Social skills teaching loses out to academic pressure, says expert

Government policy aimed at improving the teaching of the 3 Rs has been to the detriment of social skills teaching, a leading early years academic told delegates at last week's national conference of the British Association of Early Childhood Education held in Edinburgh. Addressing the question 'are social skills taught or caught?', Kathy Sylva, professor of education at the University of Oxford said, 'Because of Government pressures we have, over the last ten years, concentrated on teaching academic skills. In the process we have neglected the social skills side. We have assumed that while we should teach the academic side,...