A Unique Child: Child Development - Move on
Sally Goddard Blythe
Friday, February 22, 2013
Children at two are not 'ready' for reading, says Sally Goddard Blythe. They don't have the physical equipment for learning formal skills.
At a Policy Exchange meeting last month, education and childcare minister Liz Truss announced plans for a shake-up in nursery care. Nurseries that take children as young as 12 months, she said, 'have a job of educating. It is not just looking after children.' Some articles stemming from her speech have suggested that these proposals could include children being taught to read and write from two years of age.
The minister's argument for starting education as early as possible is based on the concept of 'critical periods' for development and research, which has shown that English pupils at the age of 15 or 16 lag several points behind students in East Asia on the average PISA maths score, and that the lag is already evident at five years of age.
Critical periods describe a period in a lifetime during which a specific stage of development usually occurs. The critical period for development of speech, for example, is the first three years of life - one of the reasons why a history of hearing impairment in the first three years can have a lasting impact on auditory processing even if hearing impairment has been subsequently improved.
The first three years of life are also crucial for developing the postural and motor skills needed to support all aspects of later learning. Postural control affects not only balance, but provides the stable platform for brain centres involved in the control of the eye movements needed for reading, writing, numeracy and ball games. Postural control and balance enable a child to sit or stand still and free the hands to develop fine motor skills.
Control of the body is the starting point for competence in space and self-confidence. It takes children up to three and a half years of age to integrate a complex series of primitive reflexes and postural reactions to support control of the body. These abilities are trained through the medium of physical experience in the context of the physical world.
TIMING AND INTENSITY
Language skills begin with hearing, listening, vocalising and interactive communication. Written language evolved from an oral tradition where stories were passed down through narration, songs and ballads. While children can and do learn to read using vision as the primary pathway, the phonological elements are also necessary to facilitate the decoding of complex words, spelling and to aid short-term memory.
Preparation for the aural aspects of written language develops through one-to-one conversation with a responsive adult; through practising sounds, repetition, listening to stories and learning to hear the 'music' of language, which conveys meaning and intention through subtle changes in tone, inflection, timing and intensity. The first three years are the critical period for developing these 'non-literacy' elements of language.
The word calculus is derived from the ancient practice of counting with small stones, an early precursor of the abacus. There is much in East Asian education that is different from current practice in the UK, including a tendency to engage in physical activity at the beginning of each school day and a greater emphasis on learning by repetition and rote. However, the abacus provides an example of using a concrete tool for learning first, which even children as young as five then learn to visualise, enabling them to carry out complicated arithmetical calculations. In other words, early physical experience leads to cognitive understanding and the ability mentally to manipulate numbers.
While the general theme of Truss's speech was that all nursery children should have the opportunity to experience reading and writing, there is the danger that this will become yet another policy that aims to teach higher cognitive skills before the foundation physical building blocks are in place. Children need to learn to speak before they are ready to read.
There is considerable variation in times of reading readiness, with some children ready at four years of age whereas others do not have full control over the range of eye movements needed to support reading until six and a half to seven years, something recognised in many other European countries. Finland, for example, does not begin the formal teaching of reading until seven. An early emphasis on the teaching of formal skills before a child has the physical equipment in place runs the risk of repeated failure and demotivation before a child even starts school.
MOTOR SKILLS
A recent pilot project which examined the motor skills of 52 nursery school children in the Midlands found a significantly greater proportion of children with immature motor skills in the lowest performing quartiles of the class on educational measures. Conversely, children in the highest education performance groups showed greater maturity in motor skills1. The researcher described immature motor skills as acting as a 'barrier to learning'2.
Studies carried out in primary schools in England3, Northern Ireland4 and Germany5 have shown that a significant percentage of primary school children still have traces of infant reflexes, which should be not be active beyond the first year of life, and there is a correlation between neuromotor immaturity and lower educational performance6. Retention of infant reflexes in older children provides 'markers' of neuromotor immaturity. These studies also indicate that introduction of a daily programme of developmental exercises into the school day over the course of one academic year can significantly improve children's balance, co-ordination, neuromotor maturity and a range of non-verbal abilities involved in social interaction, as well as reading in children who had both neuromotor immaturity and a reading age below chronological age at the outset.
While the minister's aims to ensure that all children have access to the joy of books, stories and reading from an early age are laudable, the emphasis at this age should be to provoke desire and curiosity to read through storytelling, handling books and pictures and developing the underlying motor and language skills. The recent exemption of Steiner schools, where formal instruction in reading does not begin until much later, from certain aspects of the EYFS, is a reminder that developmental readiness not formal instruction from an early age is the key to learning success.
Sally Goddard Blythe MSc is director of The Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology and author of Attention, Balance and Co-ordination - The A,B,C of Learning Success and What Babies and Children Really Need. www.inpp.org.uk
REFERENCES
1. 'Links shown between neuromotor skills and academic performance'. http://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/news/1159054/
2. Griffin P, (2012) Neuromotor Immaturity - Can some underlying physical immaturities disadvantage children in the Foundation Stage? www.-open-doors-therapy.co.uk
3. Goddard Blythe SA (2005) 'Releasing educational potential through movement' Child Care in Practice. 11/4:415-432
4. An evaluation of the pilot INPP movement programme in primary schools in the North Eastern Education & Library Board, Northern Ireland. 2004
5. Giffhorn M and Queifler C (2012) Ruhe durch mehr Bewegung. Kann sich die Schule selber helfen? Eine Studie uber ein neuro physiologisches Ubungsprogramm belegt positive Auswirkungen auf das Lernverhalten bei Schulkindern. Niedersochsisches RZTEblatt. 12/12
6. Goddard Blythe SA (2011) 'Neuro-motor maturity as an indicator of developmental readiness for education'. Report on the use of a Neuro-motor Test Battery and Developmental Movement Programme in schools in Northumberland and Berkshire, in Movement, vision, hearing - The basis of learning. Kulesza EM (Ed). Academy of Special Education. Warsaw