“It is now widely accepted that within [early childhood education and care (ECEC)] settings, teachers and pedagogical staff are the most important factors that influence child wellbeing, development and learning.”
So says the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Starting Strong report, published in 2017, which also highlights “improving the working conditions and professional education of ECEC staff” as a key challenge for the sector.
These findings have increased importance for Scotland following the news that the government may decide to raise the school starting age to six.
A resolution being proposed for the SNP conference in October calls on the Scottish government to introduce “a statutory play-based kindergarten stage for three- to six-year-olds - similar to early years education in Nordic countries - and raise the formal school starting age to six”.
It was submitted by Toni Giugliano, the party’s policy development convener.
The resolution refers to “the body of international evidence in favour of play-based early years education” and the impact of “active social play” on children’s “physical fitness, social skills, cognitive capacities and personal qualities such as creativity, problem solving, self-regulation and emotional resilience”.
Raising the school starting age
It adds that Scotland and the UK are “outliers in Europe in starting formal education at four or five”, and that “countries with later school starting ages have performed better than those with earlier starts” in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), which tests 15-year-olds’ ability in reading, mathematics and science. The resolution also suggests the change could help close the attainment gap.
It states: “In order to succeed in closing the attainment gap, early years education must be based on relationship-centred, child-led, play-based environments with a greater focus on outdoor learning.”
Whether or not to raise the school starting age is a long-running debate. The idea of increasing it to seven, “based on the Nordic model”, made it into the Scottish Liberal Democrat manifesto for the 2021 Scottish elections and the Greens - who are now the SNP’s partners in government - also proposed raising the starting age to seven.
Upstart Scotland, meanwhile, has been campaigning for the change for years - Upstart Scotland chair, Sue Palmer, argues that “introducing relationship-centred, play-based education for this age-group (with the emphasis on outdoor learning) is the single most effective step Scotland can take to achieve excellence and equity in education, as well as the long-term health and wellbeing of our children”.
There is support for raising the school starting age within the teaching profession - but with some caveats. The 2017 EIS teaching union annual general meeting passed a resolution calling on the union to “investigate and report on the effect of an increase in the statutory age for starting primary school to age seven and the development of a compulsory kindergarten stage, where there is a focus on social skills and learning through play”.
The report that followed was published in 2019 and it found teachers highlighting many potential benefits, such as older children being more emotionally mature when they start school, able to concentrate for longer, more confident, more independent and better equipped with the skills needed to cope with school, such as being able to change clothes for PE and being toilet trained.
But of course - in order to reap these rewards - it is not just a case of delaying the start to school. The OECD report cited at the start of this article makes it clear that the quality of the provision is key - and the most important factor determining that quality is staff.
In Scotland, preschool teacher numbers have fallen sharply: in 2010 there were 1,504 full-time equivalent teachers working in the sector, but by last year that figure had more than halved to 704 FTE. Other graduates, with degrees relevant to early years, work in the sector; there were 3,150 other graduates working in early learning and childcare last year, a 16 per cent increase on 2020.
However, outgoing EIS general secretary Larry Flanagan said in his final address to an EIS annual general meeting, after 10 years as general secretary, that it made “more sense to prevent the attainment gap establishing itself than to engage in a Sisyphus-like struggle to close it” - and that “securing the role of nursery teachers is the most fundamental step to achieving that”.
The 2019 EIS report warned that more teachers could disappear from early years education if the school starting age is increased. It advised that “a change of school starting age and focus on kindergarten could let the government ‘off the hook’ for not employing enough teachers, and instead employing less qualified ELC staff with different skills; particularly as teachers are more expensive than ELC staff”.
The EIS paper was also less confident that raising the school starting age would help close the gap, finding that “no longitudinal studies exist which show that an early start to formal education confers a positive long-term advantage”; it also pointed to a potential risk that “children with more difficult and less stable home lives” could be “disadvantaged”. The EIS reflected newly qualified teachers’ concerns that “children with more difficult home lives” actually benefited from “the structure and stability of school”.
So, delaying school and extending the kindergarten or nursery phase would bring Scotland in line with other European countries - but it isn’t a silver bullet. To have the desired impact on attainment, as well as children’s social and emotional development, highly trained staff and low staff-child ratios would be key.
And, of course, there is a whole other elephant in the room to consider - how would the Scottish government square a move to a play-based approach with its much-criticised policy of testing the literacy and numeracy skills of children in P1?
Emma Seith is a senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith
