Focusing on the short term tends to be strategically unwise in many areas - not so for good practice with the early years curriculum. This week, we publish the second in our series on short-term planning by Jane Drake (see pages 12-13), which gives sound advice on observing children's interests and responding to them. Yet despite agreement from experienced practitioners and early years experts that it is vital to get this right, there is much evidence that too many settings are still concentrating on medium-term planning, to the detriment of permanent provision and responding to children's interests.
Focusing on the short term tends to be strategically unwise in many areas - not so for good practice with the early years curriculum. This week, we publish the second in our series on short-term planning by Jane Drake (see pages 12-13), which gives sound advice on observing children's interests and responding to them.
Yet despite agreement from experienced practitioners and early years experts that it is vital to get this right, there is much evidence that too many settings are still concentrating on medium-term planning, to the detriment of permanent provision and responding to children's interests.
Some pre-packaged resources also encourage this tendency.
This is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the failure to invest sufficiently in training so that practitioners understand and are able to use short-term planning in the right way. Getting all children to do exactly the same activities in a ready-made medium-term project makes life simpler for over-worked managers with teams of underpaid, lowly qualified staff.
This is not how to meet children's needs, however, and we hope that this series and others will help settings to shift the focus and bring about some long-term benefits for all.
