Between the paint pots and the wooden blocks, around the sandpits and the water tables, among the role-play sets and craft areas, there is a struggle going on in the Early Years Foundation Stage. It’s a struggle for the soul of early education.

It is a struggle between those working in the EYFS and, seemingly, everyone else - and both sides claim they have science in their corner. On one side, there are those pulling for change using the findings of cognitive science. On the other, there are those resisting that pull using the findings of developmental science.

Neither side is holding back. The stakes are high. What happens in EYFS matters - it underpins every other stage of education. We need to get it right. But no one, it appears, agrees what “right” looks like.

Does it really have to be this way? The answer - perhaps surprisingly, given the level of animosity between the two camps - is no.

Cognitive science has been dripping into schools for decades, but in the past 10 years its influence on what happens in the classroom has increased rapidly. Among the most popular findings are theories on how memory works and how this impacts learning.

For example, information “retrieval” is one of the much-discussed ideas. Then there’s cognitive load theory, which encompasses the cognitive science theory that our working memory has limited capacity and if we overload it, we can’t process information to store it in our long-term memory.

Broadly speaking, these - and other - ideas springing from cognitive science seem to have been embraced most by secondary school practitioners (partly owing to the research that is most prominent being conducted with this age group and older - see box, below, for more). In primary, teachers are usually more agnostic.

In the early years, however, things are different. Here, there is caution among many - and hostility from some - about how cognitive research could be implemented in EYFS, and why.

That is largely down to a feeling that cognitive science is being pushed - by government and by teachers in other phases - as an alternative to the developmental science that the sector has based its work on for decades (though, at an academic level, the two are connected - more of which later).

As such, there is a fear that the fundamental aspects of EYFS provision - which in England are called the “prime areas” - are being sidelined or even abandoned altogether.

These are areas that certainly need protecting, says Clare Sealy, head of curriculum and standards for Guernsey and a former primary headteacher.

“Those areas include communication, physical development and social development,” Sealy says. “They are quite time-critical areas. So if we don’t give the child space to develop those things when they are very young, it’s problematic.”

And if you don’t develop those areas, then the approaches recommended by cognitive science will largely be a waste of time, says Nicky Clements, head of EYFS at Victoria Academies Trust.

“Cognitive science is very much reliant on learning lots of facts and recalling them,” she argues. “But the underlying developmental blocks need to come in first, and that’s at risk of being diminished.”

Essentially, it’s no good teaching children to recall their times tables if they don’t understand the concept of quantities, or teaching them to write sentences if they haven’t grasped language, she notes. The message here is: you’re asking us to teach the children to run before they can walk.

And then there’s play. Early years practitioners tend to stress how important it is for developing everything from communication skills to physical dexterity. “I think children need to have play to express themselves,” says Clements. “Being able to be expressive and imaginative is really important.”

There are also social, physical and communicative skills that underpin the academic and that are gained through play, says Sealy: “They’re not just ‘nice-to-haves’. For example, writing is a very physical activity - it requires good muscular development.”

The concern is that cognitive science is being used to push out play-based approaches. Worse, it is felt there are some in the cognitive science field - including some key advocates - who actively discredit play, labelling it as an inefficient route to learning.

Best of both worlds

Not everyone in early years feels this way. For example, Julian Grenier, headteacher at Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre, East London, is less anxious about cognitive science’s incursions into EYFS.

“I’m a strong advocate of play-based learning in the early years,” he explains. “Play is fun, and it’s also the best medium for children to develop their higher-order thinking skills and self-regulation. But we’re also seeing promising results when we apply findings from cognitive science to some of our work at Sheringham.” (See box, below.)

However, the fact is that there is a large group of early years teachers who feel that rather than an ‘add on’ to existing practice, cognitive science is being used as a way of changing fundamental aspects of pedagogy that EYFS teachers believe is essential and backed by developmental science. How realistic are all their fears? Are those feelings of being under attack, of being asked to sideline essential developmental steps to early years teaching, proportionate to the reality of what they’re being asked to do?

Anecdotally, those teaching in EYFS do seem to be told frequently how to teach in the phase by those who have never done it, particularly on social media.

Policy has certainly tended to treat the early years as if it should be aligned with the other school phases on pedagogy, and cognitive science has increasingly underpinned government publications - the Early Career Framework and the Ofsted inspection framework are good examples.

And then there are EYFS-specific documents, such as Ofsted’s Bold Beginnings, that advocate more direct teaching and recommend things like holding a pen correctly and working at tables, which can be interpreted as contradicting findings from developmental science.

When each of these policies was released, many in the EYFS sector fought battles against specific parts of the whole. But then the Department for Education revealed its proposed reforms to the EYFS - and things really kicked off.

The Early Years Alliance accused the DfE’s plan of being a “narrow and overly formal approach to early years practice” while many on social media were less polite in chastising the government’s shift. Some key points caused particular concern, says Clements.

“It used to be mandatory to report on the three characteristics of effective early learning - playing and exploring, active learning, creating and thinking critically - and they’ve removed that,” she notes.

“Then, the entire Early Learning Goal [ELG] for shape, space and measure in maths was removed and replaced with number skill, including recall of number bonds, which has never been taught at that age. There’s a lot of evidence that shows that spatial awareness at an early age actually leads to better maths later on. So that’s worrying.”

The latter point, in particular, has provoked a huge amount of criticism: the science is largely in agreement that spatial awareness is incredibly important for maths development. That this has been sidelined while areas around recall have remained prominent suggests to some that specific areas of cognitive science are been prioritised over more general scientific consensus.

“One of the arguments that cognitive scientists put forward is that if you have fluent recall of certain facts it aids your working memory and makes it easier to learn new things,” says Megan Dixon, director of research and development at the Aspire Educational Trust. “But the developmental educationalists say children need a depth and a breadth of understanding about number first, not just the spontaneous recall of facts.”

In short, the new guidelines - alongside the drip-feed of other policies - do appear to many in the sector to prove that a process that they have feared all along is happening: a few findings from cognitive science about learning are being wedged into EYFS at the expense of established and well-evidenced practice.

Again, though, Grenier does not see this the same way as many of his sector peers. “It’s important to remember that the ELGs are assessment points at the end of the Reception year - they aren’t the Reception curriculum,” he says.

“So shape, space and measure are included in the educational programme and they’re an important part of early maths. But it really isn’t necessary to include everything that children learn in an assessment profile that should be relatively quick to complete, so that it doesn’t take staff away from the children for excessive periods of time or add unnecessarily to workload.”

He also laments the hostility that has been witnessed since the ELGs were released. “The idea that’s been promoted by some in the sector that children who don’t achieve the goals will be dubbed ‘failures’ is just silly. I have never met anyone working in a school who would do that,” he says.

However, the anger shows no signs of abating. In fact, if anything, it is growing as every day passes. There is hope, though - and it starts with the scientists who are at the forefront of cognitive and developmental science.

When you talk to academics in the fields of developmental and cognitive science and ask them why the two sides are so opposed to each other, their first question tends to be: who exactly is fighting whom?

That’s because, at that level, such broad terms are largely irrelevant. Take cognitive science: it might sound like it’s one “thing”. In fact, it’s defined as “the interdisciplinary scientific investigation of the mind and intelligence, encompassing the ideas and methods of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology”.

So announcing that “cognitive scientists say...” seems absurd as, by definition, there are a lot of them, saying a lot of things, and inevitably they don’t always agree.

Taking on new meaning

Developmental psychologist Matthew Slocombe from Birkbeck, University of London notes that, from his experience, the phrase “cognitive science” has taken on a nuance in the education world. “The field of cognitive science is really broad,” he says. “But in education discussions, cognitive science has almost a distinct meaning where it’s focused on a few findings from cognitive science and some from educational psychology.”

Dr Victoria Simms, a developmental psychologist at Ulster University, agrees: “For example, cognitive load theory isn’t really something that dominates discussions in cognitive science - it’s much more popular in the educational literature.”

And as for clashes between cognitive scientists or psychologists and developmental scientists or psychologists, there aren’t really any, argues educational neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, of the University of Melbourne.

Indeed, Simms is a developmental psychologist who studies cognition, so she has a foot in both camps. For her, the two aren’t opposed, but go “hand in hand”.

“We can’t understand cognition if we don’t understand development. We can’t understand development if we don’t understand cognition. They feed off one another - it’s not scientific to be in one camp only,” she says.

She also points out that just because a cognitive scientist might focus on studying recall, for example, it doesn’t mean that they think everything else is unimportant - they simply have an area of expertise. She compares it to criticising an oncologist for not talking about heart health.

At an academic level, it seems, there is no beef. So why is it often presented as if there is?

Play is a useful example of why there is conflict. From a cognitive science research perspective, there is no real opposition to play, notes Horvath. “From birth to age 5, kids are learning unique stuff: how to process faces, how to differentiate cause from effect, how to recognise and feel emotions. For this stuff, play is wonderful,” he says.

However, if you want children to learn specific things, in an academic sense, from play, you also need to include play that’s teacher-guided, adds Horvath. And optimising teacher guidance is where cognitive science can possibly help, says Paul Kirschner, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the Open University of the Netherlands.

“In the early years, a child develops a theory of self, learns to communicate, to read facial expressions, etc - this primary knowledge is necessary for evolution and is acquired through enquiry and play,” says Kirschner. “But we have to realise that they also have to acquire that which is culturally transmitted - secondary knowledge - things like learning to write and read, maths. They’re not things that can easily be discovered through play, if at all, so we have to make use of instruction.”

To an academic, this is not an ambiguous statement. But in teaching it is. Kirschner and other cognitive scientists frequently talk about the inefficiency of “discovery learning” for the teaching of knowledge (not the teaching of developmental skills).

But the play that the scientists are talking about is not the play that is happening in most, if not all, EYFS settings, say those in the sector.

“I don’t think there are many primary schools now that would get away with just free play. How many schools have you been in where you’ve just seen children running feral? It’s a caricature; it’s just not how it is,” says Clements.

What you actually get is highly scaffolded, teacher-led play. But because the research uses the word “play” to mean different things, you get teachers from other phases - and government - believing that anarchistic free play is the reality.

This happens with many other areas of EYFS practice, too. It is suggested, for example, that early years teachers don’t use retrieval or other methods used in cognitive science, when actually they do.

“Certainly when I’ve taught in early years, it’s very much about breaking things down into small steps, lots of modelling and questioning, checking in on understanding. That’s big with cognitive science, so there’s a lot to be applied there,” says Clements.

Sealy adds that “the big thing that cognitive science is bringing to the party is the importance of long-term memory as the enabler of critical thinking and creativity”. And so she sees the value in review and recall: “I think if you want some things to stick, you need to go back and revisit things you’ve done before and deliberately practise so it sinks in.”

The misrepresentation that this is not happening, that the sector is cognitive science-averse, rankles. It gets people’s backs up. It feels like an unfair attack. And that attack spreads to other parts of EYFS practice. In response, the practitioners fight back with developmental science.

The misrepresentation works the other way, too. Some admit, off the record, that there is a tendency towards labelling anything coming from the government that the sector disagrees with as being cognitive science-led. But Simms explains that not everything being imposed on early years that’s labelled as cognitive science actually is cognitive science.

Take, for example, the removal of shape and space in the ELGs. “That is absolutely not something that a cognitive scientist would support,” she says. “One of the things that has been found consistently within literature is the relationship between people’s visual-spatial skills - the basis of shape and space effectively - and mathematical learning.”

And when it is cognitive science that is being suggested, the controversy is usually about the application of it, not the idea itself, says Slocombe. He notes that there is a big difference between what cognitive science says about the importance of retrieval and how that is then turned into a pedagogical practice.

Simms agrees with this: “Some of the cognitive science findings have been misinterpreted slightly to say something that we wouldn’t necessarily feel is developmentally appropriate.”

So is this really a struggle between cognitive science and developmental science, or are they proxies for something else? Is it actually about what the role of EYFS should be?

“People have very different views on what education is for,” says Slocombe. “At the extreme ends, some see its purpose as the recapitulation of cultural knowledge, whereas others see it more as to develop children’s critical thinking, creativity and social skills. Most people are interested in the science that supports their view. So this warps the discussion.”

Sealy adds that “you have political drivers that are in conflict with the early years profession in England. And some of that coincides with cognitive science, some doesn’t. But the two things are muddled up”.

So what you end up with is a kind of tribalism, claim many in the sector, where you have to pick a side.

“It’s turned into this thing where it’s like, ‘I’m in this tribe and therefore I think this stuff.’ There’s an evangelical side to it, which I’m uncomfortable with,” says Dixon.

It’s an issue that educational theorist ED Hirsch admitted was a problem in a recent Tes Podagogy podcast: people take extreme views because they fear that admitting the “other side” may have some good points will lead to the entirety of those views becoming the dominating ideology.

For early years practitioners, the government rhetoric has been a formalising of the phase and cognitive science has been used as the battering ram into the sector, hence cognitive science becomes the enemy. On the opposite side, developmental science is being put up as a blocker to the overtures of cognitive science, so developmental science becomes the enemy. So you get a dichotomy when you should have a collaboration (and, indeed, the elements of collaboration already happening are almost hidden away, lest anyone discover the betrayal).

In the middle, according to Simms, you have the fact that the lines of communication between research and practice have not always been good enough (see box, below).

So, what’s the way forward?

For a start, the relationships need to be reset, says Dixon: for too long, the attitude both within and outside of education has been to look down on early years teachers. Their skills and expertise need to be repositioned as being on a par with the rest of the sector, she says, and ideas need to be discussed, not dictated.

At the moment, Dixon says, there is a feeling that early years practitioners are being “talked at” by advisory panels on early years, with an undertone that the advisers are dealing with the serious (cognitive?) science while early years teachers are just faffing around in sand pits.

Sealy agrees: “Some of my colleagues who teach older children talk rather disparagingly about play. Whereas in an early years context, play can be really hard cognitive work.”

Resolving this conflict will partly depend upon a second shift, Clements says. That is, an acceptance that developmental science is equally as important as cognitive science.

“There’s a really rich background of research into early years development and it doesn’t get a look in, especially on Twitter,” she notes. She points to The Centre on the Developing Child at Harvard University and PEDAL - the centre for research on Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge - as good resources.

“We need this change of perception to come from policy groups and advisory groups - the people with the clout,” she notes.

There’s also a need to accept that early years is a phase that has its own identity and skills, in the same way as primary and secondary. That means that anything that impacts early years should be filtered through practitioners first, Sealy argues.

“[You need] early years educators looking at the ideas of cognitive science and seeing what they can make of it to develop an authentic use of cognitive science by people who spend all their time thinking about early years education,” she says.

Guiding principles

The scientists agree. “Cognitive science offers some guiding principles as to what things are effective in order to help students learn, but they aren’t in a position to dictate how you implement those principles,” says Daniel Ansari, professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario. “That’s where you need the people who actually have the experience in classrooms.”

And we also have to be careful not to assume that everyone in EYFS agrees with each other, says Grenier.

“Ideas in education will always be contested, and it’s always very difficult to translate findings from psychology into pedagogy. Whatever ‘research evidence’ you have, there are always huge variabilities in different schools and settings.

“It’s important for early years practitioners to resist a simplistic ‘what works’ model. We also need to respect different views and experiences. Practitioners want the best for children: it’s unfair to accuse someone who’s piloting and evaluating different blends of play and direct teaching of being a Gradgrind figure focusing purely on the memorisation of facts.”

Will we ever achieve this level of trust and collaboration, though? Well, work is being carried out to improve communication between researchers and early years practitioners.

Slocombe, for example, is working with Learnus - an organisation that aims to bridge the gap between cognitive scientists and teachers and develop research projects targeting what teachers want to know (its new blog - learnusblog.co.uk - is commissioning posts from both teachers and researchers).

As for talking to the sector more, Grenier’s involvement in revising Development Matters, the government’s non-statutory guidance for the EYFS, is a positive sign, and it needs to be built on with a wide range of EYFS views being recognised as part of consultations. Unfortunately, this is a government not known for being that amenable to discussions with those of opposing views, and the Early Years Alliance has previously stated that the views of the sector on the new EYFS framework had been “almost entirely ignored”.

Just as hard to achieve will be the unpicking of research from ideology. The government has shown no signs of lessening its use of cognitive science, so that field will continue to be politicised.

Also tough will be encouraging the wider teaching profession to take EYFS more seriously: despite everyone acknowledging the importance of EYFS, few have experience of teaching in the phase and thus misunderstandings abound. The EYFS finding its voice has been a positive shift in correcting those misunderstandings - ways need to be found to amplify those voices even more.

But despite all these challenges, many in the early years sector are still optimistic. They hope that eventually the focus will be on what is best for the child alone, not on which “tribe” certain research originated from. They long for warfare to turn to debate.

“Let’s put everything in the mix and look at it through the lens of development psychology, through the lens of cognitive science, and see what we can learn to make the experience we give young children the best it possibly can be,” suggests Sealy.

Well, who could argue with that?

Jessica Powell is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 2 October 2020 issue