of their desire to be a teacher
Your own personal belief is vital for you to be a truly effective practitioner. Too often we see schools that are driven by a hunger for data outcomes and not by the children’s best interests or personal development.
Early Years must resist the top-down mentality of seeing children as product and as outcome. Early Years holds the key to successful child development. However, nine times out of ten we see the immediate closedown of this in its truest sense once children arrive in the Year 1 classroom. It takes a brave heart and mind of school leadership to see children being truly enabled in Key Stage 1. School is and has always been a top-down pyramid where Year 6 and often the Year 6 teacher’s attitudes filter down. This often leads to children being compartmentalised, boxed up and factory-ised because leadership doesn’t understand Early Years. It is frequently the case that a general teaching degree places very little emphasis on Early Years. There’s a perception that Early Years isn’t ‘proper’ teaching.
This immediately creates a barrier between the worlds of Key Stage 2/Key Stage 1 and Early Years. Early Years somehow becomes something different and other worldly. It transfers itself unfortunately into the workplace once students become teachers. All too often teachers say, ‘Well, it’s just Early Years, they soon grow out of it, play isn’t learning, they’ll start proper school in Year 1.’
The tragedy of this is that it gets passed on to parents who then begin to see Year 1 as proper school or where their children begin to learn. This has a huge impact on how Early Years is perceived. What needs to occur is a revelation that Early Years and its practice is the most important time of a child’s school life and one in which they will do their crucial learning. By ‘learning’ I mean their perception of what school is, what teachers are and, most importantly, who they, as children, are and what they can achieve. Since we are seemingly hell bent on grading, classifying, assessing, judging and measuring children, it would perhaps seem that there is a picture of a somewhat hopeless cause. This is far from the truth – as Early Years practitioners we need to begin to make our voices heard.
‘We wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do ... we wanna have a good time and that’s what we’re going to do!’ – The Wild Angels (1966)
If freedom comes from listening to children’s voices, then we have to prepare ourselves to listen. We have to create the conditions for children to be heard. We need to fashion the space within our own adult minds to ensure that this can happen. In short, we need to let go.
If our children are really to have their voices heard, then we need to ensure that we are not blocking the airwaves with what we perceive to be their best interests, with what we want or need them to learn.
Your adult voice cannot be their voice
With the best will in the world, your half-termly themes such Spring, Chinese New Year, People Who Help Us, Under The Sea, Dinosaurs, and so on are not the children’s voice – they are yours. Nowhere in the EYFS does it say that these topics are what needs teaching, yet we find them in many Reception classes being taught year in and year out. But have the children expressed a desire to find out about these things? Have they ever once talked about or demonstrated how they would love to explore the role of the dentist to the extent that every bit of the continuous provision resembles a dental practice with a neat and tidy People Who Help Us display? I’m not denying that some of these themes contain within them some important messages, but I would equally argue that it doesn’t need often tenuous links to a theme because the adults have it in their planning and have had it in their planning since three years ago.
Thematic approaches are adult-led without a doubt – they drown out the child’s interests, look beyond them through a fug of ‘planned activity’ and prescribed outcome. A child-led approach is wild and free, it roams from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, sometimes veering off, sometimes simple, sometimes brilliant, sometimes soaring, often taking you to places you could never imagine: always exciting, always something different, forever changing, never standing still. Always, always beautiful.
‘Don’t be afraid of yourself ...’ Old Coast Road, The Church
So on one side we have the child’s world and on the other the adult’s. How to make the two come together, how to meet the needs and rights of the child to explore and discover while at the same time meeting our own adult needs for measurable progress and outcome? By itself, the beauty of children’s natural desire to interpret and express their world could quite happily exist without the influence of the adult world, but the need for data and accountability demands adult influence. The Senior Leadership Team demands an outcome.
In Early Years, the ‘goal’ is for the maximum number of children within your class to make Early Learning goals or above. It’s the crude measuring stick for both the child’s and your success. It’s the per cent that keeps you awake at night and makes you reach for that second glass of red on a Tuesday evening. The subsequent chapters of this book are going to show you just how to achieve this while balancing the need for children to be free, happy and childlike. Before we get to those chapters, we need to make sure that in our minds two things are clear: skills-focused learning and children’s Next Steps. Without these two central tenets you will never achieve your adult-led outcomes. As soon as you invest time and energy into creating a seascape in the Water Zone with magnetic letters and pretty sprinkles floating in the food-coloured water you are turning your back on skill-focused learning. If you find yourself doing circle time because that’s what you do every week on a Wednesday afternoon before home time, then you are turning your back. If your children are operating in a factory line waiting for the TA to ‘help’ them make a Mother’s Day card, then you are turning your back.
Everything, every detail of your day has to be committed to skills growth, to children applying their skills to situations and experiences, and opening up opportunities to develop new ones alongside them. Do you spend three weeks of Autumn term rehearsing your class Nativity? Ask yourself what skills are being truly developed. It’s a blunt question and if the answer is either ‘because we always do it’ or ‘because the parents like it’, then your Nativity might be something to rethink.
To achieve skills growth effectively, you need to know your children’s Next Steps
This is the key to enabling your faith in children to really show and take root in your classroom. This is perhaps the hardest thing to get right and the one that needs experimentation and perseverance. Children don’t necessarily learn in a linear way; they are not on a straight line from point A to point B. Their minds flip and switch, weave, retread, dip and soar across a year. They may show understanding one day but then the next day find the same thing challenging. Our role is to persist and repeat, and above all to give them opportunities to engage and re-engage. You will find their next steps sometimes appear from nowhere. At other times they are very clear. Children always bring their next steps into their learning – their voice is always telling you something.
Clear assessment is important here, whether it is recorded in a table, plotted on a diagram, or mentally noted. The one thing that is crucial is that you hold to the concept that each child is an individual with individual next steps. Red Group, Blue Group, Yellow Group approaches cannot work day in day out here. Yes, it can be useful sometimes to put children together in such a way, but in truth each child’s rate of development is unique to them. If you accept this and make each child’s next steps the focal point of your day, then your children will make progress – it’s almost impossible for them not to. In truth, you can find out a child’s next steps very quickly by interacting with them and talking, engaging them in an ad hoc assessment. Essentially, you need to find out what a child can do, then think – now what? If a child can consistently segment words and blend them is their
