National Curriculum In The Early Years

Challenges And Opportunities

Dr Theo Cox, Theo Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135402570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The child-centred principles of early years education - which emphasize play and holistic learning - are being challenged by the implementation of a subject-based National Curriculum. The contributors to this book explore this challenge and offer some ways of meeting it practically and productively. Issues covered include: pedagogical issues, such as the cross-curricular, topic-based teaching; teacher's attitudes to subject knowledge; assessment issues, including baseline assessment at the age of five; and parental attitudes to the National Curriculum and its content at Key Stage 1.

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1 Introduction and Overview

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Theo Cox

The National Curriculum

The passing of the Education Reform Act (ERA) in 1988 marked a strikingly interventionist phase in government policy compared with the post-war decades, characterized by central control of the content of the curriculum across the 5 to 16 age range in state-maintained schools. This was coupled with a deliberate weakening of the power of local government in educational matters through the enforced delegation of responsibility for management and budgeting to the schools themselves. The political agenda driving this legislation seemed to be based upon a belief, at least in part, in the power of market forces to drive up educational standards and a distrust of the influence of the educational establishment as ‘trendy theorists’, and of LE As in the practice of education in schools (see Chitty, 1992 and Carr and Hartnett, 1995 for analyses of this political context).

The National Curriculum was introduced in September 1989 to the nation's 5-year-olds at the beginning of Key Stage 1 after a barely notional period of prior consultation with teachers and others. The core foundation subjects of English, mathematics and science (and Welsh in Welsh medium schools in Wales) were introduced at first, soon to be followed by the non-core foundation subjects¹ of design and technology, information technology, history, geography, art, and music and physical education, during the following four years. Thus the brunt of the first phase of the new National Curriculum programme was borne by early years teachers. The pressures imposed on these teachers by the speed of implementation of such a complex curriculum structure and its associated assessment requirements were compounded by a series of ongoing changes to the curriculum or its assessment just as teachers were getting used to them (see Barber et al., 1996 for a critical account of the government's handling of the construction and implementation of the National Curriculum). The bewildering and demoralizing effect on Key Stage 1 teachers of this heavily overprescriptive curriculum and the rapid subsequent changes to it have now been well documented (see for example, Pollard et al., 1994 and Cox and Sanders, 1994).

The accumulated and overwhelming evidence for the sheer unmanageability of the National Curriculum in the form that it was introduced at Key Stages 1 and 2 (see for example, OFSTED, 1993), led the government to commission a wholesale review of it in 1993, led by Sir Ron Dearing, with the aim of streamlining and simplifying it. Sir Ron consulted widely in the course of this review and produced an interim report in 1993 and a final report in 1994. In these he recommended a slimming down of the National Curriculum, especially in the non-core subjects, so reducing its prescriptiveness, and a reduction and simplification of the programme for national assessment. His recommendations were accepted by the government and led to a review of all National Curriculum subjects by the newly established curriculum and assessment body for England, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA), and the Curriculum and Assessment Authority for Wales (ACAC) respectively. In the words of a DFE publication (undated) the aim of this curriculum subject review was to focus the curriculum requirements on the core essentials for each subject, to improve their manageability, and to give primary school teachers more time to concentrate on the basics. A further aim was to set higher standards for the National Curriculum particularly in the basics of English, maths and science.

This subject by subject review was carried out in the Spring term 1994 with the support of advisory groups of teachers and others representing the various subjects and also groups representing each key stage and children's special educational needs. The proposed new subject orders were then put out for wide ranging consultation in England and Wales during the Summer of 1994 and, following these, the final recommendations of the two curriculum bodies were made toward the end of the year. The government accepted these and the orders for the revised National Curriculum came into force on 1 August 1995 for Key Stages 1 to 3. Also, in keeping with Sir Ron Dearing's recommendations, a five-year moratorium on any further major change to the National Curriculum was declared with the aim of ensuring that teachers should enjoy a period of stability in which to implement it.

Whether the revised National Curriculum and its assessment will achieve the government's main objectives of reducing teacher workload, enabling primary teachers to concentrate more on teaching ‘the basics’, and freeing up to 20 per cent of school teaching time for discretionary uses remains to be seen. The responses so far received to a follow-up written questionnaire sent in 1996 to the head teachers and Year 1 teachers in the Swansea University Impact Study described in Chapter 2 indicate that they had not noticed any significant reduction in teacher workload following the revision of the National Curriculum. Some of them commented that even the revised curriculum was still too prescriptive and overloaded in content, making it difficult to teach the basic skills in the necessary depth.

The Early Years

There is a good deal of variation in usage of the term ‘early years’. At its broadest it covers the years 0 to 8 years, for example in the context of primary initial teacher training courses (DES, 1990). In other contexts however the term is confined to the years 0 to 5, the so-called ‘pre-school years’, although these have now been renamed the ‘pre-compulsory school years’ to avoid the confusion caused by the fact that a high proportion of 4-year-olds in England and Wales attend reception or mixed age infant classes in LEA maintained schools (SCAA, 1996). The usage in this book is the widest, i.e., 0 to 8 years although some contributors focus on particular age groups within this range.

Underlying these differences in usage of the term is the issue of whether it makes educational or psychological sense to think of the years 0 to 7 or 8 as a single broad phase as the Early Years Curriculum Group (EYCG, 1989) and the Early Childhood Education Forum (see Chapters 10 and 12) advocate, or whether it should be restricted to the years 0 to 5 or 6. The starting age for compulsory schooling is not a very reliable guide in this respect for the Plowden Report (Central Advisory Council (England) 1967) states that the choice of 5 as the starting age for compulsory schooling in England and Wales was made almost by chance in 1870,² and in most other European countries the starting age is 6 or sometimes 7 years. The Plowden Report recommended that compulsory education should begin for children in the September following their fifth birthday (which would mean a median starting age of 5½ years), to be followed by three full years of education in a ‘first school’ and transfer to a ‘middle school’ at an average age of 8½ years (Central Advisory Council for Education (England), 1967, Para 386). Prior to compulsory school entry children should receive part time nursery education if their parents wished it. These recommendations were never implemented nationally although a number of first and middle schools were created in England.

Two researchers at London University Institute of Education, Moss and Penn (1996) argue that, to avoid undue pressures from the National Curriculum upon 5-year-olds, the age of compulsory education should be postponed to 6, with the ages 0 to 6 being regarded as the first stage of education. Similarly Gillian Pugh, Director of the Early Childhood Unit at the National Children's Bureau urges that there should be an overall national policy for the care and education of children from birth to 6 years (Pugh, 1996).

Despite these differing views regarding the span of the early years there is much to be said for the view adopted in this book that the broad principles of early childhood education (see in particular Part 3 of this book) should apply to the full 0 to 8 range, even though compulsory schooling in England and Wales, and now the National Curriculum, start at age 5. However, within this broad span, it also makes sense to focus upon the distinctive educational, social and care needs of particular age groups of children, notably 0 to 3, 3 to 5 and 5 to 7 which are the age phase groups of the Quality in Diversity project described in Chapter 12. For example the Early Childhood Unit of the National Bureau is currently conducting a research and development project on the learning needs of children under 3 with the aim of exploring staff development and training models. The age range 3 to 5 years has traditionally been thought of as the nursery school stage in Britain, with its own distinctive curriculum and strongly play-based approach to learning but now, in the context of the government's nursery voucher initiative, the focus is upon the educational needs of this age group across the full range of educational and care settings to be found in Britain (see Chapters 10 and 12). The years 5 to 7/8 have not only constituted the traditional infant stage of British education but now, of course, cover Key Stage 1 of the National Curriculum.

In fact the introduction of children under 5 to Key Stage 1 of the National Curriculum appears to be officially sanctioned in a recent guide to curriculum planning at Key Stages 1 and 2 published by SCAA (1995) and written with the help of primary teachers. This states that, while the revised National Curriculum at Key Stage 1 has been designed to be taught and assessed within a period of six terms (i.e., 5 to 7 years), schools may choose to spread their teaching of this curriculum over a longer period and thus cover aspects of the National Curriculum with reception classes if they judge this appropriate to the needs and stage of development of the children (my emphasis). The guide goes on to say that there should be continuity between the curriculum for under-5s, and the Key Stage 1 curriculum. The possible dangers of a premature introduction of the more formal subject knowledge and skill requirements of the National Curriculum to such children, and the nature of the continuity between the National Curriculum and the curriculum for under-5s are discussed in the present book.

The Impact of the National Curriculum in the Early Years

The National Curriculum and its apparatus of national assessment has been perceived by many early years practitioners as threatening to some of their fundamental professional values, beliefs and practices. Anning (1995) describes how, prior to its introduction, certain right wing politicians and educationists attacked and even derided what they perceived as the weaknesses of child centred education, in particular the play-based approach to learning. As she says the value systems which underpinned the ERA, such as quality assurance, value for money, preparation for employment and, one might add, competition between providers, clashed with the value systems of early years practitioners which:

… emphasised the value of play as a powerful vehicle of learning, the importance of the social and emotional needs of the child, the significance of physicality and first hand experiences, the need to develop literacy and numeracy as tools for learning and the importance of fun and enjoyment in motivating young children to want to learn. (Anning, 1995, p. 4)

Arming goes on to outline some ways in which the ERA reforms have affected three interrelated aspects of education at Key Stage 1, namely curriculum, assessment and pedagogy and these headings are adopted in the following discussion of the impact of the National Curriculum in the early years.

Curriculum

As pointed out in an earlier publication (Cox and Sanders, 1994) the specific subject orientation of the National Curriculum contrasts with the view in the Plowden Report that for young children only the broadest divisions of the curriculum are suitable and even older primary school children should not be exposed to ‘rigidly defined subjects’ (para 538). Plowden's suggested broad divisions were however broken down further in a curriculum model for children aged 5 to 16 put forward by HMI (DES, 1985). This proposed the following ‘areas of learning and experience’:

• aesthetic and creative;

• human and social;

• linguistic and literary;

• mathematical;

• moral;

• physical;

• scientific;

• spiritual; and

technological. (DES, 1985, para 33)

These areas were not suggested as discrete elements to be taught separately in isolation from one another and were not equated with particular subjects, although it was acknowledged that some subjects would contribute more to some areas than others. Many would support this focus upon areas of learning experience in planning the early years curriculum rath...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• 1 Introduction and Overview
• Notes on Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index