Early Years Education and Care

New issues for practice from research

Susan Hay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317667230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What are the new benchmarks for the future in good early years' provision? What should children and parents expect from practice given recent research evidence on how young children thrive?

Developing and managing early years provision has changed significantly over the last few years. Parental expectations, policy creep, bureaucracy overload, inadequate training, a litigious climate, over-dependence on screens, traffic danger and child protection anxiety are among the many challenges now faced by early years providers. This timely new book explores the key issues faced by settings and what they mean for early years practice.

Looking at the real evidence around children's learning and wellbeing, parental preference and social trends, the book covers:

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• Neuro-scientific research into the way children learn

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• What parents know and expect

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• Children's wellbeing

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• The indoor and outdoor environment

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• Adult intervention

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• The risk/benefit equation

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• Nutrition, health and exercise

Drawing on examples of outstanding practice from a wide range of settings, this exciting new book will help practitioners reach beyond what is expected and provide the very best for the children in their care.

SECTION 1 Service values and principles

DOI: 10.4324/9781315768700-2

CHAPTER 1 Early childhood education and care in context

Philip Gammage

DOI: 10.4324/9781315768700-3

Introduction

The provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a major preoccupation of most advanced nations. Certainly the thirty-four (2014) OECD member countries have remarkably close agreement over its importance. However, policy makers (usually politicians), the public and the professionals are often not agreed on purpose, pedagogy, or modes of accountability (Kappan, September 2013). The OECD notes that the age range birth to three years is of special concern. How to achieve that blend of care and nurture rich in early experience and appropriate learning, embedded in a real relationship with the family, vexes many policy makers. The gradual upgrading and provision of longer training of higher quality has proved almost too much for some governments, including those of England, Australia and some provinces of Canada. There are also some groups of parents and community who (for ideological reasons) actively oppose state provision of ECEC, especially for the under-threes. With increased migration across many countries have come families who do not see the need for ECEC, or, at the very least, prefer their children to be at home for as long as possible.

There is no over-riding single cause for the current state of ECEC provision in the world; rather, there is a coalescing of forces and changes that impact critically on our children. The main drivers seem to be as follows (not in any rank order):

• the slow but gradual emancipation of women;
• efficient, cheap and safe contraception;
• an overall decline in the birth rate in OECD countries;
• increasing numbers of women in the workforce and in higher education;
• high divorce rates in western societies;
• compelling research on early brain development;
• the persistent and debilitating effects of poverty and the roots of crime;
• conflicting value systems in a fluid, post-modern world;
• the powerful and universal influence of technology and the media;
• the globalisation and interlinking of economies.

The OECD (2006) records ten imperatives for policy in respect of early childhood. They are set out thus (author précis):

1. To provide a system that reduces child poverty.
2. To adopt an integrated vision of the ECEC system and organise accordingly.
3. To coordinate and steer the national system from the centre, whilst at the same time ensuring detailed local involvement.
4. To allocate adequate public funds so as to achieve quality pedagogy and care.
5. To pay special attention to the ‘under-served’ birth to three years age range within a thoroughly integrated vision of continuity.
6. To focus research and resources on children with diverse learning patterns and reduce targeting and remedial approaches.
7. To value and encourage family and community involvement.
8. To use the stakeholders and the professions to help co-construct broad, sustainable and appropriate programme/curriculum goals.
9. Adequately to train staff and provide continued professional development. Engage them in participatory approaches to quality practice.
10. To foster the creation of visionary, broad perspectives of learning, participation and democratic ideals.

The importance of context

Constructs, concepts, beliefs and perceptions are all ways of encapsulating ideas. No concept can exist without a context in which it is framed or occurs. An idea is partly shaped by its context and policies about what we do with our young occur within a set of beliefs, values and perceptions that help shape the policy. It is a mistake to see this as a cool, dispassionate, evidence-based affair. Policy makers are mortal creatures and their judgements are sometimes idiosyncratic, ideologically committed and highly personal. It is a brave senior civil servant who asks, ‘Minister show me your evidence and sample size’.

Early childhood education and care occur within a context of ways that the culture and its communities view their children. Such views reflect beliefs and fashions of the era and sometimes more immediately local needs, too. (The use of corporal punishment in England is a good example; and there are still substantial groups of parents who think it important.) In many countries children are done unto, despite those countries being signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Kandel (the ‘father’ of comparative education) was reputed to have said that by the way a culture treated its children, so might one assess the quality of its culture. It is a sobering thought for the British, since their whole education system can be said to still display the bones of a class system and certainly a system that is utilised by the housing market! Live here and you are guaranteed companions who see education in the same light as yourself. Live there and your views may well be dissonant with the generally accepted culture of the district. Opportunities for high quality ECEC may still be an accident of location or birth, as it is for gaining access to the education system as a whole.

This chapter attempts to place ECEC in context of the big picture, dealing with certain ideas and constraints that affect the service and the training (or otherwise) of professionals who work with children. The shorthand ECEC (early childhood education and care) is used in this chapter and is pertinent for those from birth to about eight years (there are arguments about where/when early childhood ends and little convincing evidence for it being ‘hard and fast’); it is a convention followed by the OECD, UNICEF and many European countries including Great Britain. Pivotal to those context lists set out earlier is a summary of some of the main implications of our more recent knowledge (the last twenty-five years, or so) on the development of the brain. Professionals, from potters to paediatricians, cannot escape the discipline of the clay they work with. The OECD’s goal of well-trained professionals has to encompass a real understanding of what Bruner once called ‘the entering characteristics of the learners’ (ECL). Knowledge of the child and her well-being is absolutely central, as the OECD’s Starting Strong, a study of ECEC in twenty countries, demonstrates (OECD 2001, 2006).

Influences on the curriculum for the young child

At the end of the chapter is a short summary of contextual features that appear to press in on, or facilitate, the provision of ECEC. A broadly ecological approach is employed and from time to time references will be drawn from other disciplines and from other countries. By ‘ecological’ I mean noting, listing and mapping those contextual features that influence the young child. The child is central to the map, or target; influences on the developing child are then mapped as highly significant, or less so. In this chapter the development of the brain is taken as the most significant feature, embedded in all we do in ECEC, yet over-riding and central to the other features identified (see Bronfenbrenner 1979).

As already stated, policy does not occur in a vacuum and the increasing bureaucratisation of education in general, as an arm of the state, is noted as itself an increasingly powerful contextual feature. Many countries have determined a ‘curriculum’ for even their very young and, where once in universities there were departments given to discussion and research on curriculum and philosophy, now there are few and their interventions are limited and often outside the real courts of discussion (central or state government). Australia has a process-oriented ‘framework’, the ‘Early Years Learning Framework’ (EYLF) for ECEC, approximately birth to six years. It commissioned university staff to write it (2010). Such an approach was not necessarily approved of by all the Australian states. At least two have stuck to their own public servant-derived content for ECEC. And, unlike the era of the Plowden Report (CACE 1967), it is currently (in 2014) rather difficult to see the Department for Education in England acting upon research input from universities on the best curricula for ECEC!

Advances in communication change the context, too, and mean that systems, especially apparent successes in the curriculum – literacy and maths particularly – in (say) Sweden or Finland, Australia or the USA, are quickly relayed to policy makers in other countries. The OECD has a direct concern that they should be and sees that as part of its role. Often a form of ‘Chinese Whispers’ occurs, such that ideas are changed somewhat in transit, or are misunderstood, or exaggerated. Moreover, very few of the ideas are that new. For instance, though there may be up-to-date research going on about the apparent connection between poor literacy rates and poverty, the connection and some of its effects, if not its subtleties, have been noted for many years.

Early education ideology

Thus, the chapter does not contain detailed descriptions of the latest research in cognitive development, or of the social psychology of policy making. Rather, it is about the shorthand constructs which are traded, used as the basis for ideological views of what is appropriate; it is about opinions and attitudes, contains ‘one-liners’ about how the research may be interpreted. What the chapter does do is attempt to set out the main contextual features and list and summarise the major constraints noted by others, such as those by the OECD, UNICEF, UNESCO, or specific governments. Most of the constructs are not discrete; they affect our views of other constructs; they may be somewhat messily tangled up with them. Fashion plays a part and perspectives are often complex and more culturally specific than some might think. Throughout it all we must remember Kandel’s point, that culture is highly salient. By the way a culture regards its children and ‘caters’ for them, so we may register something of the quality of that culture itself. We cannot escape Mead’s comment either. We look through eyes that are peculiarly our own. Such a view has a profound effect on how we see not only our policy, but the over-arching classic sociological divisions of gender and poverty themselves. Finally we should recall Chesterton’s old adage, ‘He who simplifies simply lies’, and therefore treat the following summaries and sweeping generalisations with caution.

The child and our attitudes towards her

The child is father of the man.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

The importance of childhood as an important stage in life has long been recognised and documented by many authors, including Juvenal, Shakespeare, Freud and Spock. Observations by parents, teachers, paediatricians and psychologists also tell us that early experience coupled with the genetic legacy seem to build within us the highways of personality, such that the behaviour of (say) the two or three year old can be remarkably predictive and give indications of how the mature adult may well behave. A classic long-term study which underscores such prediction is the famous Dunedin study on a substantial cohort of one thousand children (see Silva and Stanton 1996). There are many others.

It was Robert Reiner, the film producer, who was attributed with the saying, ‘After four your brain is cooked’. And, though this is very deterministic and tends to negate the classic re-negotiation of personality that often takes place during adolescence, it is remarkably ‘pithy’ and apt. What we should dwell upon is that we now have convincing evidence that there is much in it and that evidence co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section 1 Service values and principles
• Section 2 Making values visible
• Index