The Role of Formal Learning in the Foundation Stage

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There are some very interesting developments and debates in the U.K. to which I am particularly mindful as a mother of a 4 year old, lively, summer born boy struggling with formality.

This page details some of the issues raised. The left hand column gives the link, and the right hand column gives extracts from the articles to which the link refers.

For those who do not know, there are a number of useful documents which can be accessed through the internet which state what should be taught at what is now called the Foundation Stage. These cover 6 areas of development, including, personal, social and emotional development, communication, language and literacy, numeracy, physical development, creative development, and knowledge and understanding of the world. Full details are available here To my understanding, these are extremely useful, positive documents, and my concern as a teacher, is not with their content, but with their possible delivery.

‘It is those who are most unnerved by those learning goals, or most susceptible to misguided parental pressure, or simply lack the know-how, who turn targets for five-plus children into a three-R’s straitjacket for three-year-olds.’

‘Chris Woodhead sounds like the voice of reason when he says the debate is sterile, and points out that both extremes can be damaging. Four year olds enjoy structured learning, but need chances for play and to choose their own activities too.’

TES July 9 1999 –In the early years it’s the how not what.

By Patricia Rowan

The United Kingdom Parliament The link gives access to the full report – I have included what I feel to be the most salient points.	47. In the Reception year teachers are encouraged through the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's Curriculum Guidance gradually to introduce more structured learning of literacy and numeracy skills. There is disagreement as to how formal this learning should be, with the vast majority of professionals[68] believing that numeracy and literacy in the foundation stage should be introduced informally, especially through play, games and informal conversation. Many professionals expressed concern that overly formal instruction in the Reception class would impede the learning of young children, especially boys.[69] There is some evidence that in practice OFSTED inspectors expect to see whole-class formal teaching in the Reception year.[70] This expectation influences teachers to adopt a formal approach to literacy throughout the foundation stage, especially in the Reception year.[71] 51. There has been considerable concern that the expansion of Early Years provision will mean children being taught formally, perhaps in large groups, too early. We recommend that children below compulsory school age should be taught informally in ways that are appropriate to their developmental stage and their interests. We recommend that in Reception and Year 1 classes there should be fifteen or fewer children for each member of staff working with the children in the class. 52. Children in the Foundation Stage learn best through play, experience and conversation. We support the approach in the Curriculum Guidance issued by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority that more structured learning should be introduced very gradually so that, by the end of the Reception year, children are learning through more formal, whole class activities for a small proportion of the day. 53. Teacher training will now have to be looked at again to prepare teachers properly for the new Foundation Stage. We recommend that training for the Reception year should be moved out of Key Stage 1 training and into the training for the Foundation Stage. 54. We recommend that initial and inservice training programmes for Early Years practitioners should emphasise the skills and knowledge necessary to both involve and support family members. We recommend that the Teacher Training Agency and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority should emphasise in their guidance and the teacher training syllabus the skills for working with adults as well as those for teaching young children.
EducationGuardian.co.uk | eG weekly | Tender shoots	Aaron's mother is not the only one to be questioning why children in the UK are starting school younger than almost anywhere else in the world. Education professionals have been tossing the issue back and forth for some time, and the disquiet is now beginning to filter through to those who use the system. Parents are starting to ask not what reading level is my child on, but has my child played enough today? Parents like Paulina Liberman put the question more forcefully: will a child be marked for life by starting school too young? Can a year or two matter so much? As the questions are asked, so the research studies abound. Right now there are hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of projects looking at the effect of different styles of curricula on different ages. But the fact is, for every study that shows that too early exposure to school can make boys - boys are worst affected - develop aggressive characteristics not innate to their personalities, there will be another study showing that "early childhood programmes" create more social adults. The truth is, the research is inconclusive, one way or the other. Partly this is for the very simple reason that you cannot prove how any one child will do under two different education systems, without being able to rewind that child's life - so where's your control for your experiment?
Literacy strategies - National Literacy Trust	Research suggests children are not disadvantaged by starting school at five British children are not disadvantaged by starting school at five, according to research. But the trend for them to join reception classes at four may be damaging in the long term as younger pupils seem to thrive on less formal teaching. A review of recent research into the teaching of young children was reported at a conference of the NFER. Caroline Sharp, Senior Research Officer at the NFER, who had undertaken the review for Ofsted this year said that there was no evidence that starting school at five harmed children. Miss Sharp reported a project in America which showed that children had a higher jump in IQ when they were given more choice and control over their learning than when they had teacher led learning. The strongest difference was long term. She concluded that, "Young children seem to do best when they have opportunities to socialise, make their own choices and take responsibility for their learning." Emphasis on spoken language and understanding of basic concepts, such as time and number, are recommended, as are access to books and to people who read them, but not formal, academic teaching.
Questions on Choosing a Nursery Answered	Ask yourselves what you want of a nursery? Does academic excellence come first in your list of priorities? Are you looking for a place where all sides of the brain are developed? (To function at its best all sides of the brain must be developed. Make sure your chosen nursery encourages your child’s potential brain power: i.e. not just the 3Rs but also crafts, language, musical thinking, self-control, assertiveness, physical intelligence too, which can all be used to accelerate a child’s learning.) To know more about how to develop your child’s mind, read Head Start by Robert Fisher, published by Souvenir Press, £10.99. It explains in clear language that all children, whatever their age and level of ability, have the potential to be better at thinking and learning.
.Education | If you ask me...	Freedom of movement helps all children to learn, but especially boys. The classroom should look like a nursery with lots of well organised and cared-for activities, indoors and out, and time for children to follow their own interests. Reception children are in the foundation stage and by law must work towards the early learning goals. A good reception class will follow the published guidance to these goals, which stresses an informal approach to achieving them. Ask to borrow a copy of the QCA Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage. Marjorie Ouvry Consultant in early years education Author of Exercising Muscles and Minds: Outdoor Play and the Early Years Curriculum, published by the National Early Years Network, £9.50.
SOSIG: Record Details	A key piece of research by Caroline Sharp funded by NFER and Ofsted, click on the URL to see the full extract
INCA - Thematic studies.	An interesting Link to a research article sponsored by QCA and NFER July 2002 called Early Years Education: An International Perspective by Tony Bertram and Chris Pascal. Makes for a very interesting read. Some quotes…………… There was almost universal promotion of an active, play-based pedagogy within the participating countries, where self-management and independence were encouraged. Delegates generally agreed that the role of the adult was to support, scaffold and facilitate rather than to overly direct. Some countries, such as Sweden, specifically discouraged a formal approach. In Hong Kong, although curriculum models were moving towards the developmental, thematic and constructivist approach, traditionally there had always been an emphasis on the centrality of numeracy and literacy delivered prescriptively by adults to passive and absorbent children, even when they might be very young. Even though more liberal curriculum and pedagogical changes were then happening in Hong Kong ECEC settings, the rhetoric of a developmentally appropriate approach and the reality of traditional approaches and professional conceptions were often in conflict. There was certainly pedagogical resistance in some European countries to the introduction of more formalised and centralised curriculum, again showing potential for a mismatch between policy rhetoric and practical reality. Such differences are beyond the scope of the desk reviewer, of course, but in any discussion about curriculum it is important to emphasise that what is written is not necessarily what is practised. Two historical views of the early years curriculum I have found the children have derived very little benefit from being rapidly instructed in reading and writing, particularly when no attention has been given on the part of the superintendent to form their dispositions and their habits. (Owen, 1927, page 98) Today we hold the pupils in school, restricted by those instruments so degrading to body and spirit – the desk and material prizes and punishments. Our aim in all this is to reduce them to immobility and silence – to lead them where? Far too often toward no definite end. Often the education of children consists in pouring into their intelligence the intellectual content of school programmes. And often these programmes have been compiled in the official department for education, and their use is imposed by law upon the teacher and the child. Ah! Before such dense and wilful disregard of the life which is growing within these children, we should hide our heads in shame and cover our guilty faces with our hands. (Montessori, 1912, pages 26 to 27) The erosion of the statutory starting age in the UK since the 1980s to include four-year-olds was also related to expediency, at local government and central government level, in the face of the recent rapid expansion of women in employment and the inadequacy of a coherent and universal national system of state pre-school provision compared to most other European Union countries. There was overwhelming consistency within the review countries as to the recommended pedagogical approach in the early years. This emphasised an interactional pedagogy, where the children and adults operated in reciprocity with one another. There was an encouragement of play-based, first hand, exploratory experiences which provided children with opportunities to talk and interact. The provision of opportunities for children to self-manage and self-direct their learning were also encouraged. Collaborative, peer group learning was the preferred model, with whole class teaching or circle time being used selectively to support this. The role of the adult was generally viewed as being to facilitate and support learning through skilful and guided interaction, adopting a flexible range of teaching and learning strategies according to the needs of the children. Some countries specifically discouraged the use of early disciplinary and prescriptive methods of instruction, for example, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Sweden. Most of the curricula in the countries of the delegates were based on a core of established principles which included: child-centredness work with parents integration of learning into a holistic view of the child the importance of play social and emotional development empowerment of the child to be an autonomous learner inclusiveness and equal opportunities. In Northern Ireland, there is nationally agreed curricular guidance for all funded settings that have children in their pre-school year. This guidance follows the principles and approaches outlined in the NI Nursery Guidelines (1988). In pre-school settings, the curricular guidance implies that children should be given choice and autonomy to explore, investigate and observe, and so on. Guided activities are not considered to be appropriate for children of this age, although they may be invited to take part in group activities such as stories, rhymes and songs. There is a statutory curriculum for children in compulsory education (which is currently under review and substantial changes are being proposed). The proposed curriculum for year 1 should be much less formal, building on the approaches advocated for pre-school settings and introducing some guided activities. The revised curriculum for year 1 proposes a greater emphasis on personal development (with strands of personal understanding, personal health and safety, and living in the local and wider world), on developing skills and on developing dispositions to learn. There will be a greater focus on learning through well-planned play, oral language, developing the dispositions to read and write, practical mathematical activities and the language of mathematics and creativity. The curriculum for children aged birth to five years is currently under review in Wales.
ERIC/EECE. Publications. Digests. Another Look at What Young Children Should Be Learning	An interesting article dealing with the way young children learn Contemporary research confirms that young children learn most effectively when they are engaged in interaction rather than in merely receptive or passive activities (Bruner, 1999; Wood & Bennett, 1999). Young children therefore are most likely to be strengthening their natural dispositions to learn when they are interacting with adults, peers, materials, and their surroundings in ways that help them make better and deeper sense of their own experience and environment. They should be investigating and purposefully observing aspects of their environment worth learning about, and recording and representing their findings and observations through activities such as talk, paintings, drawings, construction, writing, and graphing. Interaction that arises in the course of such activities provides contexts for much social and cognitive learning. Research on the long-term effects of various curriculum models suggests that the introduction of academic work into the early childhood curriculum yields fairly good results on standardized tests in the short term but may be counterproductive in the long term (Schweinhart & Weikart, 1997; Marcon, 1995). For example, the risk of early instruction in beginning reading skills is that the amount of drill and practice required for success at an early age seems to undermine children's disposition to be readers. Results from longitudinal studies suggest that curricula and teaching should be designed to optimize the simultaneous acquisition of knowledge, skills, desirable dispositions, and feelings (Marcon, 1995). Another risk of introducing young children to formal academic work prematurely is that those who cannot relate to the tasks required are likely to feel incompetent. Students who repeatedly experience difficulties leading to feelings of incompetence may come to consider themselves stupid and bring their behavior into line accordingly (Bandura et al., 1999). Academically focused curricula for preschool, kindergarten, and primary programs typically adopt a single pedagogical method dominated by workbooks and drill and practice of discrete skills. It is reasonable to assume that when a single teaching method is used for a diverse group of children, many of these children are likely to fail. The younger the children are, the greater the variety of teaching methods there should be, because the younger the children, the less likely they are to have been socialized into a standard way of responding to their social environment. As for the learning environment, the younger the children are, the more informal it should be. Informal learning environments encourage spontaneous play in which children engage in the available activities that interest them, such as a variety of types of play and construction. However, spontaneous play is not the only alternative to early academic instruction. The data on children's learning suggest that preschool and kindergarten experiences require an intellectually oriented approach in which children interact in small groups as they work together on projects that help them make increasing sense of their own experience. Thus, the curriculum should include group projects that are investigations of worthwhile topics. These projects should strengthen children's dispositions to observe, experiment, inquire, and examine more closely the worthwhile aspects of their environment. They usually include constructions and dramatic play as well as a variety of early literacy and numeracy activities that emerge from the work of the investigation and the tasks of summarizing findings and sharing the experiences of the work accomplished.
Educate the Children / Literacy Strategy / Early Learning Goals	Literacy Hour or Not? Many Early Years practitioners are worried about whether or not the delivery of the NLS framework might compromise their views on Early Years education and its holistic, child centred approach, or whether it formalises education too soon when we have campaigned for so long to move away from exactly what the Literacy hour seems to represent. There is no expectation by either the NLS or QCA that Reception aged children will be asked to sit for an hour on their first day at school, but indeed hold the view that in some settings this will not happen until the summer term, in preparation for the children's first National Curriculum year. As a Reception class teacher myself until very recently, I have found that the elements of the NLS framework are easily introduced to Reception aged children as part of an integrated day system, and that the teaching strategies recommended by the NLS (such as sharing big books, modelled and shared writing and immersion in a literate environment) are exactly in line with the Early Years curriculum guidance. I have found the interactive and multisensory activities in the NLS module 'Progression in Phonics' (for Reception and Year One classes) exceptionally appropriate, useful and fun and can quite honestly say that the progress made by my classes since the NLS began has been second to none. The combination of the two sets of guidelines puts us in the enviable position of being able to ensure appropriate and effective teaching and learning for all our Early Years children, regardless of age, experience or ability. Ever Onwards! Already, I am hearing of new research findings that state Early Years education is too formal too soon in England, and wonder how long it will be till things are changing once again. Early Years practitioners, in my experience, are a special breed of particularly dedicated, caring and resilient professionals who will continue to provide with excellence, yet will move with the times and continue to campaign for the best there is to offer.
partnerships	One key area of the National Literacy Strategy that has quite rightly encountered much concern is the early years. The rapid speed of introduction, the modifications required in teaching methods and the apparently prescriptive approach have concerned many teachers. Implementing a literacy hour in the early years seems an anomaly to child-centred approaches and a commitment to an integrated curriculum. How do early years providers reconcile the move towards establishing a daily literacy hour of seemingly formal status with the accumulated knowledge from established research of how young children develop as readers and writers? The key is to understand what lies behind the components of a literacy hour. A few examples serve to illustrate successful literacy hour experiences in nursery and reception classes. Practice need not be a harsh regime of decontextualised tasks. One reception class on a large estate includes many children with medical, linguistic or severe emotional difficulties. During a literacy hour, the children were provided with opportunities to engage with whole class activities that ranged from true interactive shared reading and rhyme reciting to brief interactive phonic games with props (from Progression in Phonics). The teacher was able to demonstrate and draw the children into the complex world of what it is to behave like writers and to know what readers do. Group activities included the tactile experience of sand and playdough letter formation, listening to stories on tape, making little books in the free writing area and sequencing magnetic pictures and rhyme text on bright blue frames (SmartKids). Some children were even making popcorn and having fun articulating and representing the /p/ sound. All this took place while the teacher sat with a focused reading group. Time on task was as long as it needed to be but there was a concluding time when the teacher invited some children to share their experiences and then succinctly recapped her teaching points. The biggest journey for the teacher to make was in the teaching of reading. This does require a shift in organisation away from the concept of ‘getting through the readers’ while still providing developmentally appropriate practice. Over time this teacher was able to establish oral and dramatic-based literacy hours balanced with those providing a high reading or writing focus all the time sewn together with the thematic threads of quality texts. This demonstrates that the literacy hour, in any phase group, is neither intended to result in mechanistic clock watching nor a style of teaching that regards the child as a passive recipient. A local nursery class was observed establishing a group reading time during a modified literacy hour. Some children were browsing together in the cosy book area and very much enjoying looking at books with the freedom to choose and compare. Another group was playing with the artefacts and reading the book from a storysack that had been used at whole class time. The children with the teacher were selecting books for their book bags to go home, while another group, curled up around the teacher’s chair with a classroom assistant, participated in an intimate story time. The fifth group of children, seated at a table with a nursery nurse, were engaged in what can only be described as the introduction component of a guided reading session. All the children were on the same page of the same book and were deeply involved with discussion about characters and plot using the pictures and adult questions as the vehicle for moving through the text together. The beauty of this scene was that every child was ensconced in a temporary world of words without the usual distractions of spilled paint, paper aeroplanes and obsessions with ingrained playdough on the carpet. Of course there are practical concerns and planning issues as teachers and other early years providers seek to make sense of the Early Learning Goals in tandem with the strategy. But an effective teacher of literacy is one who is both likely to treasure the linguistic and artistic beauty of books such as When Grandma Came (Jill Paton Walsh) with her children, and not neglect to incorporate brief sessions of interactive, aural phonic games. Early years practitioners can continue to embrace an integrated literacy approach of which literacy hour time is but one part of a rich and varied diet.