The government has now finished its consultation on its early years foundation stage (EYFS) reforms. Some people in the early years are pretty unhappy about the changes, which the charity Early Education has described as a “backwards step”.
Of course, the revisions are neither perfect nor to everyone’s taste (the Early Childhood Mathematics Group has highlighted its issues here). Every stage of educational change is always a compromise between different views. Nobody is ever entirely happy.
But, I think there are positive opportunities for the sector here.
Early years changes
The EYFS Profile has, for a long time, been a pretty good measure of children’s learning, development and wellbeing. But it’s been undermined by “gaming”.
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Headteachers sometimes set performance targets for their EYFS leads like “increase the proportion of children achieving a Good Level of Development (GLD) by 10 percentage points”. It’s obvious that several unwanted things will happen as a result.
First of all, there may be a strong incentive to inflate assessment outcomes, rather than be stringent and robust.
Second, more focus may go on children who are close to the border of achieving the GLD. This may be at the expense of others who need more help.
Closing the attainment gap
It’s possible that the widening gap between children with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) and all others is down to this. We’re making little progress on narrowing the gap between disadvantaged children and all others in the early years. The huge focus on tracking and data hasn’t worked.
The new profile handbook is helpful. It puts more emphasis on the professional judgement of teachers and other practitioners in the early years. We can use the profile for what matters: establishing a respectful dialogue with parents, reporting to them, and informing the transition to Year 1.
Let’s remember Alice Bradbury’s seminal research on the profile from 2012. She found that “the accumulation of evidence was a time-consuming process which dominated much of classroom life: teachers would constantly write notes, fill in charts and take photographs, while teaching assistants spent many hours each week sticking observations into individual children’s folders”.
Workload benefits
We need to free up time for practitioners to focus on where we can make a difference. We need to work on developing an early years curriculum that suits the children we’re teaching, and which is ambitious for every child.
I hope that the new handbook will encourage teachers and other practitioners to complete the profile briskly, towards the middle of the summer term. It should be a quick checkpoint on how children are doing. It shouldn’t dominate the Reception year.
Taking away data and targets is not about retreating from being ambitious for every child.
The existing EYFS statutory framework describes the early learning goals as “the knowledge, skills and understanding children should have at the end of the academic year in which they turn five”. That’s always been aspirational.
Endless tracking, collection of data, and setting performance targets has never been the best way to achieve this ambition.
Jim, one of the teachers in Alice Bradbury’s research, memorably commented that the beginning of the school year meant “You’ve got 22 folders down there with nothing in and it’s like, Christ, let’s fill it. You need stuff in there - we need to show that we’re doing work”.
Let’s support the professionalism, moral courage, and integrity of our early years teachers and practitioners. I trust them to do what’s best for young children.
