955) worked diligently together over a long period of time in order to put the case for nursery schools on the national agenda (Jarvis and Liebovich 2016).

The lesson from history that seems to emerge however, is that where the maternalist agenda conflicts with the view taken by the mainstream (or ‘malestream’) ruling culture (which may be espoused by both men and women), the route taken to slapping down those who take the maternalist position (who again may be of either gender) involves responses, most generally from men, that seek to construct the objections as irrational, emotional and even hysterical- a word that has its roots in the Greek word for womb, hysterika.  

Margaret McMillan herself faced a crisis when her work as an elected member of the Bradford School Board was curtailed by a national policy which moved the responsibility of school administration from school boards to local authorities- to which, at that time, women could not be elected. Despite McMillan’s success in achieving huge advances in the health and well-being of the children of Bradford, the male leadership of the Independent Labour Party, who had initially sponsored McMillan’s candidacy for the Bradford School Board dismissed her protestations as self-absorbed and unimportant; in fact ‘some of the leadership actively supported the rational administration that the Bill embodied’ (Steedman 1990, p.49).

Psychoanlayst Melanie Klein (1882-1960) took the position that very young children were not as emotionally unsophisticated as Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis) had proposed, challenging the overwhelming dominance of the father’s disciplinary role in mainstream Freudian theory. Klein emphasised the huge psychological significance of the intense emotional bond between mothers and babies, meeting with much angry resistance from malestream Freudians. John Bowlby (1907-1990) who later became world famous for an infant attachment theory which similarly emphasised the mother-baby bond abruptly dismissed Klein’s theories as those of ‘a frightfully vain old woman who manipulated people’ (Issroff et al 2005, p.57).

Probably the most poignant example of all relates to Margaret McMillan’s ex-student, Miriam Lord, who was Superintendent (head teacher) of Lilycroft Nursery in Bradford in 1932, as the Great Depression began to take hold. When Bradford Education Authority told local nursery schools that children were to receive a maximum of one-third of a pint of milk a day, Lord unleashed a spirited protest against this decision; in her nursery, located in an area of great socio-economic deprivation, one pint per day was allocated to each child. She appealed to Nancy Astor, to put the ‘Bradford milk’ case directly to Parliament. As a staunch advocate of the nursery schools movement, Astor swiftly obliged, but when the Conservative chairman of the Bradford Elementary Schools sub-committee, incensed at challenges to his policy on the national stage, presented his arguments to the overwhelmingly male Conservative contingent in Parliament, Astor’s protests were swiftly dismissed as over-emotional maternalist ramblings at a time of national crisis. Indeed, Lord’s biographer, Ruth Murray (1993, p.12) further comments ‘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 the 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).

In 2011, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron was admonished for his retort to a female MP to ‘calm down, dear’. The comment was aimed at the then Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Angela Eagle, who retorted that ‘a modern man would not have expressed himself that way’. The line ‘calm down dear’ was quoted from a much satirised TV advertisement of the early 2000s, which depicted a famous film director telling a hysterical woman to ‘calm down dear’. In this skit, the scenario that played out ended with the woman succumbing to the man’s superior understanding of the situation, and subsequently fawning over his celebrity. The fact that Sue Cowley has in the past month experienced a male put-down that similarly draws from a highly sexist media meme suggests that David Cameron is far from the only ‘modern man’ who reveals his underlying contempt for female challenge in this way.

So how can we move on from such a construct, which over a century, can be demonstrated to regularly emerge to slap down maternalist arguments when they threaten to pose a challenge to the malestream? Davies (1999) suggests that we use a strategy to increase “visibility” by comparing the underlying cultural constructs to a clear pane of glass that can subsequently be metaphorically ‘broken’ to make it visible, and thence explored, deconstructed and challenged. This brief trip through a few apparently unconnected, but thematically similar events in the history of early years theory and practice is just one way to set the process in motion.

   

NB: Some parts of this blog use extracts from my previous articles

Jarvis, P. & Liebovich, B. (2015) British Nurseries, Head and Heart: McMillan, Owen and the genesis of the education/care dichotomy, Women's History Review, Vol 24, No. 6, pp.917-937, Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612025.2015.1025662 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2015.1025662 

Jarvis, P. (2016) Critical Maternalism: a window on the 21^st century. Early Years Educator. Volume 18, No 2, pp.38-44. Available at: http://www.magonlinelibrary.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.12968/eyed.2016.18.2.38  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12968/eyed.2016.18.2.38

References

Bradburn, E. (1989) Margaret McMillan: Portrait of a Pioneer. London: Routledge.

Brebony, K. (2009) “Lady Astor’s Campaign for Nursery Schools in Britain 1930-1939: attempting to valorize cultural capital in a male-dominated field”, History of Education Quarterly 49:2 pp. 196-210, p.197.

Davies, B. (1999) A Body of Writing, Walnut Creek, AltaMira.

Issroff, J., Reeves, C. and Hauptman, B. (2005) Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby: personal and professional perspectives. London, Karnac.

Murray, R. (1993) The development of nursery schools and child welfare policies and practices in Bradford from the 1890s to the 1950s with particular reference to the work of Miriam Lord, Unpublished PhD thesis; University of Leeds.

Steedman, C. (1990) Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan 1860-1931 New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

My Shero: Margaret McMillan, Early Years Pioneer

The McMillan sisters, Margaret and Rachel, were born respectively in 1860 and 1859. They were activists within the English Socialist movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During the 1920s, Margaret gained national and international fame for introducing blended play-based learning and welfare within the purpose-designed environment of her open air nursery school, located in Deptford, South East London.

Margaret and Rachel did not start off in London, however. They were born in Westchester County, New York. Following the death of their father and youngest sister in 1865, the McMillans’ mother took them back to her family home in Inverness, to live with their stern, Gaelic speaking grandparents.  Margaret grew up to become forthright and fiery, Rachel, quiet, calm and contemplative.  By all accounts the McMillan sisters were devoted to each other, and formed a lifelong partnership, focused on social reform for children. By 1889, their mother and grandparents had died, and the sisters moved to London. 

Margaret began to build a reputation as an orator, losing her job as companion to a wealthy Park Lane aristocrat when she made a fiery speech on the Socialist platform at Hyde Park Corner on May Day 1892. In 1893 both sisters relocated to Bradford, following an offer of employment to Margaret as a speaker and lecturer for the new Independent Labour Party (the ILP). Margaret was to deliver a programme of Socialist lectures to a wide variety of audiences across Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Margaret was elected to the Bradford School Board as a representative of the ILP in 1894, and set to work with the forthright approach that had so irritated her grandmother. She quickly came to the firm conclusion that it was impossible to educate a tired, dirty, infested, diseased and hungry child, and the height of adult cruelty to insist that such children entered a public education system that did not concern itself with their holistic welfare. She introduced an impressive range of reforms to the schools in the area. 

With Rachel at her side to help with lobbying and fund-raising, Margaret was responsible for Bradford becoming the first education authority in the country to provide school baths and showers in 1897 and free school meals in 1902. Margaret was successfully re-elected to the Bradford School Board in 1900, but in 1902 a new Education Bill became law, resulting in the abolition of the School Boards, giving control and management of elementary schools to the District and County Councils- to which women could not be elected. Margaret publicly protested her demotion, complaining that reforming women had been ‘put on one side’, but the male leadership of the ILP refused to argue this case for her with the national government. 

The sisters therefore returned to London. Margaret was introduced to the South East London district of Deptford in1903 when she was appointed as the manager of a group of elementary schools in the area, finding conditions very much as she had found them in Bradford. So again, she and Rachel set to work and by 1906, in collaboration with other like-minded campaigners, they won the political support to lead a deputation to Parliament to lobby for the compulsory medical inspection of school children. This aim was subsequently realised in the Education (Administrative Procedures) Bill of 1907, and on the strength of this success the sisters secured a substantial bursary to open a school clinic in Deptford. But a chance comment from one of the clinic nurses soon led them to consider an ambitious extension of their initiative: 

 It’s all a waste of time. These children come here, are cured and go, but in two weeks- sometimes less, they are back again. All these ailments could be prevented; their cause is dirt, lack of light and sun, fresh air and good food. 

The McMillans subsequently determined that they would open an experimental overnight camp in the small yard of the privately donated house in which the clinic was located, for the use of local girls. The back yard was canvassed over and washing facilities were provided for the children, by means of connecting a friendly neighbour’s boiler to a shower head! A local welder donated his time to make beds for the children from some old gas pipes. Margaret and Rachel set up a standing order to a company in Scotland to send regular consignments of oatmeal, to provide the children with a cheap and nutritious breakfast.

One of the night camp girls begged to bring her little sister along, because the child was unwell, and the family hoped that the McMillans' regime would help her to get better. Sadly the child died not long afterwards, and Margaret then determined that she and Rachel should instead focus their attentions on the provision of daycare and education for the local under fives in order to provide good nourishment, sunshine, fresh air and healthy outdoor play activities before rickets and consumption took hold. The sisters subsequently received this opportunity in 1914, when, in the months before World War I, they were offered a house with grounds by Deptford Council in which to set up what was initially termed a ‘baby camp’.

The baby camp was a great success, but the hard physical work took its toll upon the sisters, by now both in their middle fifties.  Sadly, in 1917, the last full year of the war, Rachel died after developing a rapid ‘wasting’ illness. Following the war’s end, a national and international interest began to grow in what was now called the Rachel McMillan Open Air Nursery’s holistic play-based learning and welfare regime, principally due to its hugely positive results in terms of Deptford children’s greatly improved health, behaviour and academic achievements.  

Margaret McMillan went on to serve on the Education Committee of the London County Council and was subsequently elected first president of the Nursery Schools Association in 1923.  She gave a BBC radio broadcast about her work in 1927; in this she powerfully stated her rationale:

You may ask, why should we give all this to the children? Because this is nurture, and without it they can never really have education. The educational system should grow out of the nursery schools system, not out of a neglected infancy. In the nursery school, everything is planned for life. The shelters are oblong in shape. The air is moving there always; healing light falls through the lowered gable and open doors. This world is full of colour and movement. If Great Britain will go forward with nursery schools she will sweep away the cause of untold suffering, ignorance, waste and failure.

 

Queen Mary opened The Rachel McMillan Teacher Training College in Deptford on 8^th May 1930. Margaret McMillan gave the inaugural speech, characteristically proposing: 

The real object of our work is nurture... we are trying to to make a place which shall be a training ground for the happier generations of the future.

She died less than a year later, on 29^th March 1931, but Deptford memories of her activities and their impacts remained. In 1960, the BBC interviewed local people about their memories of Margaret McMillan in her centenary year. One commented:

Margaret McMillan gave her whole life to us children. She was truly a wonderful person in so much that she never thought of herself one bit. I can see her now, a determined figure with a head of lovely silver hair…. Her whole life was centred around us children.... I can still hear her now saying ‘you may be poor now but if you want, there is nothing to stop you sitting in the Houses of Parliament.

Another said:

Miss McMillan came and opened new and wonderful doors for us... thank you Miss McMillan.

One of her colleagues commented: 

When I visited Deptford I had to ask my way through smelly streets, but all whom I asked became eager friends as soon as I mentioned Miss McMillan’s name. At last I came to a door in the paling and when this was opened I saw a garden full of delphiniums. In among the flowers were many little children, like flowers themselves, with gay overalls and coloured ribbons in their hair.

I grew up in South East London during the 1960s and 70s within walking distance of the McMillan Teacher Training College and Nursery. I later discovered that my own nursery teacher had trained in the McMillan teacher training college. As a developmental researcher myself, I am convinced that the innovative practices that the McMillans introduced, and which many of the locally trained nursery and primary school teachers still espoused in the 1960s played a large part in forming the inquisitive mind that eventually led me to study for a PhD. 

So from me, too, thank you, Miss McMillan. You steadfastly followed your vision even when the going got incredibly tough, including circumnavigating enormous barriers that were placed in your way, simply because you were female. By the end of your life, not only had you succeeded in your dreams to produce a blueprint for hugely optimising the prospects of socio-economically deprived children; your pioneering practice reached out to nurture the as yet unborn, including me. And for that reason, you are my Shero. 

You can read more about Margaret McMillan and other Early Years Pioneers in my co-edited book, Early Years Pioneers in Context