We in the early years sector have much to celebrate as we watch young children at play and listen to them as they learn. However, before rushing into this New Year, for the sake of all young children we need to reflect first on the past.
There are still misunderstandings about play and learning that need to be faced before we can really get it right for young children. At the heart of the misunderstanding is a lack of definition. With so many different disciplines in our professional partnerships, we need first to negotiate a shared understanding of children's learning. Irrespective of the level of study we may have reached, this is a first step to becoming a critical and analytical practitioner-researcher, watching and listening as young children learn.
We have talked for many years in the context of human rights about babies being born as people and about childhood as a legitimate human state in which emotional and spiritual well-being are as vital as physical and intellectual growth.
To bring about a shared understanding of the child's right to play, in 1992, 28 member organisations of the National Voluntary Council for Children's Play collaborated to produce a definition of play underpinned firmly by the UN Rights of the Child. This definition was published by the National Children's Bureau and still offers a good starting point for understanding play and the current controversy surrounding it: 'Play is an essential part of every child's life and vital to the processes of human development. It provides the mechanism for children to explore the world around them and the medium through which skills are developed and practised. It is essential for physical, emotional and spiritual growth, intellectual and educational development, and acquiring social and behavioural skills.
'Play is a generic term for a variety of activities which are satisfying to the child, creative for the child and freely chosen by the child. The activities may involve equipment or they may not; be boisterous and energetic or quiet and contemplative; be done with other people or on one's own; have an end product or not; be light-hearted or very serious.
'Every child needs to play and has a right to play, but opportunities to play are often limited by external factors - discrimination, the effects of disability and special needs, insufficient space and other environmental factors, and poverty and other social conditions. Play services are the means by which new opportunities for play are created.'
Yet despite such a definition as a starting point for discussion, my research has shown that we are nowhere near putting the European notion of a long and playful childhood into practice. In England, particularly, there seems to be an obsession that children should start formal learning as young as possible.
Excessive pressure
While there is excellent practice in those settings where early years specialists interpret the curriculum appropriately and have enough adults to assist, there is still excessive pressure on reception class teachers to have four-year-olds reading, writing and doing their sums so that they are ready for their SATs at age seven.
Those in primary schools suffer most stress where colleagues teaching older children have little understanding of early childhood development and the role of play.
Such an educational system and culture results in:
* the reinforcement by practitioners of a false separation of play and learning
* a compartmentalised curriculum with play planned and divided simplistically into curriculum parts
* an underestimation of the holistic nature of children's learning and the importance of children making their own choices
* an overemphasis on adult-led formal activities that lack context, meaning and purpose for the children
* practitioners being 'tellers' of information rather than guides who facilitate and scaffold learning
* an ignorance of informal learning and of how crucial it is for links to be made between that and formal learning.
Formal and informal
This lack of understanding of informal learning is a particular problem. It was regularly apparent among reception teachers with whom I carried out some action research, and it can be assumed that many more practitioners and others in care and education are equally ignorant about the differences and think they know what they mean.
In Children's Minds (Harper Collins, 1978), Professor Margaret Donaldson pointed out how much learning at home is located or embedded within everyday, real-life events and activities. In contrast, much of the learning in any institutional setting is likely to be 'dis-embedded' or in contexts that are removed from real life and are too abstract for children to understand.
Professors Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes (Young Children Learning, Fontana, 1984) recorded and analysed the spontaneous conversations of four-year-olds at home and nursery.
Tizard and Hughes found that at home, working-class children asked innumerable questions and initiated conversations with their mothers that revealed their rich language and high demands on their thinking, while those same children hardly spoke or asked questions in their nurseries.
The homes were powerful learning environments, but the children learned to sit still and not ask questions at nursery. Nursery teachers unwittingly cut short spontaneous conversations and play that may have enabled them to use language to reveal their curiosity or depth of thinking.
In his current research, Professor Hughes defines the main features of formal and informal learning1. They are different, and each is important but needs to be linked appropriately for young learners. A key challenge for reception teachers is to do that seamlessly.
Formal learning:
* is usually associated with an educational institution
* often takes place in groups with limited time, set tasks, equipment and activities
* occurs within a prescribed learning (curriculum) framework
* is planned with specific responses and outcomes expected
* has outcomes that are checked and assessed to external specification
* has an adult-organised learning activity, event or package
* involves an adult designated to teach and expected to teach
* has (implicit and explicit) rewards for 'being a good pupil'.
Informal learning:
* is shaped by the child's interest, need or choice
* often occurs in small or mixed-age groups
* is based around authentic problems
* gives practitioners opportunities to be both teacher and learner
* often happens implicitly or without our being consciously aware of it
* is frequently spontaneous and unplanned.
This informal learning, which generally occurs within families, with friends and neighbours and in the broader community, has also been termed 'non-formal learning'2. It is this kind of learning which frequently spills over to after-school clubs or in links with other professionals such as artists and gardeners.
For many four-year-olds, informal learning involves learning:
* about relationships and friendships
* about family attitudes, values, specific skills, wishes and hopes
* about having arguments and making up
* to talk and use their first language
* to solve conflicts or authentic problems, whether emotional or cognitive
* about good places to play, safe people and about the local environment
* to take initiatives, play games with rules and have fulfilling hobbies
* about numeracy, shopping and about the local shopkeepers or supermarkets
* about stories, literacy and books and knowing about the library
* how to care for animals and the environment
* about going out in cars or travelling further on ferries, trains or aeroplanes
* about ICT and how to control a mouse, read icons to send (and receive) e-mails and surf the net.
The list of informal learning is endless - especially if we include negative emotions, like learning not to take risks because of fear of failure.
As practitioners, we need to realise that it is through real-life and simple everyday activities at home (such as building a shelf, making a shopping list, playing a game or arguing with a neighbour) that young children learn.
It is of great interest to see how the list reflects many of the 'favourite things' of the four-year-olds who talked so enthusiastically about their settings when I was an Ofsted inspector. With a passion felt only by young children, those children said they loved:
* people who are kind and help us and never interrupt
* taking lots of time and never having to hurry up
* playing in the shop and making up things with friends
* choosing activities and enjoying beautiful books
* finding creatures and looking at them with magnifying glasses
* being alone and very quiet
* chattering with friends in the garden
* discovering things and finding out for ourselves
* going outside whenever we like
* taking friends home for tea.
Transition into school
Yet for many four-year-olds, starting school marks an abrupt introduction to formal learning. From listening to four-year-olds, I found that spoken and unspoken rules were introduced at this critical stage in their lives, especially when they moved straight from home into the reception class of a 'big school'.
Among the rules were sitting still, listening attentively to adult instructions and answering often 'strange' questions - strange because the questions were 'closed' with only one correct answer - and any original thoughts by children were usually swept aside as they wasted time or deviated too far from the lesson plan.
Being a good pupil gained praise and reward, but the more active children (frequently boys) and those (often very bright) who less conventionally asked adults 'why' had to learn quickly to be part of a group, wait their turn and put up their hand for permission to speak.
Without meaning to be difficult, some children were genuinely confused and could not follow what must have seemed like a barrage of unfamiliar instructions, questions and events. Being a 'good' pupil had a profound effect on the children's talking and behaviour3.
Ways forward
If the problem with talking and thinking is really a problem of transferring knowledge acquired easily at home into an educational setting so dependent on abstraction, then why do we as early years specialists allow 'formal' learning to begin so soon? If the emotional well-being and self-confidence of so many children is being eroded right at the beginning of their schooling, then why are we not insisting that our specialist voices are heard?
Perhaps the first-hand evidence from my research will encourage other practitioner-researchers to trust simplicity in their approach to children's learning, encourage spontaneity and celebrate serendipity. You too can argue the case for young children to have time to develop creatively and spiritually and have fun learning as they play.
References
1. Hughes, M, 2002, Learning in and out of school. public lecture publication, University of Bristol
2. Eraut, M, 2001 'Non-formal learning, implicit learning, tacit knowledge'
in professional work. In Coffield,F (ed) The Necessity of Informal Learning, pp12-31. Bristol: The Policy Press
3. Willes, MJ, 1983, Children into pupils: a study of language in early schooling. Routledge Kegan Paul
Further reading
* Barrett, G, 1987, Disaffection with school in the early years AMMA report
* Cousins, J, 1999, Listening to Four Year Olds (National Early Years Network/National Children's Bureau)