News from The OpenEYE Campaign

The OpenEYE Conference was a great success with the audience listening to some truly inspirational and thought-provoking keynote addresses. Our warmest thanks to our wonderful speakers and to Jojo Mehta who sent us copy of the summary that she wrote for her local parents' group.

DVD of the Open EYE Conference Keynote Talks
We are currently producing a 3-hour long DVD of the conference keynote addresses, given by Professors Lilian Katz and Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Dr Sebastian Suggate. Recorded and filmed to the highest professional standard, the DVD will retail at £19 including p+p, and it will be ideal for showing on early-years trainings and degree courses as well as for private use. For further details and the timescale for delivery, please email team@savechildhood.org

Pre-school education's compulsory requirements: too specific too soon? - Jojo Mehta attends a one-day conference in London hosted by OpenEYE

OpenEYE is a small, voluntary, self-funded campaigning group that has had a notable media impact over the last couple of years in the area of Early Years Education (i.e. pre-school). It was formed in 2007 in response to the draft proposal known as the EYFS or Early Years Foundation Stage. The EYFS became law in England in autumn 2008 and all providers of pre-school childcare are obliged to follow its compulsory requirements unless they have been granted exemption, which is not a simple procedure and may be refused. OpenEYE does not object to many aspects of the EYFS document - indeed it would be hard, and hardly desirable, to argue with, for example, the concept of the "Unique Child". It is, rather, concerned about the "compulsory requirements" relating to literacy, numeracy and ICT (use of computer technology) on the grounds that these may not be the healthiest focus for a pre-school child's development. The conference I attended at the Holloway Road Resource Centre in June brought together various interested parties working with pre-schoolers as well as the OpenEYE panel and several guest speakers on the subject.

One conference delegate who runs a London children's centre pointed out that a mindset encountered frequently among UK parents is that the earlier a child learns to read, the better. This is far from the opinion of many academic experts in the field as well as those having to deal with the day to day care of young children. It was clearly opposed by the Cambridge Review published in the autumn of last year, and was the specific subject of one of the talks at the conference. Dr Sebastian Suggate of New Zealand noticed how previous studies apparently justifying an early reading age did not include long term data and so were unable to prove any overall advantage of the practice. He explained how he and his colleagues had made a study of children officially starting to learn to read at 5 and at 7. The groups were closely matched for all other factors, eg socio-economic status, family literacy, class size etc. His findings were clear: by the age of 10 - 11, there was no difference in reading ability, including comprehension, vocabulary, grammar and language usage.

He also made some general observations from his wider research, including the following nuggets: that children entering school later do better on assessment at the time of entrance; that ability to read does not equate with ability to effectively understand or use language - generally children who learn later do so with a more natural correlation of the two; that recognition of the alphabet and memorisation of the sounds of English takes very little time for an older child while for a young child it requires considerable time (which might be better spent doing something else). In other words, his overall conclusion was that ability does not equal readiness. Dr Suggate also mentioned a policy that was tested in a region of Germany over a number of years where an earlier school entrance age of 5 (instead of 6) was tried and the results led to the policy being abandoned as it showed no educational advantage.

So if they don't need to be learning to read, with which we seem a bit obsessed here in England, what should our under 5s be doing?

Playing, both in free and guided contexts, was the answer given by Professor Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Director of the Infant Language Lab at Temple University, Philadelphia. She has co-authored 11 books on the subject, but the title of her award-winning "Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How children really learn and why they need to play more and memorize less" gives a succinct flavour of her talk. From her decades of work with and research about pre-schoolers, she has come up with a kind of spiralling sequential progression of what she calls "the 6 Cs" as the useful focus of child learning and development. These are: collaboration (relating to others, empathizing, interaction with others), communication (in all senses), content (which she laments the over-emphasis on in most conventional educational settings), critical thinking, creative innovation and (last but by no means least), confidence. Where these abilities are built upon each other through free play and guided play, learning is most effective and most likely to become what the next speaker, Professor Lilian Katz, described as the main aim of education: a lifelong disposition to learn.

Professor Katz is Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an internationally renowned figure in the area of pre-school education and child development and outlined some of the main principles that she has concluded are key considerations in curriculum design. Her primary objections to current approaches are that pre-school education tends to fall into one of two camps: over-directed formal learning or what she called "cut and paste", i.e. activities for no particular reason and with no real meaning for the child (e.g. every child colours in an identical leaf shape in autumn, perhaps with a smiley face, and takes it home to mum).

One of the first principles Katz described was that of development and appropriateness. What is taught, and how, can and should change according to the developmental stage of the child. In the early years she emphasized that what young children need - and have a natural disposition to do - is make the best possible sense of their own experience, as this is how their world is framed. She drew a key distinction between the concepts of knowledge (facts, figures, academic input) and understanding (engaging the mind, making sense, analysing, synthesizing, hypothesizing etc) and made it very clear that the former was of very little use if it didn't serve the latter. She lamented the inclination of both modern parents and teachers to try and make things fun and exciting for children rather than interesting. This leads to the fragmented, shallow treatment of subjects, a sort of scatter input, rather than in-depth investigation - a project-based approach - which can readily feed the child's inbuilt curiosity.

She had common ground with Dr Suggate in that she had observed that learning some skills, e.g. reading, too early can damage the disposition to want to use them later, and dispositions are actually what matters most for a fulfilling life: the disposition to learn, to investigate, to find patterns and create meaning; the disposition to empathize, to seek understanding, to question; the disposition to take the initiative, the disposition to change what isn't working... For me, one of the most salient points of the day was Katz's one about dispositions, which is that they cannot be taught (you cannot instruct someone to have a disposition to learn or to empathize or indeed to do anything), they can only be learned by modelling, observation and example and strengthened by doing. They can, however, be damaged by instruction. To use again the example of reading, if you enjoy reading books yourself, your child will grow up thinking it's cool to read whether or not you're actually reading to them. Obliging a child to sit down and learn punctuation (or indeed forcing a childminder to do this to a child, as the EYFS does) when they are not ready or could better be, say, building lego, cooking, painting or climbing a tree risks forever ruining the potential joy of reading.

This point about learning by example was linked to another tendency we have: to treat children as a different species and either talk down and dictate to them or continually attempt to entertain them rather than simply esteeming them as people such that we engage them seriously. Genuine, respectful and frequent person-to-person interaction between adults and small children, as well as between children of different ages, is the biggest key to the development of their social confidence and competence - and some of the research Katz quoted had found that if these feelings and skills are not in place by the age of 6 they may never develop healthily at all.

Dr Aric Sigman, final speaker of the day (Fellow of the British Psychological Society, Society of Biology and Royal Society of Medicine as well as forthright and sometimes controversial columnist for the TES), pointed out that this person-to-person type of interaction with children has dropped drastically with the advent of screen technology. According to one study, the falling trajectory of eye-to-eye time crossed with the rising one of eye-to-screen time in 1998-9 and, on average, we now spend significantly more time in front of a screen daily in the UK than we do face-to-face with other people (whether spouses, children or friends). Dr Sigman's talk focussed on the discrepancy between what adults think about technology and how its use - more specifically, its premature and over-use - actually affects young children.

The EYFS includes certain compulsory requirements in the use of ICT. However, Sigman quoted tens of studies from a wide range of academic journals in subjects such as medicine, pediatrics, neurology and cognitive science (among others) that clearly show a detrimental effect on various aspects of childhood development resulting from time spent in front of TV and computer screens. He also clearly showed that the mainstream media don't like to report this, so we get the impression from our broadsheets that a judicious use of the internet and carefully selected toddler programming is at least, if not wonderfully beneficial, not damaging. There is of course an awful lot of money in the media and technology which can pay for column inches to encourage us to believe this. It seems, however, that research shows it to be far from the case; that (while acknowledging that there is a difference between Nightmare on Elm Street and C-Beebies) the very medium of the screen itself is actually unhealthy at a pre-school age. Any time spent watching - or even being present in the room with - TV/online entertainment under the age of 3 directly and in the long term negatively affects such things as social confidence/competence, empathy, initiative, engagement with surroundings and other cognitive functions too... and does not improve educational results at all. Screen time works as a sort of mental flavour enhancer such as MSG, stimulating rather than actually educating, a point where Sigman was in agreement with Katz that attention has become too widely distributed and in too shallow a manner. And, as with MSG, just because kids like it doesn't mean it's good for them.

Sigman concluded from his meta-research across various disciplines that a healthy age to start introducing ICT would be around 9, but that even in older children and young adults, more than an average of 2 hours of TV per day is still significantly damaging. It is interesting to note that France has banned all TV programming for children under the age of 3 in response to academic and scientific studies showing its detrimental long-term effects. It seems that keeping it real - interacting with the world in all its 3D glory and mundanity - as opposed to virtual at a pre-school age is profoundly important to the healthy development of the child.

If one wants to avoid the requirements of the EYFS in England at the moment, the only options are to apply for exemption or to home educate. Some settings have exemption from some aspects - Steiner schools, I believe, are all exempt from the technology requirement and some from the reading one too on the grounds that these requirements directly contradict the schools' educational philosophy. Some smaller childcare groups have also gained exemption through every parent requesting it. However it is very difficult to get exemption for your child in a setting with other children who are not exempt. The number of people registering as childminders has also dropped significantly since the EYFS was introduced.

On the plus side, if you do feel (as OpenEYE does and indeed I do) that these compulsory requirements should be downgraded to guidelines, now is a great time to get in contact with your MP about it... the new government may still be in a state of openness to criticism and changing policy in which it may not remain for long!