Birth to three really does matter: in search of security

This blog reviews some attachment and care related issues I have covered in recent presentations, considering the origins, further development and implications of attachment theory, and how this might inform national policy creation for children under three and their families.

‘Classic’ attachment theory

Attachment theory was created by the British psychologist John Bowlby over the period directly following the Second World War (1939–45). Bowlby had built up the theory from his psychoanalytic work with children who had been evacuated from the cities during the war, separating them from home and family at very young ages. His central proposal was that human mothers and babies have a natural, evolved instinct to form a strong emotional bond, which if never made, or if broken in the first three years, created life-long emotional problems for the child. While this exclusive focus on mothers was later found to be highly problematic, Bowlby’s concept of the ‘Internal Working Model’ is still at the centre of modern attachment theory. He proposed that, based on their earliest relationships, infants construct an Internal Working Model (IWM) of what to expect from other people, and of their own level of ‘lovability’. Bowlby proposed that stable and loving relationships create an ‘other people are nice and I am lovable’ IWM, whereas troubled and fragmented relationships create an ‘other people are unkind and I am not lovable’ IWM. This basic belief, he proposed, was the basis of all subsequent emotional interactions with others, both in childhood and in later life.

Schaffer and Emerson (1964) later found, in a longitudinal study of babies aged 0–2, that several bonds with adults were formed in the first months. The babies tended to have one primary attachment and several secondary attachments, being content to be cared for by any of these ‘bonded’ adults. Only approximately 50 per cent of these babies had the primary attachment to the mother; the other 50 per cent had formed a primary attachment to another member of the family (most commonly the father or grandmother). The primary attachment tended to be the person in the family who showed the most ‘sensitive responsiveness’ to the baby.

The flexible human being

Bowlby had also drawn from ethology to create his ‘maternal deprivation’ theory, basing it partially on the phenomenon of imprinting in birds. What Schaffer and Emerson’s work indicates is that human beings are unsurprisingly rather more flexible than birds in the way in which they construct their early relationships, but that nevertheless, these relationships are have implications for lifelong mental health.  

D W Winnicott (1951) also shed light on this element of human flexibility when he studied what he came to call ‘transitional objects’- familiar toys and everyday objects (e.g., a teddy bear or a blanket) that small children use to bolster feelings of security in stressful situations. This again is unsurprising when we consider the human being as a symbolic primate. People operate via symbols- it is what makes us evolutionarily ‘special’. Words are the most obvious symbols, standing for the object in a sound or in a squiggle on the page. Children explore the more complex elements of symbolism in learning to speak, and later to read, but in very early development, they can create such a symbol subconsciously/ emotionally in a concrete object that can then temporarily stand for an attachment figure in stressful situations; a phenomenon that had been previously intuited in the early 20^th century children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit:

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real”

(Williams 1922, online).

The studies of Mary Ainsworth (e.g., Ainsworth and Bell 1970) indicated that the quality of attachment that an infant had to bonded carers had a lasting effect on the IWM. Ainsworth proposed that where children’s experience was of bonded carers readily available to provide emotional support, they developed confidence to independently explore beyond the vicinity of the carer in an ever-widening arena, in the knowledge that they would be able to access emotional support when required. But where children learned that such support was never available, or that it was only available sporadically, they developed a reluctance to explore. Children who lacked emotional support altogether demonstrated a learned helplessness, developing a defence mechanism of responding dismissively to other people’s attempts to help; those who had learned that emotional support was only sporadically and unpredictably available developed a preoccupied/fearful style, developing a defence mechanism of constantly seeking reassurance from others due to an underlying concern that it might not be forthcoming when needed. In the mid-20^th century, therefore, building strong bonds of attachment in childhood was emphatically proposed by developmental psychologists to be crucial for lifelong individual mental health, and for cohesion and mutual trust in society in general.

The Cortisol Studies

With the growth of developmental neuro-biology in the early 21^st century, additional neurophysiological evidence emerged to support the importance of secure relationships in infancy. A range of studies discovered abnormally raised levels of the stress hormone cortisol in young children placed in situations where they did not feel secure in the care that they received. This was found in a range of studies of under threes spending full days in collective daycare, while comparison groups cared for in their family home showed normal cortisol levels (e.g., Badanes and Watamura 2012, Dettling, Gunnar and Donzella, 1999; Dettling, Parker, Lane, Sebanc and Gunnar, 2000; Watamura et al., 2003; Watamura, Kryzer, and Robertson, 2009).

However, it would be naïve to propose that every family home is more emotionally supportive than every daycare setting, and Australian researchers Sims, Guilfoyle and Parry (2006) clearly demonstrated this when they compared the cortisol levels of children in daycare settings judged as ‘high quality’ against the cortisol levels of children in daycare settings judged as ‘satisfactory’. Their findings indicated while children in the satisfactory settings typically showed the raised cortisol levels discovered by the previous research, children in the ‘high quality’ daycare typically showed no signs of a cortisol-elevated stress response. Sims et al suggested that the defining features of ‘high quality’ daycare were as follows:

• Protective care: staff provide careful, individualised care for all children at all times, and individual needs for safety, rest and comfort are met. Staffing policies and practices facilitate continuity of care for each child. Children are appropriately dressed for indoor and outdoor play. Toileting and nappy procedures are calm, positive experiences.
• Staff Relationships: happy engaging atmosphere, with staff positively guiding children’s behaviour; Staff communicate effectively and function as a team
• Partnership: Staff and families effectively exchange both verbal and written information about the children, and about the centre’s routines and expectations
• Respect: staff initiate and maintain communication with children, accommodating their individual needs including the recognition of social and cultural difference
• Planning, Learning and Evaluation: the centre programmes reflect a clear centre philosophy and shared goals, which cater for the needs, interests and abilities of all the children, and all the children are helped towards successful learning. The centre programmes encourage and support children to make confident choices and take on new challenges

The indications of Sims et al’s findings were therefore that the children in the high quality settings had fully accepted the daycare workers as into their circle of bonded adults, and felt secure in their care.

How should we care for under threes?

The key point emerging from attachment research carried out over half a century is therefore that children under three need affectionate, trusting relationships with a small group of adults who care for them in a calm, attentive fashion. With respect to home-based care, the chances that secure, bonded relationships will be cemented is greatly optimised by ensuring that parents have sufficient financial and social support, and are not placed under unmanageable stress during their child’s first three years of life. Tharner et al (2011, p.162) explain that ‘parenting stress explained the most variance in child emotional and behaviour problems’ but that ‘in families with high parenting stress, securely attached children had fewer socio-emotional problems than insecurely attached children’.

The role that well-trained professional adults can play in supporting children at risk of insecure family relationships has been further highlighted by Shonkoff et al (2015) who found that supportive adult-child relationships outside the immediate family circle could blunt the impact of insecure family relationships in early childhood, and that emotional resilience could be strengthened to some extent by supportive relationships with non-familial adults at any point in childhood. They list the important factors in such relationships as follows:

• That the relationship is long-standing, stable, caring and supportive
• The adult provides support for the child to believe that s/he can overcome adversity
• The adult supports the child to develop self-regulation skills (the ability to manage one’s own behaviour, emotions and attention focus). This is not an imposition of draconian external discipline, but gentle support for the child to learn how to regulate his/her own responses in situations that are experienced as stressful
• The adult is careful to support and affirm the social and cultural traditions to which the child and his/her family are affiliated

 Daycare is thus not precluded as an option for providing care for under threes, but the emotional support requirements of such young children put very high professional and financial demands upon it. These are principally that children have secure relationships with both the staff in the setting and with those who care for them at home, and that all bonded attachments are supported by both sets of adults, who interact respectfully and proactively. It also requires that adult-child ratios in professional settings are very high, that staff turnover is very low, and that the adults within the settings are properly trained to deal with the needs of very young children. Such staff would necessarily be well paid, to reflect the education and training required, and to be provided with further continuing professional development and a secure career structure to retain a stable staff cohort within the setting.

Children experiencing continuous stress due to early and ongoing insecure relationships typically have higher resting levels of cortisol and take longer to return to baseline after individual stressful experiences; a process that becomes ‘toxic’. A simplified comparison can be made between a continually stressed brain and a computer constantly running a program that takes up a significant amount of its processing capacity. Implications for such a child as time goes by include:

•        Fight or flight response always on stand-by

•        Quick to anger, to sadness and ‘learned helplessness’

•        Short attention span

•        Problems concentrating at school

•        View the world as a dangerous place

•        Mistrustful of adults and other children

•        Feeling of inadequacy/ lacks confidence

•        Lack of self-belief/ lack of self-motivation

•        May be over-dependent upon opinion/ support of others (preoccupied)

•        May reject support from others (dismissive)

This ongoing ‘fall out’ is emergent from the subconscious IWM they carry of the world within their emotional cognitions, i.e., that other people are not or may not be friendly and helpful, and that they themselves are not, or may not be worthy of affection. Insecurity in this fundamental construction of the self and other people’s responses to the self inevitably compromises mental well-being on a lifelong basis.

So what does this mean for policy?

Where we are constructing a national policy for care for under threes, we therefore have several choices. We may choose to rely on kin and neighbourhood to provide a bonded circle of adults, or we may set up high quality professional daycare facilities to reproduce such relationships. European nations offer models of both patterns of care, for example, the Netherlands principally relies upon kin and neighbourhood in a culture where adequate social welfare provision is made for families, and part-time working is commonplace, while the Scandinavian nations dedicate a significant proportion of their Gross Domestic Product to the provision of very high-quality daycare (Naumann et al 2013). Issues are likely to arise, however, in nations such as the UK where nearly one in three children live in families that are officially designated poor (Child Poverty Action Group 2019); where there is little financial or social support specifically targeted at families with children under three, and where funding mechanisms for daycare have been so badly managed by the government that a significant number of daycare providers closed down over the year following a funding policy change (Morton 2018), while those left are barely managing to meet their staff payroll (Ferguson 2019).

Towards the end of his life, Bowlby accepted that he may have put too much emphasis on the exclusive role of the mother, but further reflected:

Man and woman power devoted to the production of material goods counts a plus in all our economic indices. Man and woman power devoted to the production of happy, healthy and self-reliant children in their own homes does not count at all. We have created a topsy-turvy world’

(Bowlby 1988, p.2).

This point is just as relevant today. The birth to three period of a human life matters intensely in terms of nurturing an emotionally secure individual, but we give this so very little thought in contemporary policy creation. When we piece our society back together after the current Brexit crisis, this consideration must be placed at the very top of the national policy agenda.

References

Ainsworth, M.D.S. and Bell, S.M. (1970) ‘Attachment, exploration, and separation: Illustrated by the behavior of one-year-olds in a strange situation’. Child Development, 41, pp.49–67.

Badanes, L., Dmitrieva, J. and Watamura, S. (2012) ‘Understanding cortisol reactivity across the day at child care: The potential buffering role of secure attachments to caregivers’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly 27, pp.156– 165.

Bowlby, J. (1988) A Secure Base. London: Routledge.

Bowlby, J. (1952) Maternal Care and Mental Health. Geneva: The World Health Organisation. Retrieved from http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/9241400021_part1.pdf

Child Poverty Action Group (2019) Child Poverty Facts and Figures. Available at: http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/child-poverty-facts-and-figures

Dettling, A.C., Parker, S.W., Lane, S., Sebanc, A. and Gunnar, M.R. (2000) ‘Quality of care and temperament determine changes in cortisol concentrations over the day for young children in childcare’, Psychoneuroendocrinology 25, pp.819–836.

Dettling, A.C., Gunnar, M.R. and Donzella, B. (1999) ‘Cortisol levels of young children in full-day childcare centers: Relations with age and temperament’, Psychoneuroendocrinology, 24, pp.519–536.

Ferguson, D. (2019) Parents in England face shock rise in childcare costs as government cuts bite. The Observer online. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/mar/31/childcare-fees-rocket-lack-of-early-years-funding-nurseries-close

Morton, K. (2018) Nursery closures rise 66 per cent since 30 hours began. Nursery World Online. Available at: https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/news/1165551/nursery-closures-rise-66-per-cent-since-30-hours-began

Naumann I., McLean, C., Koslowski, A., Tisdall, K., and Lloyd, E. (2013) Early Childhood Education and Care Provision: International Review of Policy, Delivery and Funding. Edinburgh. Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (University of Edinburgh). Available at: https://www.nls.uk/scotgov/2013/9781782564164.pdf

Schaffer, H.R. and Emerson, P.F. (1964) ‘The development of social attachments in infancy’. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 29 (Serial No. 94).

Shonkoff, J., Levitt, P., Bunge, S., Cameron, J., Duncan, G., Fisher, P., Fox, N., Gunnar, M., Hensch, T., Martinez, F., Mayes, L., McEwen, B. and Nelson, C. (2015) Supportive relationships and active skill building strengthen the foundations of resilience. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. Harvard: Center for the Developing Child, Harvard University. Available at: https://developingchild.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/The-Science-of-Resilience.pdf

Sims, M., Guilfoyle, A. and Parry, T. (2006) ‘Child care for infants and toddlers: where in the world are we going? The First Years – Nga Tau Tuatahi’. New Zealand Journal of Infant and Toddler Education, 8(1), pp.12–19.

Tharner, A. (2011) Parents and Infants: determinants of attachment in a longitudinal population-based study. Amsterdam: Erasmus Medical Centre​

Watamura, S.E., Donzella, B., Alwin, J. and Gunnar, M.R. (2003) ‘Morning-to-afternoon increases in cortisol concentrations for infants and toddlers at child care: Age differences and behavioral correlates’, Child Development 74, pp.1006–1020.

Watamura, S.E., Kryzer, E.M. and Robertson, S.S. (2009) Cortisol patterns at homeand child care: Afternoon differences and evening recovery in children attending very high quality full-day center-based child care. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 30, pp.475–485.

Williams, M. (1922) The Velveteen Rabbit. Available at: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html

Winnicott, D.W. (1951) ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. A study of the first not-me possession’. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, pp.89–97.

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.