The Early Years has not been made a topic of major emphasis in any of the main party's political manifestos. Emily Watson, in Children and Young People Now magazine, provided the following analysis of the situation:

EARLY YEARS AND CHILDCARE

Conservatives

Support free nursery care for pre-school children from a range of private and public providers
Extend the right to request flexible working to every parent with a child under the age of 18
Focus Sure Start on the neediest families
Cut expenditure on Sure Start outreach services
Support the Early Years Foundation Stage but make efforts to cut bureaucracy
Ensure new Sure Start centres are paid in part in relation to the results they achieve
Bring all funding for early intervention and parenting support into one budget to be overseen by a single, newly created Early Years Support Team
Hand power to public sector staff and voluntary groups to run children's centre co-operatives

Labour

Extend the free childcare entitlement from 12.5 hours a week to 15 hours, available to threeand four-year-olds
Provide nursery places for 20,000 two-year-olds in the most deprived areas by 2012
Provide more flexibility over when parents use free childcare and carry over free hours of nursery education from one year to the next
Ensure that all schools are providing affordable childcare between 8am and 6pm by the end of 2010
Greater choice over when children start school
Fund two parenting advisers in every local authority
Provide two extra outreach workers for 1,500 Sure Start community support centres in the most disadvantaged areas
Invest £305m on graduate-level recruitment and training in early years to reach the target of one graduate with Early Years Professional Status in every setting by 2015
Provide £73m to help low-income families access childcare
Set up mutual federations of local charities, organisations and parents to run groups of children's centres

Liberal Democrats

Twenty hours of free childcare a week from age 18 months when the financial climate allows
Support efforts by childcare providers to encourage more men to work in childcare
Extend the right to request flexible working to all, making it easier for grandparents to take on a caring role
Eliminate the rule that only parents that work 16 hours a week are entitled to childcare tax credits
Focus resources on improving outreach services for Sure Start centres
Replace the Early Years Foundation Stage with a slimmed-down curriculum

And we found this in the Green Party's manifesto:

Early Years education

ED020 The Green Party acknowledges that in many countries academic learning is not introduced before the age of 7.
ED021 Many teachers believe that it is more appropriate to start academic learning at least one year later
ED022 In accordance with the values outlined in the Introduction there will be an emphasis on social cohesion, play, relatedness and character building as well as knowledge and skills particularly in the early years.
ED023 We will move towards a system in which early years education extends until the age of 6. This will mean that academic learning is not introduced until the age of 6. That does not preclude those who wish to enter their children into school earlier from doing so.
ED024 Free and subsidised nurseries and early years education combined with Citizens' Income would help to create structures that encourage and support parental involvement and nurture in these important years. We would build upon and continue successful schemes such as Sure Start.

Drawing on both its final report and the discussions of the last six months, the Cambridge Review has identified 11 post-election policy priorities for primary education. These include extending th e EYFS to age six so as to give young children the best possible foundation for oracy, literacy, numeracy, the wider curriculum and lifelong learning.

But one of the most critical areas of concern that they have identified in their recommendations rings really true with OpenEYE and that is that experienced practitioners have become afraid to stand up for what they know to be right, for fear of not being seen to tow the party line. This hampershonest dialogue and debate and creates a culture bound by increasingly onerous and potentially misleading measures of success.

"If schools assume that reform is the task of government alone, then compliance will not give way to empowerment, and dependence on unargued prescription will continue to override the marshalling and scrutiny of evidence.

For perhaps the most frequent and disturbing comment voiced by teachers at our dissemination events has been this: "We're impressed by the Cambridge Review's evidence. We like the ideas. We want to take them forward. But we daren't do so without permission from our Ofsted inspectors and local authority school improvement partners.

The fact that many of our most senior education professionals fear to act as their training, experience, judgment and local knowledge dictate is a symptom of what has gone wrong."

..in taking the lead on such pressing matters government must not presume that they can be fixed by setting up "expert groups" from which the experts are excluded, or by dismissing evidence other than that which supports the party line.

The review recommends a radical overhaul of the educational policy process itself and the relationship between government and national agencies on the one hand and schools, researchers, teacher educators and local authorities on the other.

Read Robin Alexander's article in The Guardian here

Access The Primary Review website here

We read with interest a posting on Frances Laing's EYFS blog site in response to Sebastian Suggate's letter in last month's Nursery World and thought that readers might find the ensuing dialogue interesting:
 
Early reading

There was a letter in last week's Nursery World  (now I'm on maternity leave I'm lucky if I am only a week behind) from Dr Sebastian Suggate, who has carried out research suggesting that learning to read early on does not necessarily make a child a better reader. In his letter he responds to another writer who said that early reading can lead to a wider vocab by asserting that "it is highly unlikely that children's language is improved by reading, until they are in their fourth or fifth year of school, simply because the richness of language found in books that young children read is inferior to what they could obtain from oral discourse."

I don't have a problem with the idea that not all children want or need to be taught to read at the same age, or that early readers are not necessarily better readers when their peers have caught up. And I realise that anecdotal evidence is not always the best way to judge these things ("I was smacked as a child and it didn't do me any harm!"). But with those caveats in place, I have to say I agree with the original letter writer. If a child can read early, then the type of books they are reading, well before their fourth or fifth year at school which in the terms of my youth would been second and third year juniors, will not be simplistic "the cat sat on the mat" type tomes. In second year juniors as a class we were reading the Narnia books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Children of Green Knowe ( I mean these books were available on a shelf to take and read and they had activity sheets in them - I remember drawing the chocolate lake.)

As an early and enthusiastic reader I remember reading Malory Towers and Famous Five books at nursery school aged four (I used to go up to the "big school library" to get them), and the words I learned from there I definitely would not have come across in "oral discourse".  Is anyone likely to use the word "ingots" or "alibi" in conversation with a four year old or even a seven year old? I remember learning both these words from the much mocked Enid Blyton. Malory Towers, or possibly St Clare's, taught me "abominable", "mademoiselle", and probably the existence of French as a language.Of course I didn't understand everything in the books I read. And I certainly didn't look up every word I didn't know, or indeed know how to pronounce them.  But continual reading in context helped me along. Whether this did anything apart from make me a precocious little thing with a wierdly 1950's vocabulary I don't know but I certainly got a lot of enjoyment out of my reading. As I said above there may be benefits for some children, perhaps many children, not to learn to read formally until a later age than is currently the case. But to turn that around and say early reading is not beneficial to any child is scary.

Posted Mar 31 2010, 09:36 PM by Charlotte Goddard

Dr Richard House responded as a member of OpenEYE:

Charlotte's point is an important one, and deserves a full response. It would be foolish to argue that either every child, or no child, is unduly harmed by an early introduction to literacy learning; and to the extent that Charlotte is saying that, I agree. But I believe that we are speaking about deep archetypes of childhood and children's development here, and from that kind of perspective I think it is legitimate to make generalised statements about child development, whilst acknowledging that it would be absurd to insist on the archetype being mechanistically and insensitively applied to every single child!

Charlotte wrote that "I certainly got a lot of enjoyment out of my reading". However, the problem with using data on children's enthusiasm for or enjoyment of early literacy, as an argument in favour of it, is that many, if not most, children tend to do (and often enjoy) what they know will please the adults/parents around them; and unfortunately we are all caught up in a "hyper-modern" culture in which both parents and mainstream thinking peddles the quite unsubstantiated ideology that it is somehow helpful if young children get a "head" (!) start in the learning stakes (just listen, for example, to informal conversations between parents who are locked in thinly-veiled competitive discussions about whose child is furthest ahead in their learning and capabilities - I'm sure we've all heard them). People like Sebastian Suggate and the Open EYE campaign strongly believe that the opposite is the case, and that if children are taken or coaxed, however unwittingly, into unbalanced cognitive-intellectual learning at too young an age, it has quite possibly life-long consequences for both their all-round development and their attitudes and dispositions to learning.

Charlotte also speaks about "the "richness" of language found in books that children read"; yet what she has to demonstrate is why on earth it is in any way helpful for a child's overall long-term learning and development for them to be encountering words like "ingots", "alibi" and "cache" at the age of 4? - and nothing that she has written here remotely shows how this could conceivably be the case, i.e. why there is some developmental advantage to be gained from a child learning these words at the age 4 rather than at, say, 7 or 8.

Finally, campaigns like Open EYE do tend to take up a robust position on these issues that may at times sound rhetorical and single-minded; but this is in large part because we are immersed in a culture that is giving exactly the opposite message to ours, and the contrary position we are taking up is an absolutely necessary one in order to inject some kind of balance into the culture-wide debate on these issues. And if we are anything like right in our concerns, then it would be tantamount to be "fiddling while Rome burns" to be adopting "cautious" and "equivocal" positions on these matters.

And this was subsequently Sebastian Suggate's own response

I would like to post a comment on this blog in response to a comment by Charlotte Goddard disagreeing with my letter in Nursery World. The essence of Ms Goddard's disagreement with my letter is that she believes that early reading of books such as Narnia at age four taught her words that she definitely would not have come across in 'oral discourse'. The first point to make is that my claim that it is unlikely that children encounter new words from reading text over other learning environments, arises from a study of average readers (Nagy and Anderson, 1984) and therefore cannot lead to strong conclusions about individual readers (if her reported early reading ability is accurate, Ms Goddard would likely have been categorised by psychologists as a precocious reader).

The research is also in need of updating, I might add by way of qualification, and this aspect of the field is actually quite under-researched (which I am currently trying to rectify), However, from the retrospective account of hers, whereby words such as 'alibi' were encountered in text and understood through context, three points come to mind. First, it is quite possible that other children who were playing, instead of reading these complicated books, learnt words that Ms Goddard did not. Second, I would like to underscore that reading depends on the coming together of two processes. On the one hand there is 'decoding' - that is the turning of text into language. The second is the understanding of that language. Even if a young child learns to recognise and repeat - perhaps even in context- words, it does not mean that the requisite comprehension of these words is in place.

Learning a language is a life-long phenomenon and, if I may make a personal remark, I am always discovering new meanings, roots and applications of words that I have probably known since I was four years old. In short, it is highly likely that young children's encountering and deciphering of new words is only accompanied by a superficial understanding of their meaning. This raises questions as to how much this process can be meaningfully accelerated through either reading, or superficially enriched language environments. Third, the question has to be asked, whether it is still appropriate for four, five or even six year old children, on average, to be reading text, to be working with language in such an abstract form. As I mentioned in my earlier letter to Nursery World, there is some evidence that children initially in play-rich preschool versus academic environments have better later academic achievement (Marcon, 2002). Important neurological development, as well as fine motor-skill development, occurs during this period. However, further research is desperately needed, as there is a possibility that replacing imaginative, language and motor activities with early reading acquisition, is gambling with child development, whatever the stakes.

Dr Sebastian Suggate will be speaking on his pioneering research into early literacy at our June conference; see above for full details.

See Frances Laing's site

In a letter to the TES 14 professors of education called for politicians to stop micromanaging teachers' work and to set up an independent body that draws on research to improve standards. This echoes OpenEYE's own concerns about the amount of political interference now compromising the natural learning and development of young children.

"Education will be a battlefield in the forthcoming election so we believe it is imperative to define clearly what may be fought over by politicians and what should be a politically neutral zone.

Fundamentally, we urge that schooling should be depoliticised. What happens in classrooms should no longer be micromanaged by Government, irrespective of who wins the election. While many recognise that political intervention in the work of schools was necessary at the end of the last century, it is now counterproductive and damaging the all-round education of our youth.

Early in the next Parliament, we would like to see an Education Bill that resolves the question "Who is responsible for what?" along these lines:

Parliament should (as now) fund national education and control its overall systems and structures. On these national issues political parties may differ and Parliamentary debate should precede Government action. Government should engender respect for teachers and trust their commitment and professional competence.
Schools and colleges should shape classroom practice. What is taught (curriculum), how it is taught (pedagogy), whether it is learned successfully (assessment), and how effectively each school tackles its tasks (evaluation) should be the local province of teachers, working collegially and supported by school governors, neighbouring schools, parents, a constructive inspectorate and, nationally, educational researchers. Guidance should be available from outside bodies, including local authorities - for example, in mathematics.

But in between these two levels of responsibility must be a third: a research-informed National Education Council working with rejuvenated local authorities. The latter are democratically accountable to their citizens, big enough to employ the requisite specialists, close enough to schools to understand local issues and to ensure that sufficient school places are available. And able to support and challenge a process of accountability in which school self-evaluation is scrutinised by school governing bodies as the starting point for a reporting process that goes via local authorities to an independent and research-based National Education Council.
This council would: guide schools in their development of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and self-evaluation; monitor children's attainment by sampling; monitor local authorities' support for schools; sponsor research into worthwhile practice; and generally aim to tell the public and Parliament of the successes, failures and future directions of the education system - without fear or favour of party politics.

It is time to shift the prime responsibility for education towards schools and colleges, and so enable teachers to build the public trust that they deserve and need in order to be effective guardians, with parents, of the development of the young, and hence custodians of the nation's uncertain future.
It can be done."

Professor Stephen Ball, Institute of Education, London University; Emeritus Professor Michael Bassey Nottingham Trent University; Professor Bernard Barker, Leicester University; Professor William Boyle, University of Manchester; Professor Margaret Brown, King's College London; Emeritus Professor Frank Coffield, Institute of Education, London University; Emeritus Professor Tony Edwards, University of Newcastle; Emeritus Professor Ron Glatter, Open University; Professor Harvey Goldstein, University of Bristol; Professor Mary James, University of Cambridge; Professor Saville Kushner, University of the West of England; Emeritus Professor Colin Richards, St Martin's College, Lancaster; Professor Peter Tymms, Durham University; Professor Mick Waters, University of Wolverhampton

A BBC World News item explored why Finnish results are consistently better than those achieved in the UK.

Last year more than 100 foreign delegations and governments visited Helsinki, hoping to learn the secret of their schools' success.
In 2006, Finland's pupils scored the highest average results in science and reading in the whole of the developed world. In the OECD's exams for 15 year-olds, known as PISA, they also came second in maths, beaten only by teenagers in South Korea.
In South Korea, the school day is long and pupil's have a much stricter study regime.This isn't a one-off: in previous PISA tests Finland also came out top.

The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind. A tactic used in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject. But the pupils are all kept in the same classroom, regardless of their ability in that particular subject.
Finland's Education Minister, Henna Virkkunen is proud of her country's record but her next goal is to target the brightest pupils.
''The Finnish system supports very much those pupils who have learning difficulties but we have to pay more attention also to those pupils who are very talented. Now we have started a pilot project about how to support those pupils who are very gifted in certain areas.''

According to the OECD, Finnish children spend the fewest number of hours in the classroom in the developed world. This reflects another important theme of Finnish education. Primary and secondary schooling is combined, so the pupils don't have to change schools at age 13. They avoid a potentially disruptive transition from one school to another. Teacher Marjaana Arovaara-Heikkinen believes keeping the same pupils in her classroom for several years also makes her job a lot easier. ''I' like growing up with my children, I see the problems they have when they are small. And now after five years, I still see and know what has happened in their youth, what are the best things they can do. I tell them I'm like their school mother.''

Children in Finland only start main school at age seven. The idea is that before then they learn best when they're playing and by the time they finally get to school they are keen to start learning.

Finnish parents obviously claim some credit for the impressive school results. There is a culture of reading with the kids at home and families have regular contact with their children's teachers. Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland. Teachers are highly valued and teaching standards are high. The educational system's success in Finland seems to be part cultural. Pupils study in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. Finland also has low levels of immigration. So when pupils start school the majority have Finnish as their native language, eliminating an obstacle that other societies often face. The system's success is built on the idea of less can be more. There is an emphasis on relaxed schools, free from political prescriptions. This combination, they believe, means that no child is left behind.

Story from BBC NEWS

A Guardian article reported that nearly 900 nurseries and playgroups in England shut last year as parents turned to family and friends to care for their children in the economic downturn. Following a question by Lord Moonie in the House of Lords, the education inspectorate, Ofsted, revealed that the number of nurseries and playgroups on its official register fell from 27,866 in December 2008 to 26,985 last December.

Opinions differ as to the reason for fall, but it is suggested that the introduction of the EYFS may well have been a significant factor.

Read Jessica Shepherd's full article here

Lack of emphasis on play

Emily Watson, in Children & Young People Now, looked at the lack of political commitment to play provision:

The play sector has hit out at the main political parties' failure to address the future of play provision, in the run-up to the general election next week. With Labour's Play Strategy set to be reviewed next year and little mention of play among the Conservative and Liberal Democrat camps, the future of the national play initiative is being called into question.

Read the full item

Janaki Mahadevan, n Children and Young People Now, provided the following manifesto analysis:

Conservatives

Combat the problem of children not playing outside and encourage children to "get out of the house"

Labour

Continue with the Play Strategy published in December 2008
This includes investing £235m to give families access to good recreational facilities and to create new or refurbished play spaces and adventure playgrounds

Introduce tougher planning guidelines for local authorities to protect the use of open spaces for children's play

Liberal Democrats

Create a new designation - similar to Site of Special Scientific Interest status - to protect green areas of particular importance or value to the community

Aim to double the UK's woodland cover by 2050
Will stop "garden grabbing" by defining gardens as greenfield sites in planning law so that they cannot so easily be built over
Commentary

Labour reaffirms its commitment to the Play Strategy and the £235m funding allocated for play spaces in its manifesto. While the play sector is unsurprised that the Conservative Party has not matched this, hope has been raised by shadow children's minister Tim Loughton's reported comments that it would be a false economy to cut play services.

But other than these brief mentions the issue of play has been overlooked by the other parties.

Nursery owner Kim Simpson had this to say about the Nursery Education Grant on the journalist Frances Laing's EYFS blog:

"First the Labour Party, then the Liberal Party and now the Conservative Party make these idealistic claims that 'they support the provision of free nursery care for pre-school children'.
The current 'so-called' nursery grant is for education and not just for 'care'. However what politicians continue to fail to understand is that, however much rhetoric gets bandied about, nursery education is not currently 'free', any more than the Emperor wore clothes! For nursery education genuinely to be free, then the nursery education grant (NEG) would need to cover the cost to Providers of delivering nursery education, sufficient to enable them to remain financially viable.

With the NEG running at less than 50 % of the amount required for high quality nurseries to remain in business, then it is disingenuous of any political party to claim that it is 'free'. With the current financial crisis it would be irresponsible if not impossible for government to cover the full cost of a nursery place, which means it is time for whoever forms the next government to come clean; own that the NEG is a subsidy only (not free) and suspend the new Code of Practice which bans the charging of 'top-up-fees' by private, voluntary and independent nurseries.

Many nurseries are closing, or considering closure for these very reasons and the very thing which Labour have so vociferously claimed for years, 'high quality nursery education for all' is in real danger of collapsing."

See the blog site

We were sent this data by one of our supporters with the accompanying statement 'The undervalued childminding profession, overburdened by the unreasonable demands of EYFS, is increasingly an endangered species.'

The number of childminders in England falls for 13th successive quarter. There were 871 fewer registered childminders in England at March 31st than at the end of 2009 and 5,868 fewer - 9.2% - than at September 1st, 2008 when the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) was implemented. The figure, published today by Ofsted, represents a drop of 17.4% since the launch.
 
The number of registered childminders in England
 
March 31, 2003                                    68,200 - 300,900 places
(the first set of figures published by Ofsted)
 
June 30, 2003                                       70,000 - 300,500
September 30, 2003                              70,200 - 309,000  
December 31, 2003                               72,000 - 317,200
March 31, 2004                                     72,400 - 319,700
June 30, 2004                                       72,700 - 322,100
September 30, 2004                              71,900  - 320,300
December 31, 2004                               71,000  - 318,100
(No figures for March, 2005)
June 30, 2005                                       70,900 - 310,200
September 30, 2005                              71,100  - 319,700
December 31, 2005                               71,500 - 321,200
March 31, 2006                                     71,600 - 322,200
June 30, 2006                                       71,600 - 323,000
(Childcare Act 2006 passed into law July 11th)
September 30, 2006                              71,200 - 321,700
December 31, 2006                               71,500 - 323,600
March 31, 2007
(EYFS launched)                                    69,925 - 317,700
June 30, 2007                                       68,348 - 311,800
September 30, 2007                              67,443 - 308,700
December 31, 2007                               65,776 - 302,300
March 31, 2008                                     64,648 - 298,600
June 30, 2008                                       64,300 - 298,000
August 31, 2008                                    63,600 - 295,300
(EYFS implemented)
December 31, 2008                               61,929 - no places
(Original figure reinstated)
March 31, 2009                                    60, 915 - 294,010
June 30, 2009                                      60,178 -  291,974
September 30, 2009                              59,323 - 293,200
December 31, 2009                               58,603 - 287,512   
March 31, 2010                                     57,732 - 280,988              

Neil Puffett, in Children and Young People Now, highlighted the fact that thousands of private tutors are set to refuse to register for the government's controversial vetting and barring scheme.

A poll carried out for www.thetutorpages.com, shows that nearly three-quarters of self-employed tutors, for whom the scheme is voluntary, will refuse to register.

Read the full article

You can read it via the Alliance for Childhood site here.