Understanding Early Years Inequality

Policy, assessment and young children's identities

Alice Bradbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136183492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Understanding Early Years Inequality uses critical sociological perspectives to examine the impact of changing assessment policy on primary school classrooms, with a particular focus on issues of inequality. Drawing on accounts of life in early years classrooms, Alice Bradbury suggests that a specific model of the 'good learner' operates, and that this model works to exclude some groups of students from positions of educational success.

Key themes examined throughout this book relate to:

• The relationship between assessment policy and children's identities as learners;
• The complexity of classroom life;
• The power of assessment to shape definitions of 'learning' and 'learners';
• The impact of discourses of class, race, religion and the 'inner city' on how children are assessed, and how assumptions about inner city schools and low attainment can put pressure on teachers to assess children in particular ways.

In this important text, the author argues that assessment policies can have a huge impact on classrooms and teachers, as well as having potentially damaging effects for young children, particularly those from minoritised and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The book explores in detail the complex interaction of education policies with discourses of attainment and expectation, and the resulting reproduction of patterns of inequality. Understanding Early Years Inequality will have an immediate impact on current debates about educational policy and practice in Early Years education, and will be of particular interest to academics and students in educational studies, sociology of education, and early childhood studies.

1

POLICY AND INEQUALITY IN PRIMARY EDUCATION

Introduction

This book examines the relationship between education policy and inequalities in education, in the early years of primary education. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of two Reception classes of children aged four and five, I explore the relationships between assessment practices, children's identities as learners and the reproduction of disparities in attainment in terms of ‘race’, class and gender. It is a story, to put it simply, of how policy changes what teachers do, what they think is important and how they judge children as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ learners. It is a story of how some children, aged four or five, will spend their first year in school being talked about and assessed as having become successful learners and some will not, and of how who they are – in terms of ‘race’, class and gender, among others – will affect this. It is also a story of the inner city school, where government schemes and media representations encourage low expectations, and where teachers feel they have to change children's results so that they make sense within these ideas about urban schools.

In this book, critical sociological perspectives are used to examine the impact of changing assessment policy on primary school classrooms. Central themes include the complexity of classroom life and the power of assessment to shape definitions of ‘learning’ and ‘learners’. The aim is to increase our understanding of how inequalities are produced and reproduced in the early years, through an examination of the impact of discourses of class, ‘race’, religion and the ‘inner city’ on how children are assessed. The focus of much of the ethnographic data here is on the impact of an assessment policy, introduced in 2003, for children in Reception, the first compulsory year of school. This assessment, the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFS Profile), was the first statutory assessment for children of this age in England and is one of the most formal systems worldwide (note that alternative systems operate in other parts of the UK). It is conducted through teacher assessment throughout the school year, and is based on teachers’ observations of children in all areas of classroom life. The EYFS Profile includes social, physical and emotional development as well as more academic skills, and is explained in detail below. These assessments play a crucial role in shaping children's schooling and yet there has been virtually no research on the impact on the EYFS Profile on classroom practices. The Profile was reviewed and reformed in 2012 by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, and, in the final chapter, I consider the impact of these changes to the assessment.

I begin this introductory chapter with a discussion of the wider context of education policy in the 2000s under New Labour, before explaining reform of the early years and the introduction of the EYFS Profile. These changes are then placed in an international context of increased standardisation in early childhood education. Final sections of the chapter explore reactions to the EYFS in the press and in government, and the patterns of inequalities the assessment has revealed, before I set out the structure of the rest of the book.

Education policy under New Labour

The introduction of a statutory assessment system for children aged five, comparable with Standard Assessment Tasks (Sats) for children aged seven and 11, has to be considered within the wider context of education policy under the New Labour governments of the late 1990s and 2000s. Increased regulation of the early years was consistent with a wider trend towards systems of accountability in schools in England (Ball, 2008). Policies such as high-stakes tests for children aged seven, 11, 14 and 16 at the end of each ‘Key Stage’, the use of league tables to compare results between schools, and school choice policies became embedded in the education system through the 1990s and 2000s, as Labour governments built upon the neoliberal market-based education policies of the Conservative governments in the 1990s. Under Labour, more detail was introduced to league tables, including ‘value added’ measures, and there were increased sanctions for schools deemed to be failing. Diversification of school types continued with the expansion of faith schools and the introduction of Academies, independent of control from local government. The wealth of new initiatives and reforms in education was accompanied by a huge investment in the sector, with a £33 billion increase in total spending on education during the first ten years of Labour governments (DCSF, 2009a: 3). In common with a worldwide trend of increased focus and investment in early years education, this included an 84 per cent increase in spending on education for the under fives in England between 1997 and 2009 (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2009: 24).

In 2003, the Department for Education and Skills¹ introduced the term ‘Foundation Stage’ for provision for children from three to five years old, suggesting equal status with Key Stage 1 (ages 5–7) and Key Stage 2 (ages 7–11), which had existed for several years. Curriculum guidance was provided for the Foundation Stage, and ‘Early Learning Goals’ were set. In 2008, this increased status was solidified when all educational provision from birth to five was brought together under the unwieldy term ‘Early Years Foundation Stage’ (EYFS). The intention was to create some consistency in provision across preschools, nursery schools, home childcare and school classes for three-to-five-year-olds, with the identification of key themes and principles. The EYFS was described as providing a ‘regulatory and quality framework for the provision of learning, development and care’ from birth to five years (DfE, 2010d). The framework set out objectives for children across different age groups using expected developmental points, including statements such as ‘Learns by observation about actions and their effects’ and ‘Are logical thinkers from birth’ (DfE, 2010a). These staged developmental points reach their conclusion in an assessment conducted at the end of the ‘stage’ – the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile, which is compiled in Reception in primary schools. Previously, systems of assessment for this age group varied widely and there was no statutory requirement to report the results to the government. ‘Baseline’ assessments were the main method used for assessing pupils when they first entered school, and these varied widely between different areas (Kirkup et al., 2003). The EYFS Profile was the first system to be consistent across different regions in England, allowing results from different areas to be compared and an analysis of patterns of attainment by pupil characteristics to be conducted for the first time.

The introduction of the Foundation Stage Framework and then the Early Years Foundation Stage reflected the government's concerns to ‘raise standards’ and increase accountability in this sector. The EYFS Profile results are used to monitor standards of teaching in Reception classes; they function as an accountability measure of ‘value for money’ in early years education. The introduction of a statutory assessment marked the spread of accountability mechanisms down into early years, and, as I discuss in later chapters, signalled the accompanying arrival of what Stephen Ball terms ‘the terrors of performativity’ into this sector (Ball, 2003b). Before I consider the detail of the EYFS Profile, I provide some background information on Early Years Foundation Stage classrooms.

The Early Years Foundation Stage

The Early Years Foundation Stage covers the wide variety of provision for children from birth to five that exists in England. Children under four attend a range of settings on a voluntary basis, including playgroups, preschools and care by childminders, all of which come under the EYFS framework. Children aged three and four may also attend Nursery classes located in primary schools. The government funds part-time childcare in a range of settings so that provision is free for all children of three and four; as a result, the majority of children are in some form of early years education at the age of four (DfE, 2010e). However, provision for children of four and five has a different status: attendance at school is compulsory by law from the term (semester) after a child's fifth birthday.² The vast majority of children begin to attend a ‘Reception’ class in the September or January before they turn five.³ Reception classes cater for these four- and five-year-olds until they begin Year 1 in the following September. Thus compulsory education begins earlier than in many other countries and this is a constant source of debate in the sector (Alexander, 2009; DfE, 2010c). Reception classes, although located in primary schools, are the final year of the Early Years Foundation Stage, and thus are bound by its statutory requirements rather than the National Curriculum which applies to Key Stages 1 and 2. Before the Foundation Stage and the EYFS, Reception classes had not been part of a designated stage and were loosely linked to Key Stage 1 (Nutbrown, 2006), and the new designation has been regarded by many in the sector as an ‘asset to status’ (Hargreaves and Hopper, 2006). However, Reception remains an important part of the primary school: Reception children and staff participate in whole-school activities, use school facilities such as sports grounds and the lunch hall, and may also join in with assemblies. The headteacher of the school is responsible for the Reception class, although it may be managed on a day-to-day basis by an EYFS Coordinator. The Reception classes and Nursery classes for younger children are commonly known as the ‘early years’ in schools in England, and this is a term I use throughout this book to distinguish Reception from other ‘early childhood’ settings.

In England practices in Reception classes are guided, as part of the EYFS, by four main principles:

A Unique Child

• Every child is a competent learner from birth who can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured.

Positive Relationships

• Children learn to be strong and independent from a base of loving and secure relationships with parents and/or a key person.

Enabling Environments

• The environment plays a key role in supporting and extending children's development and learning.

Learning and Development

• Children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates, and all areas of Learning and Development are equally important and inter-connected.

(from DCSF, 2008b)

As shown from these principles, the idea of ‘development’ is embedded in the EYFS. The importance of ‘enabling environments’ is a key consideration in the case of Reception classes, which provide a wide range of different activities to enable ‘learning and development’ in all areas of the curriculum. Children spend the majority of the day in ‘free play’, where they can select what they want to do from a range of both indoor and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Policy and inequality in primary education
• 2 Understanding learner identities in the early years classroom
• 3 Assessing learners in the first year of school
• 4 Assessing a ‘difficult intake’: ‘Race’, religion, class and gender in reception
• 5 ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ learners in the classroom
• 6 Playing with numbers: Learner identities and assessment
• 7 Policy, equality and ‘learning’
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index