Pay attention now, all you babies out there. Have you said your ABC yet? Counted 1, 2, 3? Can you recognise a triangle? And how do you feel about “exploring vocabulary through poetry and video” while listening to Beethoven this morning? The last exercise comes courtesy of the Baby Einstein company, whose products include Baby Shakespeare and Baby Mozart videos under the slogan “Great minds start little”. It is just one example of a trend in “educational” toys for very young children that will dismay most teachers.

The pressure to achieve is reaching through the bars of the cot. Some might say this is no surprise, given the ever-younger age at which UK children start school and the barrage of tests they face once there. Just two weeks ago, The TES reported on government plans to introduce starred grades for the brightest 1 or 2 per cent of seven-year-olds in national tests. Toys for babies these days are “smart”. There’s the Fisher-Price range of Baby Smartronics products, which includes a computer learning system for babies aged nine months and upwards. There is Smart Frames, a kind of curly abacus. VTech’s Little Smart toys include baby’s first book - “very interactive, very clever, very VTech”.

Online from the United States, where there is an even bigger appetite for “build-a-better-baby” hype, comes Baby Smart, a company that markets cot mirrors on the basis that they enhance youthful self-image. “It’s true,” they say, “genius babies prefer smart toys!!” Back on this side of the Atlantic, genius infants can turn to the IQ Builders range. The company says parents are very positive about the name.

Of course, educational toys are nothing new. Frederick Froebel and Maria Montessori, those great early-years gurus, both invented their own, versions of which are still in use. But many manufacturers, eager for a chunk of the pound;291 million UK pre-school toy market, are simply bolting on the trappings of what should be later learning and playing on parental hopes and fears. As early-years teachers know, a baby cannot grasp abstract concepts such as shape, nor will endless gadgets whining “A-B-C” teach it the alphabet before it is ready.

Pre-school toys are also often about getting ahead of the infant opposition. Is it chance that one of the major electronic toy manufacturers is called LeapFrog? Its pound;30 talking book, LeapPad, was the pre-school product of 20012. It promises to teach pre-reading and pre-maths skills to three-year-olds, and offers them membership of the Never Ending Learning Club.

The Early Learning Centre, that bastion of middle-class respectability - or anxiety - talks of “smart cookies” and “clever kids getting a head start for school”. Even babies’ rattles have not escaped the “educational” marketing hype. Boots the chemist sells them as part of a new range called Learning through Play, while a Fisher-Price rival is burdened with the name Learning Patterns.

“It’s horrible,” says Frances Marriott, headteacher of the Rachel McMillan day nursery in south London. “Parents have always been anxious and vulnerable to being conned into buying these things. League tables and baseline assessment don’t help. We have always had to fight our corner and stand up for play and active learning.”

“It’s boring,” says Eva Lloyd, chief executive of the Early Years Network. “We start our children off terribly early and that anxiety does inform parents. There is a danger of turning children off, of making them bored. We get so keen on the educational aspects that we forget to listen to them, forget to respond to all the things they are offering.”

“It’s worrying,” says Mike Thompson, managing director of Child Base, a chain of 30 day nurseries in south-east England. “Parents seem to want a formal setting for their under-threes. More and more pressure is being put on us to offer reading and writing, and to employ teachers rather than nursery nurses.”

Mr Thompson and his staff have been driven to running parents’ evenings to explain how children learn - spelling out, for instance, the “value” of sand and water play. What the company wants is “the well-balanced child who is confident and socially aware and has learned how to play, share and care. He or she is going to be a much better adult than a child who has been put on the treadmill to pass his or her exams.”

Child Base recently took over a nursery which had its three-year-olds formally sitting in classrooms. Mr Thompson stopped this practice, replacing it with the company’s play-based curriculum. “The parents were up in arms and we lost a lot of them, but we insisted that it was not right for children at that age.”

His fears are borne out by a recent study from Sheffield University. Researchers found that an emphasis on reading and writing in the nursery had damaged children’s spoken language. Nurseries need to provide a rich language environment, singing songs, telling nursery rhymes and relating stories. Talk, not chalk.

Professor David Buckingham, organiser of this summer’s Third World Congress of the International Toys Research Association, remembers the controversy surrounding Teletubbies. Some people feared the cuddlesome television quartet would hamper babies’ development. “Teletubbies,” says Professor Buckingham, “were not seen as sufficiently educational, and what we mean by educational in that context is very narrowly defined as drilling kids in letters and numbers. There you had a programme designed for one and two-year-olds that was accused of failing to prepare them for the national curriculum.”

Professor Buckingham, who is based at London University’s Institute of Education, has been studying the booming market of pre-school “edu-tainment” magazines. He has no problem with the entertainment aspect, but worries about the pedagogical advice being peddled to parents. “It is no longer enough for kids just to play or have leisure. Somehow they have to be on task all the time, doing pedagogically valuable activities. Now we have a national curriculum, a foundation stage and baseline testing, the sense that children might have a right to leisure begins to go out the window. Everything becomes a preparation for testing.”

lly, the early-years lobby won many victories in its battle with the Government over the foundation stage for three to five-year-olds. The resulting curriculum is practical, play-based and generally regarded as a good thing. Yet its very existence may be feeding a neurosis about early learning that the toys are exploiting.

Jennie Lovell is head of Dulwich Woods nursery school in south London, and a supporter of the foundation stage. She still encounters misconceptions about how children learn. “Toys can be too restrictive and too formal. The fun goes out of learning. There is pressure from parents and that passes on to the baby and the child.”

So, do children actually suffer from being given an inappropriate toy? Eva Lloyd stresses that babies’ learning is all social. They need interaction. “The danger is that parents think the toys can do it by themselves, but they can’t. Once you realise that, you realise you can teach them an awful lot more yourself, and do it a lot more cheaply.”

Jeffrey Goldstein, social psychologist and chair of the National Toy Council, says there is no evidence that children get ahead by using educational toys, but he sees no harm as long as parents don’t push them. “Parents who believe their kid is going to be an Oxford scholar just because he or she uses a toy called Oxford Scholar are using the same kind of magical thinking that says that if I give a Barbie to my daughter she’ll grow up to be a ‘traditional’ woman.”

Professor Goldstein believes in variety, in providing children with a “laboratory” to help them explore their world and eventually to learn how to make good choices. “I want a child to try everything within the limits of safety. I want to make it possible for a child to find what he or she is interested in, good at, not interested in, bad at. Play allows them to do that - that is what it is for. Having fun, but also trying to understand the world around you.” After all, he says: “You’ve got to learn how to get along in a world full of garbage.”

Perhaps that includes some toys.

TOYS ON TEST

The two-year-olds at the Julia Durbin day nursery in Oxford weren’t impressed by the Baby Einstein video (pound;8.99). Despite its promise of “visual and multilingual experiences to stimulate and delight”, they found the television trolley more interesting.

Sally Goodchild, a teacher and the education co-ordinator for the Child Base chain of nurseries, was also unimpressed. “It was too slow,” she says. “The babies didn’t look or listen.” Sally tried out four toys and two videos, all heavily marketed as “educational”. “We couldn’t justify buying any of them. Most weren’t suitable for under-threes.”

Particularly inappropriate, she says, is the LeapFrog Count and Sing Express (pound;19.99), which promises to teach numbers, counting, addition and subtraction from age two.

Toddlers confronted with Baby Smartronics’s Cookie Shape Surprise (pound;14.99) declined to put the shapes through the appropriate holes, preferring to remove the lid and pop them in the top, thus presumably failing to “reinforce their identification skills”.

The VTech Nursery Rhymes Book (pound;9.99), for use from three months, was well made and good for one-to-one work. But the electronic voice that read the rhymes was unclear and it failed to hold the babies’ attention.

Ms Goodchild tends to stick to more traditional fare of wooden building blocks, dolls and home corners. “Parents are being scared into buying these things. Children need concrete, first-hand experiences to learn,” she says. “They need to find things out for themselves.”