Confessions of an Early Years trad
This is a blog I have wanted to write for a while but have always been too scared. Since this is the year of Emma being brave now feels like the right time.
Confession...I think I am a trad.
I wasn’t sure at first. I thought, ‘well I love children so that immediately excludes me’. I smile A LOT. I really love singing with my class. A trad, I could not possibly be.
When I first engaged with edutwitter I had no idea of the trad/prog debate. All I knew was that I was passionate that the children I worked with, the vast majority of whom came from deprived social-economic backgrounds, got the best possible education. I instinctively knew that this was their one shot. They didn’t have the same privileges as middle-class children to fall back on if it all went wrong. Their parents did not have the same connections or money to fix poor education. From the beginning, I never wanted to paint Roman shields in a topic lesson.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate joy. I adore children. I especially adore working with the little ones. Reception, year one, and year two are my dream year groups. Anyone scrolling through my Twitter feed will pick up quickly just how much I enjoy being with my class. But I don’t believe in wasting time on things that will not further their learning and development. Every single minute those children are with me is a minute I cannot give back to them, so every single minute has to count.
Early Years has always been a different world to most outside of it. For some hearing the word ‘play’ automatically minimises its importance. The assumption is made that play does not equate to learning. I truly believe that is not the case and have written my thoughts in a previous blog about continuous provision. However, I also don’t believe that EY should run on a diet of CP (continuous provision) alone. In the EY setting it is my belief that both play and explicit teaching are of equal importance and are imperative in ensuring that ALL children are given the best possible start in life.
EYFS practitioners plan for their environment using the Characteristics of Essential Learning. Development Matters (Non-statutory guidance supporting practitioners in the implementation of the statutory requirements of learning and development under the EYFS framework) defines the characteristics of essential learning as:
Playing and exploring – children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’;
Active learning – children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements; and
Creating and thinking critically – children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things.
In my blog Things EYFS Practitioners want you to know: Continuous Provision I state that:
Good EY practitioners will ensure that the environment the children are accessing is planned for with the children’s interests in mind, as well as planning for next steps to build upon previous learning. The aim is always to engage each individual and move forward their learning. Areas in the environment are carefully monitored for use and engagement. Nothing is there for the sake of being there and looking pretty. Engagement and learning are paramount.
I originally wrote the blog around a year ago and republished it on my own website. This allowed me to reread my own words and reflect. My thinking has evolved in the last year. I firmly believe in the Characteristics of Essential Learning. I feel they are fundamental to the early learning of children. My thinking has changed in how we implement them within the reception setting.
My mum and dad split up when I was very young. I spent the vast majority of my childhood living with my mum and younger brother. We did not grow up with money. Struggles became more apparent as I got older. What also became apparent was that education was going to be my way out. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my family furiously but I wanted to live in a world where I opened up the fridge and food was inside, where there wasn’t mould in the bathroom and where heating took the place of blankets and jumpers. I was extremely lucky (beyond lucky) that as I grew older my dad became successful in his business and so those worries were no longer at the forefront of my mind. But I will never forget them. And I will never forget the sheer desperation at 11 years old of wanting to pass my 11+ and knowing that my life would be much worse if I didn’t (In a slight digression it is because of this formal testing at 11 that determines a child’s future education that I am anti 11+ in Kent. But that is a blog for another time).
That is my long-winded way of saying that from a VERY young age I saw education as a way out of poverty. Now I know this shouldn’t be the case in a first world country as wealthy as the UK but with 4.2 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2018-19 it is what is. Those are the cards we have been dealt. So what does this have to do with reception? Well, the reception year is where the primary journey begins. It is where the foundations are laid. I would argue that it is the most important year in primary schools!
Image taken from: Three Star Learning Experiences
When we are growing, we literally learn through play. This is known as biologically primary knowledge. David Geary has written extensively in this area in his book The Origin of Mind. As seen in the image above it is understanding other species (folk biology), learning how to interact and cooperate with others (folk psychology), and navigating inanimate objects (folk physics).This is a key part of a child’s development.
This is where EYFS practitioners often find themselves at odds with other teaching professionals. We are told these are automatic skills we have evolved to learn. Whilst biologically primary knowledge is something that human beings have evolved to learn, it is something that little children are still learning when they attend their EY setting. Remember, EYFS is from 0-5.
It is why there is such a focus on the Prime Areas of Development: Communication and Language, Physical Development and PSED (more detail can be found in the image above and here). Development is of key importance in EYFS as it should be.
However, I do believe that these developmental skills should not be found through play-based means only. This is where I find myself at odds with some other practitioners. Can play be the answer to everything in EYFS? For some children, explicit teaching and direct instruction have to play a huge part in ensuring children in EY can develop appropriately.
Deprived children can be the ones that suffer from a predominantly play-based learning approach. What this approach can assume is that children entering the Early Years setting (at any age from 0-5) have had developmentally appropriate experiences to date when that is just not the case for so many children.
Some children have a privilege that others do not. They are born into families that place value in specific areas. They have a parent/s that can model and engage with them. For some children, just the lack of space and lack of an outside area at home means they are already at a distinct advantage to others. How are you able to navigate inanimate objects if you are never given the exposure to do so? How can you absorb language and learn to cooperate with others if you are often placed in a crib without those interactions? To assume all children will naturally take on this biologically primary knowledge is to assume that all children are in environments that will enable them to do so.
What this means is that when some children enter reception they are already at a deficit when compared with other children in their class. My answer to this is explicit teaching in conjunction with play-based provision to ensure that those primary knowledge areas are met. We should not leave it to chance.
In my previous job, I worked in an inner-city school. A big focus in reception and KS1 was oracy skills. It was directly teaching children how to speak in full sentences, how to engage with another person in conversation, how to actively listen, and how to respond appropriately. This was explicitly taught. It was planned for and taught in both small focus groups and whole-class settings. I explicitly created situations for children to acquire these skills.
I strongly believe that if we create secure foundations through enabling environments and explicit modelling and direct instruction we will be able to quickly secure a child’s biologically primary knowledge to proceed swiftly to what Geary refers to as secondary knowledge (which will be the next blog in the series).
Often, 'trad’ is seen as more of a secondary label. There are primary trads on Twitter of course but by the time you make your way down to reception they are few and far between, which is one of the main reasons that I have been reluctant to put this out into the world. If you’re unsure of what a trad is whilst there is no definitive explanation, here are some articles and blogs discussing the topic further: one two three four five
The longer I teach, the more research I read, the more I engage on Twitter, and the more children I teach the more I realise I am a trad.
