Kicking off a new series exploring the revised Development Matters guidance, Dr Julian Grenier looks at the first two key features of effective practice within the document: ‘The best for every child’ and ‘High quality care’
The revised Development Matters is set out in two sections to convey a clear message: practitioners can use their professional judgement to decide how they organise care and learning for the children they work with.
Development Matters begins with seven key themes. Those themes summarise some of the important professional knowledge we need to have as practitioners. The themes can be used to guide managers and leaders in planning for professional development and quality improvement in settings. They can also be used on an individual basis by practitioners to help us build on our professional knowledge.
After the seven key themes come the tables which summarise some of the pathways of children’s development. Those tables exist as a backdrop. They provide guidance to help us develop an ambitious curriculum which is appropriate for the children we are working with.
The guidance sets out a basic outline of how we can support children’s learning and development in the early years. It is a starting point, not the full story. I would urge practitioners and settings first to make sure their ambitions match the document. Then it will be possible to take off with confidence and go well beyond what is suggested.
GETTING TO KNOW YOU
Each setting and childminder has a uniquely important duty. We need to get to know and understand the children and their families in the local community. Working on the ground, we are in the best position to do that. Our perspective informs many of the decisions we make about what to prioritise.
At Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre, where I am the head teacher, over 90 per cent of the children are learning English as an additional language. For that reason, we put a very strong priority on supporting children’s early communication, both in their home language and in English.
We give children many rich and fascinating experiences which encourage them to talk. We listen to them and make ourselves available in an unhurried way, to promote extended conversations. We support their vocabulary development through our carefully chosen and sequenced programme of ‘core books and rhymes’. This ensures that all children become familiar with a range of books, songs and rhymes.
Everyone reading this article who works directly with children will be following a similar process. We are always working to make sure that our settings meet the needs of the children on roll.
Secure professional knowledge
Many of these decisions are complex. We must have secure professional knowledge about child development, and the best ways to care for children. As the Fostering Effective Early Learning (FEEL) Study (Iram Siraj and others, 2018) explains, we need to ‘support knowledge, confidence, risk-taking and autonomy in the children’s learning, through play and playful interactions’ so that ‘each child is supported according to their needs, by educators who use a range of different teaching and learning strategies, together with a comprehensive and relevant content knowledge, that they apply flexibly with contextual, individual, and socio-cultural sensitivity’.
Reflecting on our own attitudes
The emphasis on diversity in the FEEL study is significant. We need to understand the different backgrounds, cultures and faiths of the children we are working with. We need to respond to children with individual sensitivity. We should be helping all children to learn about each other and be positive about diversity. Children also need to understand that racism and prejudice are not acceptable. That means we need to work hard on our own attitudes as practitioners.
We need to understand how the ways we talk and act can perpetuate negative attitudes towards people of colour. Our attitudes can restrict the choices available to boys and girls if we are drawing on gender stereotypes. We all have biases from our upbringings and our life experiences. We have to work hard to become aware of this ‘unconscious bias’ so that we can tackle it.
Professional development
This requires a significant focus on professional development. This is especially important when we consider how some early years practitioners were let down by their initial qualification and left poorly prepared for the complex demands of working with young children.
As leaders and managers, we need to plan carefully for the professional development of our teams. That growing professionalism is the engine of change for the early years.
No document or policy initiative from the Government or Ofsted can in itself help us to keep improving the quality of early education and care. Positive change happens at the level of the practitioner and the setting. It happens when we improve children’s minute-by-minute care routines and learning opportunities.
TIME TO REFLECT
Before looking more closely at the first two themes, I have two final reflection points. The revised document does not replace the current Development Matters until September 2021. I wouldn’t recommend changing any practice in the light of the new guidance right now. We are all hard-pressed by the day-to-day challenges of Covid-19.
Secondly, the new document is brief and written in plain English, so you can read it in about 90 minutes. We have the best part of a year to read, reflect, and discuss this new guidance. There is plenty of time to plan how we will put it into practice.
The best for every child
‘The best for every child’ is the first of the seven key features of effective practice outlined in the revised Development Matters. I haven’t yet met anyone working in the early years who doesn’t want the best for every child. But the uncomfortable fact is that we are far from achieving that. Children’s learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage is significantly determined by how well off their families are.
As the Education Policy Institute reported earlier this year, ‘When they start school, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are, on average, four months behind their peers.’ This has not changed for several years. Once children fall behind, it is hard for them to catch up with their peers.
This is a sobering fact, especially as the Covid-19 pandemic may make things even worse.
Despite all that, we can tackle this positively. But, first of all, it is important to note that the impact of poverty on children is complex and takes many forms. I am not suggesting that early education and care provide a simple solution to a complex social issue.
The more heartening news is that we can make a difference. In the early years, disadvantaged children can make strong progress in their development, with the right support. For the most part, that ‘right support’ is access to high-quality provision, ideally from the age of two years old. The Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) Project found that while high-quality provision is good for all children, it is especially important to children living in poverty. The EPPSE research brief (2015) comments that, ‘At age 11, high quality pre-school was especially important for boys, pupils with SEN and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. High quality pre-school enhanced the maths outcomes for disadvantaged pupils and for those of low qualified parents.’
It is also worth noting the importance of offering all children a rich and broad curriculum. Every child needs to experience fascination and wonder in the EYFS. We need to offer every child irresistible learning experiences across all seven areas of learning.
As Ofsted noted in January 2020, a narrow curriculum can have a disproportionately negative effect on the most disadvantaged children. If early years settings don’t provide well for children’s early scientific learning, for example, or enjoyment of nature and the outdoors – who will?
The Unique Child
Some practitioners might worry about the concept of ‘catching up’. They may feel it contradicts the focus in the EYFS Statutory Framework on ‘the Unique Child’. Shouldn’t we allow children to develop in their own way, rather than expect most children to get to the same point by the end of the EYFS? I would argue that it is important to focus on children’s uniqueness. The pace and patterns of children’s development in the early years are very variable.
On the other hand, we need to ensure that children leave the EYFS with the core understanding, attitudes and skills they need. For example, without well-developed communication and the ability to sustain their concentration, they will struggle to access the curriculum in Year 1. Children will need to read fluently in their primary school years to widen their vocabulary and learn more about the world. They need to have the early building blocks of reading in place when they leave the EYFS.
That is why the achievements of the whole early years and school system in Newham, where I work, are notable. The gap at the end of the early years is small. It gets even smaller as children go through their primary schooling. There is a strong focus on the Prime areas of the EYFS and on building on the Every Child a Reader programme.
As a result, the large majority of disadvantaged children achieve a Good Level of Development (GLD). For those who don’t achieve the GLD, their early years give them the secure foundations they need to access the Key Stage 1 curriculum with extra help.
HIGH QUALITY CARE
The second of the seven themes within the revised Development Matters focuses on high-quality care. This is fundamental across the early years. Young children are delightful to be with. But it is physically and emotionally exhausting to spend many hours with a baby who is struggling to manage being away from home, or a toddler who is often angry and frustrated.
I have been in schools where Reception children have a lovely, well-organised, nurturing morning. Then, in the middle of the day, they might spend over an hour trying to manage a loud and busy dining room and playground, without the care they need.
Confronting our emotions
Working with young children can be stressful and draining. We can feel so overwhelmed that we put our attention and energy in other, less demanding places. When a key child yet again needs support in managing a conflict, we busy ourselves in some other tasks such as sorting out the Duplo. When children show or tell us they are upset or struggling, we respond with a kind of false positivity and jolliness: ‘You’ll be alright’, or ‘We’re all friends here who share’.
It is ordinary for adults in the caring professions to do this. That is why it is important to have structures to enable practitioners to think about the children they are with all day. We need a safe time and place to reflect on the children’s emotions. Otherwise we can feel afraid to think about the emotions that children evoke in us.
Some children might make us feel weary. Others might be hard to spend time with. As a result, we might end up giving more attention to the children whose company we enjoy. This is why settings need a well-designed key-person system, including a system for ‘supervision’ or ‘Work Discussion’. It is important, but very difficult, to ensure that the child’s experience is central to our thinking. Peter Elfer’s 2011 guide to implementing the key-person approach is both insightful and practical (see box).
Children’s understanding of their feelings
A big part of offering high-quality care is the need to be attuned to children’s emotions, and then to help children recognise and process how they feel. For example, as toddlers seek to become more independent, they can often become frustrated and angry. It is especially helpful if we can calmly acknowledge and accept children’s different emotional states.
We can help children to manage their feelings by staying confident. The child may feel overwhelmed by their feelings: we do not need to. Sometimes a cuddle or other affirmation is what children need most. Other times, suggesting words or symbols to describe the child’s feelings can be helpful.
For older children, it is important to go beyond simple naming such as ‘sad’ and into more complex ways of thinking together. ‘I wonder if you’re sad because you wanted that toy?’
For vulnerable and emotionally fragile children, calm and loving care combined with sensible, clear routines and expectations is especially important. This type of high-quality care can offer them a pathway to the type of emotional and social development which will help them enjoy their early education and care. It can also help to prepare them well for their future learning.
You can see from that last example that to secure the best for every child, including children who may be vulnerable, we have to provide high-quality care. That is just one example of how everything in Development Matters connects. We cannot put children’s learning into neat separate boxes, and we cannot separate out the different aspects of effective practice. That’s both the challenge, and the joy, of working in the early years.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Development Matters: Non-statutory curriculum guidance for the early years foundation stage, published in September, is made up of two parts: an overview of seven key features of effective practice in early years care and education, followed by tables setting out the pathways of children’s development.
The seven features are: ✔ the best for every child ✔ high-quality care ✔ curriculum ✔ pedagogy ✔ assessment ✔ self-regulation and executive function ✔ partnership with parents.
This series aims to describe each of the seven features, explain their importance and show how settings can incorporate them into their practice, so that they can deliver high-quality provision that meets the learning and development needs of each child in their setting.
The guidance is at: https://bit.ly/2Fpxt5c
The best for every child: reflection points
The focus within this feature of effective practice is the Unique Child, and the right of every child to high-quality early education, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Reflection points
- How do you get to know each child and their family? Do you have a way of checking that families feel respected and safe when they come into your setting? Suggested further reading: ‘Working with parents’ on the Foundation Years website, https://foundationyears.org.uk/working-with-parents.
- Have you reviewed your practice and your resources to check you are promoting equality and opposing racism and gender stereotyping? Suggested further reading: ‘Inclusion: Let’s talk about race’ by Stella Louis, www.nurseryworld.co.uk.
- Harvard’s EdCast: Unconscious Bias in Schools, www.gse.harvard.edu/news/19/11/harvard-edcast-unconscious-bias-schools.
- Young Children and Racial Justice by Jane Lane (National Children’s Bureau, 2008).
- Supporting You to Raise Antiracist Children by Laura Henry-Allain and Emma Worrollo, www.mattel.com/sites/mattel_mattelcom/files/2020-07/Supporting_you_to_raise_antiracist_children2.pdf.
- How do you identify children who may be struggling to take part in the play and learning you offer, and how do you set about giving them extra help and making adjustments so they are included? Suggested further reading: ‘Universal inclusive practice’, www.foundationyears.org.uk/files/2015/06/Section-3-Universal-inclusive-practice.pdf.
High-quality care: reflection points
‘High quality care’ focuses on the emotional needs and development of the child, in particular:
- the child’s need for consistent warm relationships
- the key person role
- transitions and school-readiness.
Reflection points
- Have you reviewed your key-person approach to check how well it is working? Suggested further reading: People under Three: Play, work and learning in a childcare setting by Sonia Jackson and Ruth Forbes (Routledge, 2014) and Key Persons in the Early Years: Building relationships for quality provision in early years settings and primary schools by Peter Elfer, Elinor Goldschmied and Dorothy Selleck (David Fulton Books, 2011).
- How do you talk with parents and children to prepare them for transitions? Suggested further reading: ‘Being school-ready’, www.pacey.org.uk/working-in-childcare/spotlight-on/being-school-ready.
MORE INFORMATION
- Fostering Effective Early Learning (FEEL) Study (2018) by Iram Siraj and others, https://bit.ly/2FuIX8c
- Education in England: Annual Report 2020 by the Education Policy Institute, https://bit.ly/3jV2m0T
- EPPSE (Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education) Project: Research Brief (2015), https://bit.ly/3jSGrHN
- Ofsted blog: ‘Making curriculum decisions in the best interests of children’ (2020), https://bit.ly/3lEdy2i
NW CONFERENCE AND SHOW
Dr Julian Grenier will be talking about the revised EYFS guidance at our online conference (9-12 November) and Show masterclass (5 February). For programmes and to register, visit:
Dr Julian Grenier led on the revision of Development Matters for the Department for Education. He is head teacher of Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre, east London, which is a Research School.
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