In the early years, as in other phases of education, it’s common for teachers to be concerned about parents having low aspirations for their children or not giving them enough support at home with their learning.
Often, we use this to explain why some children, mostly those from poorer areas in our communities, achieve less well.
This line of thinking is understandable yet unhelpful.
Research from the Education Policy Institute tells us that poorer children are 4.6 months behind their classmates by the end of the early years foundation stage.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has also found that the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the achievement of children learning English as an additional language in Reception.
So, teachers are right to be concerned about children’s progress. But blaming parents will not help.
Instead, it would be more productive for us to reflect on our own attitudes and the impact they have.
I remember my first day as an early years teacher in a poor part of east London. The deputy headteacher warned me that “with the parents we have here, we don’t expect much from the children”. And yet, we had both applied for jobs at that school; we were both there to work with the families in that community, not some notionally “better” ones.
Negative discourses about families are common in research, too. Margaret Caspe, director of research and professional learning at the Global Family Research Project, and Laura Alves, a research assistant at Harvard Family Research Project, comment that research into early maths learning at home often takes the activities of upper-income families as the yardstick, which then pinpoints the deficiencies of lower-income families.
Instead, they argue, we need to “develop the disposition of being able to look into all communities and understand what they are doing and the strengths that they do have”.
More from Julian Grenier:
We know that teacher attitudes matter. In a classic experiment, Rosenthal and Jacobsen told a group of teachers that 20 per cent of the children in their classes were showing “unusual potential for intellectual growth” and would bloom academically. Unknown to the teachers, the children were randomly selected. At the end of the year, when they tested all the children, they found that this random group of children had scored significantly higher. Teacher belief really can act like rocket fuel.
Similarly, research by Marquita Foster and her colleagues showed that “teacher perceptions of parental involvement can have a statistically significant effect on the achievements of students who experience poverty, along with culturally and linguistically diverse students”.
When teachers assume that poor achievement results from poor parental involvement, they don’t check for other important factors. These include whether the pupil has a learning difficulty or whether the overall quality of teaching is good enough to enable all pupils to succeed.
As Professor Iram Siraj argued at the recent East London Research School conference, we need to have high expectations for every child and provide them with high-quality early education every day. That’s how we can help children to succeed against the odds.
We can then take practical steps to improve the quality of our practice by using the best available environmental quality scales - such as the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale-3, ECERS-E, the Movement Environment Rating Scale and the Sustained Shared Thinking and Emotional Wellbeing scale - and reflecting on the evidence summaries in the EEF’s Early Years Toolkit.
But first and foremost, we need to work on our own attitudes and our own practice. Deficit narratives about some children and their families are a road to nowhere.
Dr Julian Grenier is headteacher of Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre. He co-leads the East London Research School
