Play may be the work of the child, but the myriad learning opportunities that early years children can gain through being supported to learn through their own interests and explorations are being thwarted by many of the educational establishments that are there to help them.
A play-based approach to learning has long been advocated by early years pioneers such as Froebel, Piaget and Montessori as being developmentally appropriate, more creative and holistic. The Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) research also shows that children’s outcomes and experiences are best in settings where there is a balance between child-initiated and adult-directed activities, and especially child-initiated activities that are then supported by adults.
Despite this, many schools, under pressure to deliver on outcomes, are continuing to implement a more formal approach to learning. They are favouring the need to instruct directly and focus on results instead of allowing young children to be active in their learning – making meanings, choosing and planning what to do – which is emphasised in the Characteristics of Effective Learning in the EYFS Statutory Framework.
LEARNING TO LEARN
Jan Dubiel, national development manager at Early Excellence and former QCA lead on the EYFS Profile, defines a play-based pedagogy as: ‘The notion of flow and intervention with a balance between adult direction and child-initiated play, which should be done in a high-quality resourced environment, also well supported by adults. In play-based pedagogy, the flow of learning needs to be right for the child and not dominated by the adult, rather supported by them.’
He believes that if a child is prevented from doing their own learning, then they don’t have the same level of purpose and accumulation of learning. A formal, didactic approach is a more superficial type of learning, whereas play-based pedagogy allows for ownership and making real usable discoveries that are applicable to the individual child. They are learning how to learn.
‘The aspiration is that children grow up being able to make their own choices and develop a habit of lifelong learning,’ he says. ‘With a didactic pedagogy, the child is adult-driven and is more dependent and compliant.’
Play-based approaches allow children to display and adults to observe what children actually know and can do, says Linda Pound, early years consultant and author. The concentration, exploration and curiosity that children are enabled to develop have positive implications for how they approach all future learning. In contrast, a more formal approach, she says, leads to ‘too much time wasted sitting passively, too much time sitting, insufficient emphasis on contributing, too much on listening and few opportunities to actively engage’.
Speaking at the recent Nursery World Business Summit, Usha Goswami, researcher and professor of cognitive developmental neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, explained how play helps children’s social interaction, self-regulation and symbolic representation.
‘Pretend play is so important for children as a way of understanding their environment, and understanding who they are and how life works,’ she said. One example she gave was of children spending more time discussing the rules of a game rather than actually playing it.
‘Children are subject to many rules in their lives, but they’re often adult rules and don’t necessarily fit the child’s desire,’ she explained. ‘In a game, children are making up their own rules and their strongest desire is to be a participant in the game, so the rules are incredibly important. And rules are how we self-regulate.’
PLAY-BASED PRACTICE
A stumbling block to professionals embracing a play-based approach is that people hear the word ‘play’ and translate it to mean ‘free-for-all’, says Tony Draper, president of the National Association of Head Teachers.
He would like to change the term and suggests ‘independent learning’, so that people understand that there is structure with children learning through their own investigations, supported by adults intervening appropriately.
‘The word play raises right-wing hackles and implies that teachers are sitting in the corner and children are running around and not specifically learning from their actions,’ he adds.
The important point to remember, says Julian Grenier, head teacher of Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre in London, is that play-based pedagogy is not free play, and embracing it is not an easy task. Highly skilled practitioners are needed to tune in to the children’s needs, and ‘the EPPSE findings tell us that it is important to have well-qualified staff, led by qualified teachers’.
Mr Dubiel agrees, adding: ‘The tools practitioners need for play-based practice are a good understanding of how learning works – understanding the important Characteristics of Effective Learning in the EYFS and what it looks like in practice. Also an environment that enables children to make choices and pursue their independence.
‘Above all, there needs to be a quality of interaction between adults and children. The adult needs to know when to intervene and when not to, when to ask direct questions and to constantly have different behaviours at their fingertips so that they can support and not disrupt the focus of learning,’ he says.
The provision needs to be carefully organised and resourced to support play-based learning and Dr Grenier suggests using audit tools such as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS-R and ECERS-E) to help assess this.
‘Staff need to focus on interacting with children all the time, supporting children’s social and emotional development and developing their capacity to manage their feelings – “self-regulate” – and solve conflicts,’ he says.
‘It is also important to emphasise children’s communication, across the spectrum of supporting their early communication – for example, by using approaches from Every Child a Talker – to develop children’s capacity to think aloud, working together with their peers and with adults to achieve “sustained shared thinking”.’ Developing a good partnership with parents, he adds, is also crucial.
Mr Draper expresses a hatred of walking into a Foundation Stage classroom and seeing every child sitting at tables filling out worksheets. ‘I like to see a lively buzz with children actively focused on independent learning,’ he counteracts. ‘Rather than roaming around the class, I like to see teachers actively engaging with children and what the children want to learn. Teachers should be looking at their plans and relating them to where the learning is taking place.’
SHORTAGES AND SHORTCOMINGS
So why aren’t we witnessing this ‘buzz’ of learning in early years classrooms across the country? Mr Draper blames a shortage of high-quality practitioners and teachers due to Government underfunding. ‘The Government doesn’t value high quality in the way that it says because, if it did, it would fund it properly,’ he argues.
‘Budgets are also definitely an issue. Schools don’t have enough money to fully staff themselves any more. Many are working on a deficit budget and they aren’t able to employ the staff that they want. Facilitating this kind of working takes more than minimum ratios.’
Early years consultant and author Helen Moylett believes that while better ratios are useful, children who are absorbed in their own learning don’t need as much supervision as those taught with a more didactic approach. ‘You can leave them to get on in a way you can’t if you’re constantly instructing them,’ she says.
While Dr Grenier emphasises that there are many schools and settings doing great work in the EYFS, he says that there are ‘serious shortcomings in both teacher training and Level 3 qualifications, so new staff do not necessarily have the skills and understanding they need.’
There is also a level of misconception about what practitioners think they should be doing, suggests Mr Dubiel. ‘This can be down to demands from managers, heads, advisors or consultants who do not understand early years pedagogy – they may try to fit early years pedagogy into a watered-down version of what is happening to older children,’ he says. ‘There can be a lack of confidence to go with their own intuition and follow a child development approach.’
Dr Grenier agrees that many school head teachers don’t have experience of teaching in nursery and Reception classes, which can lead to inappropriate expectations being placed on early years staff.
‘It is important that staff in the early years have a strong understanding of appropriate and effective pedagogy,’ he says. ‘They need to be able to demonstrate that their ways of working support good outcomes for all children, especially those who are disadvantaged. Early years staff need to be secure in their understanding and they need to be able to demonstrate the impact of their work.’
TARGETS AND OFSTED
This is against a backdrop of schools feeling pressured to demonstrate that children are making progress and achieving high results, which can be pushed down to the early years. It’s often easier to meet the needs of specific targets with a didactic approach, says Mr Dubiel, because it measures a surface level of learning rather than assesses a child more holistically.
‘No school wants to be seen to apparently not care about results,’ suggests Ms Pound. ‘It takes an act of faith in children’s abilities to deviate from prescribed pathways.’
Despite many early years teachers knowing that a play-based approach is right, Mr Draper believes there is a ‘fear’ that they will be regarded as failing if they don’t ‘cram’ children with phonics and reading.
‘Contrary to this, high-quality intervention in a high-quality planned environment will actually lead to accelerated outcomes for children,’ he says. And developing children’s language and communications skills will also help them greatly in their future schooling, he adds.
Another common assumption is that Ofsted wants to see a more formal style of teaching, a myth that can be dispelled by a close reading of the Ofsted Early Years Inspection Handbook (see box).
The role of the adult is also explored in Ofsted’s Teaching and play in the early years – a balancing act?, a good practice survey commissioned by the chief inspector to explore perceptions of teaching and play and ‘address the recurring myth that teaching and play are separate, disconnected endeavours in the early years’.
But Mr Draper argues that Ofsted should be held to account for not having enough qualified early years specialists in its inspection teams. Previously his school’s early years provision was inspected by a secondary language specialist who he believes had ‘no idea’ what they were observing. ‘Every Ofsted inspector should have an early years specialism and too many of them don’t,’ he says.
STANDING THEIR GROUND
When discussing the failure to act on the strong evidence for a play-based early years pedagogy, Ms Pound quotes professor of psychology and early childhood author Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, who writes: ‘The accumulated data underpinning the science of learning coupled with our knowledge of human development has moved beyond the instructions of the past where children’s prior knowledge and dispositions to learn were essentially ignored. Ignoring what children bring to the classroom in both the cognitive and social domains leads to bad pedagogy.’
Ms Pound says that, sadly, the schools that achieve well are often the ones with the most advantaged children and the ones freest to engage in playful activity.
‘There is no local authority that is amazingly good,’ says Ms Moylett. ‘It is patchy, with schools across the country giving it a go but in pockets.’ Despite many schools having a long way to go to embrace a play-based approach, she is hopeful that there will be a gradual change, perhaps brought on by the growing popularity of the resilience movement, which chimes with this approach – children gaining a sense of well-being by taking control of their own learning – and by heads now having more autonomy.
Ms Pound says that well-trained Foundation Stage co-ordinators who are willing to stand their ground are essential to driving change, while Mr Dubiel urges practitioners to think about why they went into teaching. ‘Many will have chosen the profession because they want to make an impact on children’s learning, to enable them to be well-motivated and to have high levels of communication – all of which result from a play-based pedagogy and are hard to achieve from a didactic, narrow curriculum,’ he says. ‘It’s important to move away from a didactic pedagogy, return to their roots and the core values of education and what learning looks like in practice.’
TEACHING IN THE EARLY YEARS: OFSTED’S DEFINITION
‘Teaching in the early years should not be taken to imply a “top down” or formal way of working. It is a broad term that covers the many different ways in which adults help young children learn. It includes their interactions with children during planned and child-initiated play and activities: communicating and modelling language, showing, explaining, demonstrating, exploring ideas, encouraging, questioning, recalling, providing a narrative for what they are doing, facilitating and setting challenges.
‘It takes account of the equipment adults provide and the attention given to the physical environment, as well as the structure and routines of the day that establish expectations. Integral to teaching is how practitioners assess what children know, understand and can do, as well as taking account of their interests and dispositions to learn (characteristics of effective learning), and how practitioners use this information to plan children’s next steps in learning and monitor their progress.’
Early Years Inspection Handbook (2015) and School Inspection Handbook (2015)
FURTHER READING
The Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) project, www.ioe.ac.uk/research/153.html
Teaching and play in the early years – a balancing act? A good practice survey to explore perceptions of teaching and play in the early years, www.gov.uk/government/publications/teaching-and-play-in-the-early-years-a-balancing-act
Achieving Excellence in the Early Years: A guide for headteachers by Early Education, www.early-education.org.uk
Hirsh-Pasek, K et al (2008). A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence. Open University Press
