It’s 9am and the Year 1 pupils are sitting smartly on the carpet. The registers have been done and the children are beginning their phonics.

It’s 9.45am and the Year 1 pupils remain on the carpet. They are receiving their daily input to develop their maths fluency. One or two are not looking at the board; there’s something far more interesting going on outside with some workmen on the playground.

It’s 10.15am and the Year 1 pupils are still on the carpet. On the board is an online assembly video. Year 1 pupils have definitely got the “fidgets”. Some children are lolling or shifting uncomfortably, some are playing idly with their shoes or trying to whisper to their friends.

The Year 1 pupils have been on the carpet for 75 minutes.

The ‘secondary-isation’ of primary

This scenario is not uncommon. Such well-intentioned but misinterpreted adherence to research guidance means that approaches used in secondary-phase lesson structures, secondary timetabling and secondary movement of pupils from class to class have been transferred directly into primary classrooms.

Over the past decade, we have seen a slow creep of secondary-focused pedagogy and research into the primary phase - a “secondary-isation” of primary. Through guidelines, training, policy and national programmes, a narrow band of cognitive science findings have become the generalised framework for informing teaching.

These findings have largely been tested on older students. And the anecdotal evidence that has emerged has almost all come from practice in secondary schools.

Cognitive science and teaching

How has this secondary-isation happened? Potentially, it’s because we have not cast the research net widely enough or because the lens may have unintentionally been skewed when it comes to the research base informing primary practice.

Occasionally, it is because of an assumption that practice and lesson design from later key stages are directly transferable to, and congruent with, earlier stages.

Whatever the reason, it’s a problem that needs some close attention. In failing to champion aspects of child development and having cognitive science as the dominant lens through which we view how primary teaching is approached - via policy, regulation, accountability, secondary-focused trust structures and other mediums - we are potentially grossly mismatching aspects of pedagogy and practice, which is doing a disservice to our younger learners.

Child development

Let me explain. When we step back and consider the primary age range, we take children from the cusp of toddlerhood to the edge of adolescence. This is a huge developmental trajectory socially, physically, neurologically and emotionally.

Primary practice, therefore, requires a relentless focus on understanding “age and stage” alongside what we know about cognitive science. Any teaching and learning strategy we employ needs to work symbiotically and respectfully with a child’s developmental stage.

That is not to say the latest findings from cognitive science have no place in this phase. It means that we require a nuanced and deep understanding of the interplay between general cogsci approaches that often underpin schools’ teaching and learning strategies alongside a thorough understanding of child development.

We can use “attention” as an example.

Attention and learning

Attention has been a key area of focus and forms much of the discussion and training around cognitive science. Attention is not the same at all phases of a child’s development, however: the way a child is able to control and sustain attention changes over time.

Research suggests that children’s voluntary, sustained attention is not secure until approximately the age of 6. Until it is secure, children will find attending voluntarily for a sustained period incredibly challenging, if not impossible.

This does not mean they cannot attend to anything for long periods. The challenge for younger children is sustaining attention on something that someone else is trying to get them to attend to, rather than what they wish to attend to.

Research also shows that children under 8 are more likely to be distracted and to have an increased reaction to distractors. Younger children “distribute” their attention, too, in that their attentional field is broader than the precise focus of older students and adults.

Attentional development continues to mature throughout childhood and adolescence, and has critical maturation points at the ages of approximately 6 and 13.

This means that all children in primary are still developing control over their voluntary sustained attention and will be more easily distracted than older students.

Primary focus

This will not be any surprise to seasoned teachers of the early phases of primary, but it is rarely discussed when unpicking the popular model of memory and its narrow arrow between environment and working memory. Indeed, it would be inefficient for primary teachers to structure their teaching and input in the same way as for children in secondary, who have largely met the attentional development milestones.

So what should primary practitioners do? Give up trying to get their pupils’ attention?

Of course not. We should look at the cognitive science research to inform our view but we should look at developmental research, too.

For example, we know that young learners follow the eyes, mouths and hands of those instructing them, so the use of gesture, pointing to key information and ensuring contingent communication is maintained through lots of eye contact during periods of instruction is key.

Short feedback loops with paired talk, mini-whiteboards and interactive periods of active learning, such as rhymes, games and actions, can help to mitigate some of the effects of younger children’s developing attentional capacity.

Play and smaller group work provide excellent opportunities for this type of contingent communication to occur, as well as whole-class instruction.

Working memory and young children

Another example is working memory.

Here, we see how knowledge of children’s development can help us to tailor the cognitive science research to the primary space.

We know that the younger the child, the smaller the working memory capacity. We also know that working memory capacity can vary greatly within any class, with a class of seven- and eight-year-olds having a potential range of working memory from age 4 (approximately three children in a class of 30) to age 11 - broadly the same as an adolescent (approximately three children in a class of 30).

The fact that younger children have smaller working memory capacity means that our instructional design needs to focus even more precisely on reducing cognitive load, and be respectful of their biological and developmental status.

The use of directly congruent instructional approaches, timings and logistics across both primary and secondary without considering the role of working memory is akin to using a stool with a missing leg.

Lesson structure for primary phase

What we need for younger children are opportunities for short feedback loops to harness attention and for cognitive offloading through the use of bodily movements and manipulatives. We also need a sharp focus on reducing the transient information effect that can occur when an overreliance on spoken instruction is not supported by models, imagery, concrete apparatus and opportunities for direct involvement and experience of what is being described or discussed.

We can take this a step further by looking in detail at writing.

If we were to select an activity that placed the greatest possible cognitive load on a child, the process of writing would likely feature high up the list.

Although seemingly simple to the expert, the process of writing for a novice learner involves huge cognitive effort to balance correct seating position; pencil grip; phoneme/grapheme correspondence; correct pencil pressure; left-to-right orientation; crossing the midline; correct letter formation; finger spaces; accurate and consistent letter sizing; grammar, punctuation and composition; and proofreading.

Cognitive load

When we therefore design lessons or instructional approaches that appear directly congruent in their efficiencies to those that work with older students, we can overlook the demands placed on younger learners in terms of their novice status and their immature working-memory capacity.

Even the simple act of completing a quiz or a worksheet, or responding in writing, can be cognitively demanding and leave little cognitive bandwidth left for thinking about the wider curriculum content or lesson focus - potentially causing accidental increases in both extraneous and intrinsic cognitive load.

Task design for younger students therefore needs to take into account the multi-novice effect, and subsequent associated assessments need to ensure that what is being assessed is indeed the assessment focus, and not wider competencies such as proficiency in reading or writing.

A combined approach

In the above examples, you can begin to see how blunt some of the messaging about the application of the research that has filtered into dominant education narratives is for primary - and yet how powerful it can be if we combine it with the right evidence from other fields.

On that point, let’s talk a little about implied competencies. Although not written anywhere in detail in the statutory national curriculum, there are many competencies that need to underpin learning in primary: using scissors; being able to work in a group; being able to glue in a sheet of paper; knowing how to manage time on a task; knowing how to lay out work using tables, boxes, arrows and callouts; knowing how to share resources with others. The list could go on.

All of these competencies will need teaching and time given for practice. Task design and provision in primary therefore often needs to look different from that of later stages so that children receive ample opportunities to develop the associated knowledge and skills of the implied competencies as well as the academic curriculum.

Core skills for children

What about movement? Often, we expect very young children to be sitting for long periods. The stillness effect documented by Langhanns and Müller, where participants’ cognitive load increased significantly under the instruction not to move, is another aspect that seems particularly relevant in the primary classroom.

Children are hardwired to move as part of healthy human development. Being required to sit still for extended periods not only reduces the amount of time they are able to move but can also potentially add to cognitive load in their already less developed working memory.

This does not mean that primary classrooms should descend into chaos or that there should never be times when children are expected to be still, but we need to take into account the fact that when children are involved in hard thinking, remembering to be still while doing so is another pull on their developing working memories.

Timetabling the primary space

Put all of this together and you can see the requirement for a very different view of the school day in primary compared with secondary. Balancing a range of tasks that require children to work and think in a range of ways is an age-and-stage consideration that needs careful thought and planning.

When we think of the curation of a primary child’s day, it should be a carefully constructed and deliberately kaleidoscopic offer of opportunities to develop competence within the academic curriculum, set against a rich and broad backdrop of age-and-stage-appropriate tasks and experiences.

To reiterate, this view of primary pedagogy has, at its heart, an understanding that instruction will always be necessary to teach much of our national curriculum content. Excellence in primary practice is not a move away from high-quality teacher modelling, instruction or opportunities for retrieval thinking and practising.

But what we know about the primary child is that they are on a unique developmental trajectory that is different from that of older students.

Training teachers

So when we look to plan for success for our younger learners or design continuing professional development for primary colleagues, we need to insist on a stacking of the research filters: this is what works for instructional design linked to cognitive science; this is what we know about how children’s brains and bodies are developing at these stages; and this is what pedagogy should look like for our youngest learners.

To focus only on cognitive science is to rely on that stool with the missing leg: things will fall over for practice in primary very quickly.

Primary practice should ring-fence, reflect and champion the unique developmental stage our youngest learners are in. Cogsci is too lean a research base to be educators’ only talking point; those who work within primary or with primary colleagues and primary children, or those who advise and train colleagues in primary, need a rich experience and research base to truly understand and ensure success for our youngest learners.

Emma Turner FCCT is a school improvement adviser, primary advisory consultant and author