An Open Letter to the Minister

This letter was sent to the then Minister Beverley Hughes by independent consultant and OpenEYE campaigner Margaret Edgington and has the backing of the full team. We feel it so important that the whole letter is shown here. We are already receiving reports from people at the grassroots who are experiencing just what Margaret has described- highly unfortunate 'outcomes' that OpenEYE has been foretelling for many months.

Open Letter to:

Rt. Hon Beverley Hughes
Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families
 
19th May 2009
 
Dear Minister,
 
It has now been nine months since the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework became statutory.  In the run up to the launch of the EYFS, I and others wrote to you to challenge the notion of Learning and Development requirements for very young children and drew attention to the flawed nature of the age-related Learning and Development Grids in the Non-Statutory Practice Guidance. We predicted that this totally inadequate view of development would be used to measure children's progress and to put pressure on practitioners and children in settings deemed to be 'failing'. We also predicted an unacceptable increase in paperwork for practitioners.

In Nursery World (4th September 2008), and in subsequent letters, you dismissed our concerns with the following assertion:  'It (the EYFS) will not require endless bureaucracy. The only written record that is required is the EYFS Profile completed at the end of the EYFS, and that is no change on what happens already.'
I have passed this message on to many practitioners and advisory team members.

However, I have now seen the Primary Strategy's publication Progress Matters (March 2009).  This document asks managers and practitioners to put in place 'a robust system' 'for identifying the stages children are at and showing the progress they make over time in all six areas of learning and development' (p. 10)?  All the example materials on the CD Rom appear to require settings to judge their children from birth against the Development Matters statements and Leicestershire's model actually makes this a requirement of Nursery Education Grant funding. This does represent a huge 'change on what happens already' for most settings and is, in my view, a gross misuse of non-statutory guidance materials.  It is clear that managers will only be able to provide the tracking demanded by Progress Matters if they ask their already-overworked practitioners to match observations to the grids. 

This is already happening.  A significant number of practitioners say they have been asked to number all the statements so they can annotate each observation with the initials of the area of learning and development, its aspect and the relevant number on the grid. This is a complete waste of time and does not reflect the EYFS principle of the Unique Child - it is also impossible to know whether a child has achieved something securely on the basis of one observation. Worse still, poorly-trained practitioners are seeing the grids as an accurate view of child development rather than a top-down model, which has simply tracked flawed goals back to babies and toddlers.  In the EYFS Practice Guidance it states clearly that the Learning and Development grids 'are not exhaustive' and should 'not be used as a checklist'. Children do many things that are not reflected in these grids and there is a real danger that practitioners thinking will be constrained when they follow them rigidly.

If, as you wrote in September,the 'only written record that is required is the EYFS Profile,' how do you justify the publication of Progress Matters?  Can you assure practitioners and managers that they will not be penalised if they celebrate and note their children's unique development and progress through individual learning journals, rather than plotting them against the grids?  Can you also assure us that there will be a complete review of the grids by an independent expert in child development?
I look forward to reading your reply.
 
Yours sincerely
 
Margaret Edgington

Pat Adams, a childminder from Warrington is the first person to have her application for exemption from the EYFS early learning goals turned down.

Pat said she still wanted to continue childminding and would be "very sad" if she had to give up, but felt that she had to make a stand because she objects to the EYFS being statutory and believes it should be used only as guidance.

She said she had seriously considered giving up childminding before the EYFS was brought in last September, but with the full backing of the parents of the children she cares for had decided to apply for exemption from the EYFS learning and development requirements instead.

Catherine Gaunt's full article in Nursery World

Julie Henry's piece in the Sunday Telegraph

Rosemary Bennett's piece in The Times explores how the Government's new Children's Centres are under threat with one quarter of nursery places empty. We wonder what will happen when the subsidies run out and struggling parents cannot find the fees.

We were delighted to hear that France has cracked down on children's use of mobile phones amid growing fears that they may cause cancer and other diseases. We simply do not know enough about the damage that such technology is causing to children's health and development and OpenEYE calls on the government to urgently follow this lead.

This is from Geoffrey Lean's article in The Independent:

"The clampdown represents the most comprehensive action yet taken by any government worldwide. It contrasts sharply with the stance of British ministers, who have largely ignored the recommendations of an official report nine years ago that people aged under 16 should be discouraged from using mobiles, and that the industry should be stopped from promoting them to children. Since then their use by the young has almost doubled, so that nine out of 10 of the country's 16-year-olds own a handset.

Swedish research indicates that children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer if they use the phones, causing some experts to predict an "epidemic" of the disease among today's young people in later life. But consideration of the threat to them has been specifically excluded from Britain's official £3.1m investigation into the risk of cancer from mobiles."

According to researchers in Russia children using handsets are prone to the following disorders: weakening memory, decline of attention, reduction of mental and cognitive capacity, irritation, sleep violation, increasing epileptic possibility. The other possible far-standing consequences are brain, auditory and vestibular nerve tumor (at the age of 25-30), Alzheimer's disease, 'acquired dementia', depressive syndrome and other forms of neuronal degeneration of brain structures (at the age of 50-60).
The Russian National Committee on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (RNCNIRP)

Read Geoffey Lean's full article

Charles Bremners' article in The Times

" I suggest that for all of us as teachers it is a good idea to cultivate our own intellects and nourish the mind. For teachers, the cultivation of the mind is as important as the cultivation of our capacities for understanding, compassion, and caring - not less important, not more important - but equally so. In other words, we must come to see ourselves as developing professionals - whether we teach adults or children. So I suggest: become a student of your own teaching - a career-long student of your teaching.

Never take someone else's views or opinions of you or your work more seriously than you take your own! Take other's views seriously - there may be much to learn from them - but not more seriously than you take your own; for that is the essence of self-respect, and I believe that children benefit from being around self-respecting adults.

As teachers, all we have at a given moment in a given situation is our very own best judgment. Throughout our professional lives we study and reflect in order to refine that judgment; we exchange with colleagues, consider others' solutions to the problems we face, we come together at meetings like the Working Forum, we examine the available evidence - all in order to improve our judgment. But in the last analysis, our very best judgment is all there is.

Finally, remember that whoever might be the leader of our country in 40 or 50 years from now is likely to be in someone's early childhood program today - maybe in your class. I hope she is having a good experience!"