Teachers in England preparing to take children through the ordeal of SATs at Key Stage 1 may be excused for dreaming of relocating across the Severn Bridge to Wales. The devolved Welsh Assembly abolished SATs last year and has now unveiled its proposals for a Foundation Phase for three-to seven-year-olds, with a shift towards a play-based and experiential approach rather than a rigid, formal curriculum weighed down with individual subjects.
The consultation paper The Learning Country: the Foundation Phase 3 to 7 years was launched last month by minister for education and lifelong learning Jane Davidson. Responses to it must be in by the end of May.
Schools will be chosen to pilot the Foundation Phase from September 2004 before its implementation in 2008.
Jane Davidson says, 'Educators have long argued that the years before formal schooling are critically important to a child's development. The stimulation a child receives in their early years can affect their abilities and potential throughout life.' A curriculum would be devised, she promised, with the help of experts 'which offers a broad range of experiences and has a positive long-term effect on children's social and intellectual development'.
THE LISTENING COUNTRY
Currently in Wales, practitioners working with children aged three to five, use the six areas of learning identified in the guidance document, Desirable Outcomes for Children's Learning Before Compulsory School Age, as the basis for planning activities.
At the beginning of Key Stage 1, five-year-olds are introduced to the crowded national curriculum, which consists of core subjects including English and/or Welsh, mathematics and science and the foundation subjects of Welsh second language, design and technology, information technology, history, geography, art, music and physical education.
Practitioners have long protested that this harsh transition puts children off learning. The consultation paper identifies strengths and weaknesses in child and teacher performance in early years and Key Stage 1. But crucially it concludes, 'The best practice in early years education provides a good basis on which to build, but children in many classes in Key Stage 1 do not benefit enough from it.
'Teachers introduce formal learning too soon, before some pupils are ready.
Children are given too many tasks to do while sitting at tables rather than learning through well-structured play, practical activity and investigation. Some sessions are too long for young children to maintain their concentration, and classrooms do not provide enough opportunities for practical activities and well supported play.'
This declaration is music to the ears of freelance family support worker and early years specialist Dr Jacqui Cousins, who has worked closely with Welsh schools over the past three years. She says, 'Wales - the learning country, but also the listening country because they have listened to specialists in the field, and that is positive and refreshing.'
Jane Davidson has been widely praised by early years experts both for listening to their views and heeding the findings of international research. Studies show that children benefit in the long term from a child-centred approach, which does not rush them into the constraints of a subject-laden curriculum. There is evidence too that children who do not begin formal learning until they reach six or seven outperform UK children, with better literacy and numeracy rates at 11. More of them also stay on at school.
Other research has shown that obliging very young children to engage largely in sedentary pen and paper activities results in behavioural difficulties, according to Judith Stevens, an early years advisor in Lewisham, London. Boys, in particular, are penalised by this approach, raising 'serious equal opportunities issues'.
AREAS OF LEARNING
The Foundation Phase framework will be based on adapting and integrating the desirable outcomes for learning with the programmes of study and focus statements in the current Key Stage 1 national curriculum.
The seven areas proposed 'to form a rich, exciting curriculum for young learners' would be flexibly applied across the three-to-seven age range in pilot schools from September 2004. The results will then be published as 'A Framework for Children's Learning in the Foundation Phase'.
The seven areas are:
* personal and social development and well-being
* language, literacy and communication skills
* mathematical development
* bilingual and multicultural understanding
* knowledge and understanding of the world
* physical development
* creative development.
Claire Watkins, an early years adviser to Newport City Council in Wales, says she welcomes the Foundation Phase because it will focus on the developmental needs of individual children, matching their cognitive, physical and social needs, and it will involve structured play and a focus on developing speaking and listening skills.
'If a child should need, for example, extra gross motor work, teachers and child won't be limited by an arbitrary year group curriculum,' Ms Watkins says.
Branwen Llewellyn Jones, a former lecturer in early years at Trinity College Camarthen and now an early years consultant, welcomes the move towards a curriculum based on areas of learning and away from separate subjects.
'The whole thing is geared to raising children's self-esteem, developing their autonomy and disposing them to engage in active learning - and not just in early years but to want to go on learning throughout life. It's in the early years that the foundations for that are laid,' she says.
TRAINING CHANGES
The consultation paper stresses the importance of early years teachers being trained in child development to degree level in order to understand how children learn, and suggests ambitious adult:child ratios. For example, it indicates that in classes of 25 to 32 children, one teacher could be supported by three trained assistants. The document says the 'suitability and affordability' of the ratios will be subject to detailed evaluation during the piloting of the Foundation Phase.
Branwen Llewellyn Jones believes a focus on subject-based training has resulted in teachers being de-skilled. 'Since the inception of the national curriculum, child development has all but disappeared from teacher training. Bringing it back will mean that staff will be able to teach children in a way in which they naturally learn, rather than delivering knowledge, particularly subject knowledge.'
She says substantial investment in in-service training will be required to ensure teachers are equipped to undertake observation-based assessment 'because it is so different to the pen and pencil assessment of the SATs'.
Pat Davies, assistant director of the Basic Skills Agency Welsh team, acknowledges that a proper teacher training strategy now needs to be developed, and that it must be well funded and strategically planned. But it would ultimately 'depend on the political will of those in power'.
A Welsh Assembly spokesman says the Early Years Advisory Panel has initiated a training and qualifications subgroup to begin the work of compiling a framework for training and it will complete its work later this year.
Tina Bruce, honorary visiting professor at London Metropolitan University in Early Childhood Studies, hopes that the training needs of support staff will not be neglected and wants to see trained nursery nurses as part of a multi-professional team.
SPREADING REFORM
While practitioners in England look enviously at the proposed Welsh reforms, there are signs that the DfES has become more prepared to listen to concerns about SATs.
Gail Bedford, headteacher at the Mountpleasant Primary School in Dudley, has extended play-based learning into Year One.Recently she received a visit from a director of the DfES's Innovation Unit - a recent primary school head - anxious to observe the school's way of handling the transition from Foundation to Key Stage 1.
'They are looking at ways of drawing together innovative practice in order to network and disseminate, and that can only be good,' she says.
Judith Stevens in Lewisham detected a new mood at a Foundation Stage Profile training conference in January. 'The training was very different from any other we have had. There was talk of valuing teacher judgements.
Perhaps we will see a bottom-up movement towards teacher assessments and a move away from testing.'
In his foreword to the Foundation Stage Profile handbook, Qualifications and Curriculum Authority chief executive Ken Boston seems to articulate this mood. 'Through observing children at work, and by making notes when necessary about what has been achieved, practitioners can make professional judgements about their children's achievements and decide on the next steps in learning.'
Tina Bruce hopes that the DfES will follow the example of the Welsh Assembly and scrap SATs in England. Few practitioners in England would disagree with the move, and Wales' Foundation Phase could become the model for reform that they have been yearning for.