The past year has been a period of rapid change for the early years sector, especially in view of the revised Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and its impact on the assessment system for monitoring children's progress through the EYFS Profile at the end of the reception year.
Practitioners and teachers have responded as best they can to changes and to the new framework for inspection that has been implemented. The revision of the curriculum focused on reducing bureaucracy and on ensuring that practitioners used more of their time interacting and communicating with children rather than observing them.
The review also questioned teaching and learning in principle and, in particular, examined the dichotomy between adult-led and child-initiated activities. This article is about trying to understand what is meant by teaching in the EYFS, and to investigate what the difference is between adult-led and child-initiated learning. The aim is to help practitioners feel more confident about how they want to deliver a high-quality service to children and parents, and thereby ensure the best outcomes for children's learning.
BACKGROUND TO TEACHING THEORY
The Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage, which came into effect from September 2008, was published with the Practice Guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage booklet. The statutory framework explained the regulatory nature of the curriculum and its application in supporting the future life chances of children.
The practice guidance booklet contained 'the areas of Learning and Development', and was 'a non-statutory guidance with additional advice and information' that practitioners could use to enhance their planning and assessment for children's learning. Both documents placed strong emphasis on the importance of 'making on-going observational assessment to inform planning for each child's continuing development through play-based experiences'.
The message of the EYFS, in tune with Lev Vygotsky's theory, as expressed in Mind in Society in 1978, and other later play theorists, is that practitioners need to support children's learning by focusing on what they can do rather than what they cannot do.
This is a positive approach to teaching and relies on the practitioner to assess the level of development that each child has reached, and always provide experiences slightly above the level of cognitive functioning of each child to ensure that they are challenged and stimulated to learn more.
From pre-birth, babies use their senses to attune themselves to the noises and feelings they experience in the womb. When they are born, they continue to learn this way as well as to copy what they see and hear of their parents and carers. As they develop strength through movement and their brain connections are made, they learn to reason and recall.
Teaching successfully is associated with ensuring babies and children have the love and attention to develop to their full brain and physical potential. Children should be receiving the support they need to learn skills and knowledge that match their individual stage and maturity.
The role of the practitioner in this context is to be the facilitator for learning, providing stimulating and challenging environments, the activities, and the communication to support language and brain development. To do this, they need to understand how to maximise children's interest and potential for growth.
TEACHING IN THE EYFS
The EYFS, in its previous and revised versions, acknowledges that 'good parenting and high-quality early learning together provide the foundation children need to make the most of their abilities and talents as they grow up'. There is strong emphasis in the documents on how parents need to be encouraged to work closely with providers so that children are given and receive consistent messages about how to behave and how to enjoy learning.
From this perspective, the revised EYFS 'sets the standards that all early years providers must meet to ensure that children learn and develop well and are kept healthy and safe. It promotes teaching and learning to ensure children's "school readiness" and gives children the broad knowledge and skills that provide the right foundation for good future progress through school and life'.
Practitioners need to feel comfortable and directly responsible with parents for the learning opportunities they offer the children in their care. They must acknowledge that they play a significant role in teaching and have a direct impact on the outcomes for children's learning.
Practitioners must monitor their own practice in delivering a varied curriculum across the areas of learning and ensure that they fulfil the expectations in supporting children to learn the knowledge and skills that will enable them to achieve the early learning goals by the time they complete the reception year. Their efforts to achieve these aims are also evaluated through the Ofsted inspection framework.
To sum up ...
'Teaching' is the combined impact of parents and practitioners on the children for whom they care. In their respective contexts they each develop the environment and the relationships that structure how they want children to respond and behave, as well what they want them to learn and recall. The EYFS curriculum provides a framework for the knowledge and skills that children need to acquire to function well when they start school and to achieve their potential in future life.
HOW SHOULD WE TEACH?
The definition of the facilitator for learning role for parents and practitioners, described above, has implications for how it should be performed. In the past, the common interpretation of teaching has been that teachers use didactic methods to instruct children what to do and that children follow prescribed programmes of study. However, this was not the intention of either the previous or the revised EYFS.
As quoted left, the focus of the curriculum is that children learn best through playful and enjoyable experiences. It is, therefore, essential that practitioners and parents promote learning through playing together and talking about what is happening, introducing language and vocabulary that stimulates thought and action and helps children make connections so that their knowledge and capacity for learning is enhanced.
In practice
In practice, children in early years settings need to have time to learn from everything they do and witness. The daily routines are enjoyable times that are much more fun and more purposeful if they are used to teach children to become independent to wash and dress themselves, and prepare food as well as lay the tables to eat together. Similarly, activities promoted indoors and outdoors must be inviting and stimulate children's participation and discussion that involves other children and adults.
Practitioners must always look for the potential to extend children's learning through children themselves, recording what they do and thereby empowering them to express their feelings and communicate a growing knowledge of their world. Feeling part of a community and learning its rules and expectations helps children learn how they can contribute to what goes on and rise to the challenge of what it offers.
More formal demands
More formal educational endeavours such as reading, writing and mathematics should also be introduced in this playful context so that children learn that they must develop formal skills as well, and respect that it takes effort and dedication to achieve them. In other words, play is children's 'work'.
They need to have lots of good-quality play to ensure their brain develops well and that they are challenged sufficiently. Quality interaction with children must help them become thirsty for knowledge and encourage them to develop the ability to think creatively and solve problems as they present themselves.
Adult-directed and child-initiated learning
There has been much discussion about how teaching and learning should be delivered, and in the context of the EYFS it has been particularly emotionally charged.
In actual fact, the reference in the previous statutory framework (2008) to adult-led and child-initiated learning comes in the learning and development and organisation requirements, where it states that, 'Providers must ensure that there is a balance of adult-led and freely chosen or child-initiated activities, delivered through indoor and outdoor play.'
WHAT HAPPENED?
In response to this first publication of the EYFS in 2008 and the requirement for the curriculum's delivery across both the maintained and non-maintained sectors, National Strategies advisors geared themselves, through numerous training and conference events, to lead local authorities to oversee the implementation of the curriculum. In particular, their mission was to use the latest research into teaching and learning, as epitomised in the EPPE (Effective Provision of Pre-School Education) reports, to influence the understanding of practitioners and teachers about how children learn and how they should teach them.
The purpose of the 2008 practice guidance
The practice guidance had been written to support practitioners and teachers, whose original training may not have covered child development in sufficient depth. Therefore, it was thought that they needed structured information about what children should be doing and how to present activities that stimulated children at the right level for their age and stage of growth.
National Strategies advisors fully promoted both the statutory framework and the practice guidance, which was helpful.
Unfortunately, the practice guidance began to be used as a checklist and a set of demands on teachers and practitioners who relied on the advice to plan the learning programme for children. This was despite the fact that the statutory framework emphasised that children's progress at the end of the EYFS should be assessed against the assessment scales identified in Appendix 1 of the document.
Assessment scales
There were nine levels of 'assessment scales' in each area of development, with three or four subsections for Personal, Social and Emotional Development; Communication; Language and Literacy; and Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy. In all, there were 117 statements against which to assess children's progress in the Profile at the end of the EYFS.
As can be imagined, practitioners and teachers had to adapt to a very structured working practice, and there was considerable pressure to produce paperwork and systems that would meet expectations.
The demand for evidence of children's progress
The demand for evidence was made even more burdensome because of the interpretation that was given to the 'balance' of adult-led and child-initiated activities. The message in the statutory framework was meant to ensure that practitioners developed a programme that was enjoyable and that children were not forced to do work that was repetitive and boring. The intention was to stop practitioners presenting children with mindless worksheets and instead to use real objects and natural contexts to count and measure, to read for a purpose and to make sense of their world.
Child-initiated and adult-led 'requirements'
However, out of nowhere clearly identified, because one cannot blame any particular Government body, came the idea that the 'balance' specified should be in the region of 80 per cent child-initiated to 20 per cent adult-directed. So, it is for this reason that from 2008 practitioners and teachers began to spend less time communicating with children and introducing new ideas and concepts through direct and indirect methods, and more and more time observing what children did of their own volition in the nursery or reception class.
The 'learning journeys' produced at the time were an outcome of this unfocused and purposeless recording of children's progress with very little evidence of the impact of teaching or their progressive development of skills. It could be said that in many settings and schools, it appeared as though children in the EYFS would be learning by osmosis, that just being in an environment they would know what they were expected to learn. Clearly, this was not easy to manage and, luckily, as the levels of objections to the curriculum grew, the Government decided that it had to take action.
TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE REVISED EYFS
The slimmed down, revised EYFS has been introduced at the time when many other aspects of education have been subject to change. Central Government has reduced the bureaucracy by withdrawing the National Strategies. Local authorities have been given more autonomy over budgets with no ring-fencing to early years services, and Ofsted has revised its frameworks for inspection.
The purpose of the revised statutory framework is not only to cut down paperwork and give more freedom to providers to devise their own methods to deliver the curriculum - it is also more focused on the impact of teaching on children's learning.
The aim is to make practitioners and teachers a great deal more aware of their role in participating in strong and effective interaction with children to promote learning through playful experiences, with 'a mix of adult-led and child-initiated activity'. The statutory framework also acknowledges that as children grow older, the 'balance will gradually shift towards more activities led by adults, to help children prepare for more formal learning, ready for Year 1'.
A measured response
The immediate response should not be to assume that the Government is placing pressure on providers to take the step of going back to children sitting in rows and receiving directions. There are clear expectations that children must be supported to learn effectively, with adults taking key roles in assessing and planning activities that meet children's individual learning styles. Practitioners must also provide a programme that extends children's opportunities to learn more. This is highlighted in the key principles and the effective characteristics for teaching and learning.
The revised EYFS is based on key principles. These are:
- that every child is a unique child
- that children learn to be strong and independent through positive relationships
- that children learn and develop well in enabling environments
- that children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates.
Furthermore, practitioners are expected to support children's development across the seven areas of learning by employing three characteristics of effective teaching and learning, as follows.
- Playing and exploring
- Active learning
- Creating and thinking critically.
Expectations for practitioners
A strong thread through the revised curriculum framework is that practitioners and teachers need to be self-reliant and work co-operatively with their colleagues and parents to review their practice with children. There are also responsibilities for all staff to assess their performance and ensure that their educational qualifications and knowledge are of sufficiently high quality to deliver the support children require.
Teaching young children effectively is not only about having natural common sense, it is about making sure that one has the knowledge and skills to interest children in the world about them. The early learning goals give a clear understanding of the depth of knowledge that practitioners need to have to ensure that they plan effectively and they move children seamlessly from one concept to another. This is the element of the revised curriculum that has been the hardest for practitioners to come to terms with, as they have relied for so long on the one practice guidance with its statements for development.
For example, practitioners need to think about how they introduce children to measuring in mathematics, and how that concept includes learning about lengths, heights and weights. They need to plan activities that encourage children to explore these concepts. They need to make tasks and experiences enjoyable and ensure that, through careful and supportive communication, as well as frequent use of relevant tools and correct terminology, children become familiar with the concepts. The repeated use of rulers and measuring tapes, for example, will help children use them purposefully. It is in this way that they develop new skills and a growing body of knowledge.
CONCLUSIONS
Teaching in the EYFS is about having a good knowledge of how children learn, and understanding the content and concepts embedded in the areas of learning and the early learning goals. It is about working closely with parents to encourage them to be interested in supporting their children's learning at home and about creating the environment in which children have expectations that they come to school or nursery to learn new things, as well as to enjoy themselves.
A well-planned environment is one in which the children have ownership of the tools that promote learning, and know that the adults who care for them are there to communicate their knowledge and to answer relevant questions to extend children's understanding. Every time children have enhancing, active, learning experiences, the connections in their brains grow. It is our duty to ensure that what we offer our children every day is the chance to have valuable and stimulating experiences.
There should be no weighing up of what is adult-led and what is child-initiated any more, because the revised EYFS is about providers planning a programme that meets the needs of children according to their age and stage of development, and ensuring that they learn through active and enjoyable experiences. Adults need to use their training and upgrade their expertise to ensure that they take responsibility for their part in teaching children to achieve the early learning goals by the time they leave reception.