STS0017
Written evidence submitted by TACTYC
Submitted on behalf of TACTYC: the Association for Professional Development in Early Years.
Our activities include:
Executive Summary
1.1 The statutory age for starting education in England is the term after a child’s fifth birthday, which is relatively young compared with most other countries where children start at 6 or 7 following extended experience of a coherent programme of early years education. Currently, children in England are expected to enter school in the September of the year in which they will become five, which means that summer born children are admitted a year ahead of statutory school age.
1.2 The reception year in primary school is still part of the EYFS, but the breadth of provision and emphasis on the characteristics of early learning are being eroded by changes to the measures of literacy and numeracy in the EYFS Profile and the introduction of the phonics check. Rising expectations of outcomes in the Early Years Profile, together with downward pressures from the phonics check and more demanding literacy and numeracy requirements in Key Stage 1 are distorting the early years curriculum, with undue emphasis on literacy and numeracy, and a narrow view of school readiness.
1.3 The pressures on teachers presented by the emphasis on measurable outcomes are unavoidably passed on to children and indeed to parents. DfE policy does not recognise the fact that young children’s development is not linear: the prime areas of learning remain central for young children at least until they reach expected levels of development in line with the full extent of the EYFS Profile. Personal, social and physical development and communication and language skills are crucial, and sustain a continuing motivation to learn and long term achievement.
1.4 There is evidence that summer born children are having particular difficulty: their levels of achievement have not risen as a result of recent measures and remain significantly lower than those of their older peers and a very high proportion are erroneously identified as having special needs (1,2)
1.5 It is worth noting that reading achievement of children at age 11 is no worse and often better in countries where formal education starts later (3, 4)
2. Implications of annual entry for schools and pre-schools
2.1 Annual entry means a whole class of 30 children must be settled in quickly. This is demanding enough for staff, parents and children to manage without additional pressures caused by the proposed on-entry baseline assessment.
2.2 Nursery provision suffers through the consequent requirement to fill a large number of places each September, and through the loss of older role models. The recent insistence on annual entry to primary school does not sufficiently take into account the effect the policy has on the lives of individual children, parents and educators, nor the inevitable consequences for feeder settings. Pre-schools have a large number of vacancies to fill each September. Financial considerations mean that nurseries in all sectors need to admit children as quickly as possible, so the settling in process is inevitably more demanding and stressful than it should be for all involved. The foreshortened time in pre-school education leads to a lack of coherence in the experiences we are offering our youngest children, just at the time when they need continuity, consistency and well-tuned stimulus and challenge in their social, emotional, intellectual and physical development.
2.3 Countries with effective provision for early care and education keep children in pre-school for at least three full years, which enables staff to provide a coherent programme focusing on the skills that underpin later more academic learning, and the building of secure relationships with families. In this country, early years education is disjointed, and is undermined by the loss of five year olds from nursery settings. These older children provide invaluable role models for the younger children, enriching social skills and the quality of play and learning. Being the oldest in their group, even only for a term, gives summer born children the experience of being “at the top of the class” at least once in their lives, and contributes to their ability to cope with the demands of school.
2.4 There are constraints for schools who may want to offer part time places or deferred entry – this is a real problem if the school is over-subscribed, especially in the light of an expected shortage of primary places.
2.5 Funding decisions depend on the number on role on enumeration day, so it is in schools’ financial interest not to delay registration for younger pupils
2.6 Current proposals to allow parents to defer entry for a year so that the youngest children are allowed to be in a younger year group are not a satisfactory answer in the long term, as they may lead to difficulty when pupils reach the age at which they can leave statutory education. It is also not suitable for children to go straight into Y1, where they will encounter a more formalised approach to the curriculum. Parents’ decisions about moving their child from pre-school to school are based largely on Local Authority policy or information from the school, which is not always consistent. Although the Schools Admissions Code (2.16) states that “Admissions authorities must make it clear in their arrangements that parents can request the date their child is admitted to school can be deferred until later in the academic year or until the term in which the child reaches compulsory school age”, most parents are not aware of this, and those who do want to defer entry often have a difficult battle. Over a third of parents in one study felt that their child was too young for school, and only around a third of parents had heard of deferred entry, but most said they would not have chosen it anyway because of concerns about the child ‘falling behind’ or wanting to start at the same time as friends (5) Some feel that the social cost of separating their child from the rest of the cohort is too great, even at the expense of their learning. Others are told by schools that due to the high demand for admission, a place cannot be guaranteed for a child to enter the school part-way through a school year. Admitting up to 30 young children into class at one time makes settling them very hard, for staff and parents as well as children, and this further exacerbates what can be a difficult transition.
2.7 Summer born children have a particularly demanding time on entry to school as they are less mature and less experienced than the older children in the cohort. At the age of four, even a few months’ difference is significant. Although it is predictable and normal for younger children not to reach an arbitrary average standard, they are too often perceived and labelled as ‘failing.’
3. The importance of the Early Years Foundation Stage for children up to the end of YR
3.1 The solution is to make sure that schools are ready for children. Learning and development are not linear and there are wide individual variations, within as well as between individual children in the early years. The high levels of misdiagnosis of special needs in YR, especially for boys and the summer born cohort, are worrying, and have serious effects on children and families (6)
Sykes et al (2009) conclude that their findings ”suggest that the disadvantage for summer-born children, which is particularly significant in the early years of schooling, might be eased by delaying the undertaking of a formal curriculum, but that care should be taken to make adequate and suitable provision for children’s education prior to that point…In summary, this review has highlighted the robustness and persistence of birthdate effects and confirmed that they present potentially serious consequences for relatively young children that put them at a clear and long-term disadvantage in the educational system (6)
3.2 Teacher expectations of the youngest children in their classes affect tasks given and pupil performance. A study showed that summer born children’s results in standard tests at the end of Key Stage One were not significantly affected by spending seven or nine terms at school, because they remained the youngest in their class (7).
3.3 Children who enter school at just four, a year before statutory starting age, have a year less in an environment with more favourable adult:child ratios (be that home or preschool) to support their individual language development and learning, and instead have a year in an environment with brief, infrequent and restricted adult-child interaction. An ethnographic study of four reception teachers which aimed to find out to what extent and in which ways reception teachers conversed with their pupils found that the patterns of interaction that emerged reflected other studies of teacher/pupil classroom interaction. “The teacher is very fully occupied in a multitude of often-simultaneous tasks including classroom management, whole class teaching, small group facilitation, one-to-one reading and so forth. Interaction is teacher-dominated. It is teacher-led, extends to all members of the class, but from the children’s point of view is brief, infrequent and restricted. This did not reflect a lack of concern for interaction on the part of the teachers, but rather the reality of dealing with a complex curriculum with a large number of young children in limited time. Sustained detailed conversations between children and teacher were not part of the routine school day”. (8)
3.4 August born children’s achievement in the Foundation Stage Profile is significantly lower relative to those born in September. Their lower achievement across several measures impacts on summer born children’s perceptions of self-worth and their views of the value of school. It would be useful to introduce an analysis of children’s achievement at the end of the EYFS by their month of birth, as has been done in relation to the Year 1 phonics check. This shows a predictable drop in percentages of children reaching the expected score for younger children, month by month. The long term effects of mis-identification of SEN in YR and Y1 is of grave concern, when many children are diagnosed as having problems, although they are younger and less experienced rather than less able than their autumn-born peers.
3.5 the proposals to introduce a formalised baseline assessment at the start of YR and to make the EYFS Profile voluntary from 2016, will undermine the crucial settling in time for children new to school, and tend to narrow the curriculum, making it difficult for staff to ensure that all children have access to experiences that promote the characteristics of effective learning that apply in the EYFS (9).
3.6 Early entry is only acceptable where there are small classes with specialist early years teachers and generous ratios of adults to children, careful induction of individual children into an imaginatively resourced learning environment including access to outdoors, some quiet space, careful arrangements for meals, plenty of time for creative activities and play offering optimum stimulus for learning, all supported by observational records and good links with parents.
3.7 The OFSTED definition of teaching in the early years applied in PVI nurseries makes it clear that:
Teaching should not be taken to imply a ‘top down’ or formal way of working. It is a broad term which covers the many different ways in which adults help young children learn. It includes their interactions with children during planned and child-initiated play and activities: communicating and modelling language, showing, explaining, demonstrating, exploring ideas, encouraging, questioning, recalling, providing a narrative for what they are doing, facilitating and setting challenges. It takes account of the equipment they provide and the attention to the physical environment as well as the structure and routines of the day that establish expectations. Integral to teaching is how practitioners assess what children know, understand and can do as well as take account of their interests and dispositions to learning (characteristics of effective learning), and use this information to plan children’s next steps in learning and monitor their progress.
4. Recommendations
4.1 The right of parents to keep their children in nursery provision or at home until such time as they reach statutory school starting age should be publicised and respected.
4.2 The integrity of the statutory Early Years Foundation Stage should be preserved throughout the Reception Year, and into Y1 for any pupils who do not reach the expected level of development as measured by the full Early Years Foundation Stage Profile.
References
February 2015