The A to Z of Early Years. June O'Sullivan

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      Further Reading

      Farmer, N. (2012) Getting it Right for Boys. London: Bloomsbury.

      Sharp, A. and O'Sullivan, J. (2019) 50 Activities for Dads. London: Bloomsbury.

      E is for Early Learning Goals

      The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is a statutory framework for learning, development and care for children from birth to five in England (DfE, 2014). The introduction of the EYFS was a bit of a shock to a very disparate sector, but I have always felt it did a great job in cohering the sector around a framework with a clear set of standards and that it was a very significant lever in shaping quality.

      The principles which framed the EYFS are worth mentioning as they are warm and ambitious and not uttered often enough today. The view was that every child deserves the best possible start in life and the support that enables them to fulfil their potential. That includes a secure, safe and happy childhood, good parenting and high-quality early learning. Combined, these three elements are the foundation children need to make the most of their abilities and talents as they grow up.

      The EYFS framework, which has become a most significant document in the life of any early years setting, combined the welfare requirements to safeguard children with learning and development requirements known as the Early Learning Goals (ELGs). These were designed to ensure that the educational programmes of every early years setting were designed to provide children with the knowledge, skills and understanding necessary to enable them to manage the transition into Key Stage 1 (children aged five to seven years). Since then, much to our consternation, this has been pushed further down and the term ‘school ready’ is used for children as young as three.

      Like any significant document, it is regularly reviewed and sometimes used as battleground for bigger philosophical arguments. For example, in 2009 there was a call by the Cambridge Primary Review to extend it to children age six and scrap KS1. Concerns were growing that how the framework was applied was leading to an overload of arbitrary bureaucratic expectations. In 2010, the then Minister of State for Children and Families, Sarah Teather, commissioned Dame Clare Tickell to review progress, especially in terms of the focus on getting children ready for education and improving the attainment of children from deprived backgrounds. There was a large consultation, and what became clear was that the sector had warmed to the EYFS and asked that the framework itself should not be changed, but that how it was being interpreted should be examined, especially with regard to funding and paperwork.

      Published in 2011, the Tickell Report (Tickell, 2011) made some key recommendations, reducing the number of Early Learning Goals from 69 to 17 and replacing the six areas of learning with seven areas. There were three prime areas (communication and language; personal, social and emotional development; physical development) and four other areas (literacy; mathematics; expressive arts and design; understanding the world). The changes caused many discussions, some of which still rage, especially the school readiness agenda and the lack of guidance on teaching and learning. Despite these concerns, the new Early Learning Goals were made operational and generally accepted by the sector. There was a slight amendment again in 2014 and since then we have been using them with relative tolerance. The challenge between what new research tells us about how children learn, and the school readiness agenda, remains both controversial and emotive.

      Things changed when the Children and Families Minister, Nadhim Zahawi, instigated a review of the ELGs in 2018. The approach courted controversy from the initial appointment of an advisory panel by the DfE and a pilot tested in 24 schools during 2019 with the intention of allowing schools to adopt the new framework from September 2020. All of this was organised quite furtively with limited input from the early years sector, causing much consternation.

      The stated purpose of the revisions (DfE, 2019) was to:

       make all 17 ELGs clearer, more specific and easier in order for teachers to make accurate judgements;

       focus on strengthening language and vocabulary development to particularly support disadvantaged children;

       strengthen literacy and numeracy outcomes to ensure all children had a good grasp of these areas of learning in preparation for Year 1;

       ensure the ELGs were based on the latest evidence in childhood development;

       ensure they reflected the strongest predictors of future attainment.

      The early years sector responded as it always does by debating publicly and lobbying quietly. There was sympathy with the intention to examine why the achievement gap between children eligible for free school meals and their better-off peers had not changed and remained stubbornly at around 17%. Everyone was happy to explore how we could improve children's speech and language and who would complain about any effort to reduce workload? The issue was that no one was convinced that changing the ELGs would solve the workload issues without addressing the process of assessment, and nor would it address the fundamental issue of how children learn to communicate without looking at how we teach and how children learn.

      The government was quite open that the new ELGs were a way of trying to align the curriculum to how maths and phonics are taught in Year 1. This simply confirmed the view from the early years sector that the Early Learning Goals were moving towards a more formal Reception curriculum, in contrast to the rich and varied play-based learning proven to be a more effective way for small children to gain a strong concrete grasp of the skills, knowledge and understanding necessary to apply abstract concepts. Was this yet another push towards rushing children into meeting targets that they were not developmentally ready to meet? Or was this approach contributing to the negative achievement gap currently applied to children's circumstances, rather than a response to inappropriate developmental targets?

      The specific changes to the ELGs tended to align with the view that the government wanted a more formal curriculum pushed downwards onto our smallest children in direct opposition to a raft of international educational research. The tone of the changes to the ELGs seem to imply that they were designed for the older children, including using the term ‘pupils’ which would be rare in an early years setting. Unsurprisingly, the sector's greatest concerns began with the language and communication goal, e.g. removing ‘understanding’ failed to recognise the significance of how small children learn to ‘read’ communication through non-verbal cues and facial communication, and how they link this to meaning. The use of ‘recently introduced vocabulary’ was a source of confusion, especially with the addition of ‘using full sentences’ and ‘making use of conjunctions’ overcomplicating this desired outcome. It will be interesting to see how Ofsted inspectors interpret this statement and the pedantically phrased ‘hold conversation when engaged in back-and-forth exchanges'. How else do we converse?

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