Learning & Development School Readiness: Part 1 - Starting points

The phrase 'school readiness', or 'readiness for school', is cropping up with growing regularity in Government reports and politicians' speeches about the early years, as the Government drives home its message that it wants early years settings to prepare children for school. But just as the phrase becomes more common, so too does early years practitioners' confusion about what it means.

It hasn't helped that the expression has been used to mean a range of different things, across a variety of major reports:

• the report on poverty and life chances entitled The Foundation Years: Preventing poor children becoming poor adults (Field, 2011)

• the reports by Graham Allen MP on early intervention, Early Intervention: The next steps (2010) and Early Intervention: Smart investment, massive savings (2011)

• the report by Dame Clare Tickell, entitled The Early Years: Foundations for life, health and learning (2011)

• Families in the Foundation Years - this document, published in July, sets out the Government's commitment to early intervention and its vision for family services during children's 'foundation years'. The report also incorporates the Government's responses to the reviews mentioned above.

So what does 'school readiness' mean? Acknowledging that there are several interpretations of the term and that the use of the phrase may continue to vary, we suggest that it is important that settings consider three perspectives on 'readiness' which may have an impact upon their planning for children's learning.

These perspectives are:

• 'readiness for learning'

• 'readiness for school'

• the 'readiness of the setting for the child'.

Examples of the use of 'readiness' according to these definitions of 'readiness for school' can be found in the reports listed above.

READINESS FOR LEARNING

All children, at all ages, are 'ready to learn'. The exciting research resulting from new techniques in developmental cognitive neuroscience has established in recent decades that many of our cognitive processes are there and fully functioning at birth, or they mature very quickly during the first four to five years of life.

But young children do not passively receive the information we provide for them. During this period, as the brain increases fourfold in size, it seems that the 'building mechanisms' of cognition develop to support children in very active abilities to interpret new experiences, understand new information and make cause-and-effect links with further new experiences.

The neuroscience research also shows us that our brain will learn from every event we experience and that learning is cumulative, so the more experiences we have, the deeper the learning will be.

As practitioners, if we want to help young children to make sense of their educational experiences we must ensure that we place new tasks in contexts with which they are familiar and which carry meaning for them.

In addition, since learning depends on neural networks distributed across many regions of the brain, the wider the range of types of experience, the better (Goswami & Bryant, 2007). This is referred to as 'multi-sensory' learning. Early years practitioners understand the importance of providing a learning environment rich in opportunities for children to learn through the full range of their senses.

So, the important question is not whether a child is ready to learn - since our brains are uniquely programmed to prepare us for learning from very early in life - but rather, the question must be about what a child is ready to learn.

Theories of development

The concept of 'readiness to learn' was historically put forward in Piaget's theory of development, within which development (growth and maturity) was seen to determine what the child learned. However, subsequent research showed that Piaget's experiments severely underestimated the abilities of young children, and undermined much of his theory.

It is no longer accepted that there are different developmental stages in children's ability to learn, or that a child cannot be taught until they are cognitively 'ready' (Donaldson, 1978). It is accepted that development is uneven and multidimensional, so each child's path through development is different. Within modern developmental psychology and among early years educators in the UK today, Vygotsky's theory of social constructivism (1978) underpins practitioners' views of how children learn in their early years.

This theory recognises that what the child learns from their environment determines how they develop, and that all learning is social in origin; a child does not learn in isolation. The theory suggests that when faced with any particular task or problem, children can operate at one level on their own, but when supported or 'scaffolded' by an adult or more experienced peer, their learning can go further. It is understood that cognitive development does not just happen by itself within the brain of the individual child, but depends upon interactions between the child and others, including adults and peers, mainly through spoken language.

READINESS FOR SCHOOL

'Readiness for school' is a more limited idea and implies a fixed standard of physical, intellectual, and social development that enables children to meet school requirements and cope with its curriculum, usually including specific cognitive and linguistic skills.

The model of 'readiness for school' is attractive to governments, as it seemingly delivers children into primary school ready to conform to classroom procedures and even able to perform basic reading and writing skills.

However, from a pedagogical perspective, this approach is regarded with suspicion. Early years educationalists reject processes of early education that are passive in nature, where teachers transmit knowledge into children's minds for them to reproduce later on demand. In this light, early childhood education is simply seen as preparation for school rather than for the longer term - for 'life.'

Teacher-driven, curriculum-centred approaches do not fit well with the ways in which young children learn. They leave little room for children's individual differences, or links to specific social context. Furthermore, there is a danger in this approach of distorting the pre-school curriculum towards pre-literacy and teacher-initiated activities, with the consequence that it does not meet children's basic needs to feel autonomous in their learning, to feel increasingly competent at various skills and to feel emotionally connected to adults and peers within the classroom.

An example of the use of this definition of 'readiness' is to be found on page 19 of The Early Years: Foundations for life, health and learning (2011), where it relates to the ability of the child to cope with the challenges of a new environment in school and its associated demands: 'Most children begin reception class at age four, and for most parents and carers this is when school life begins. If children are not ready for this transition or the move to Year 1 because, for example, they are not yet toilet-trained, able to listen or get on with other children, then their experiences of school could present difficulties which will obstruct their own learning as well as other children's. The evidence is clear that children who are behind in their development at age five are much more likely than their peers to be behind still at age seven, and this can lead to sustained but avoidable underachievement.'

Alarm bells

Many readers have interpreted the use of the term 'ready' to indicate the Government's expectation that children should be prepared for the established primary school system and its fixed Year 1 curriculum. But more strikingly, the wording of the phrase 'If children are not ready for this transition ...' sounds particular alarm bells among many early years practitioners, implying as it does that if a child is 'behind', as perceived by the child's primary school teacher, then there will be problems, primarily for the child in 'fitting in'.

Even more alarming is the fact that the phrase clearly refers to the move of a child into the reception year, demanding that all children should be made ready for this change at the age of four. It is important to remember that in the majority of other countries, including those European ones that are currently achieving much better outcomes than the UK in terms of academic achievement and children's well-being, children are not deemed to be ready for school until they are aged six.

The notion of preparing children in readiness for the demands of school is found again within The Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage consultation document (2011), which prescribes the learning and development requirements in terms of the skills, knowledge and attitudes children need for good future progress.

This puts the onus on providers to complement and reinforce children's experiences at home in order to 'promote the learning and development of all children in their care, ensuring they are "school ready"'.

The dangers of a child not achieving 'readiness' are emphasised: 'A strong start in learning and development helps prepare children for the school environment, so they are ready and able to manage transition into reception class and the move to year 1. Children who are not ready for school may experience difficulties that disrupt their learning, and that of others. Early years providers must guide the development of children's capabilities with a view to ensuring the children in their care complete the EYFS ready to benefit fully from school' (page 5).

READINESS OF SCHOOLS

Opponents of this view, on the other hand, argue that this prevailing diagnosis of the problem of children's transition into school is fundamentally misguided. The informal, play-based curriculum of many pre-school settings, in which children are offered choice and opportunities to make decisions about their own learning activities, and are supported and scaffolded in their learning by skilled early years practitioners, needs supporting, not undermining.

The current policy endorsing the preparation of children for starting school is based on the premise that the curriculum in Year 1 is 'set' and children must fit into it as it stands. However, the evidence from neuroscience and developmental psychology suggests that a more appropriate strategy would be to adapt the school curriculum so that it meets the developmental needs of the children who enter Reception and Year 1.

If children are faring poorly there, the solution needs to be found in the school's 'offering', including perhaps a recognition that the National Curriculum is inappropriate, rather than assessing the child as 'inadequate'.

In this view, ideally the transition from pre-school programmes to reception and then into Year 1 schooling should be seamless and continuous - not the abrupt shift to a completely different social context and set of academic demands that the notion of 'readiness for school' implies.

Many early years practitioners believe that the important issue is not where young children's educational needs are met, but whether the types of curriculum they are offered are of high quality, appropriate for their developmental needs and offered through appropriate teaching methods.

Appropriate practice

Many early childhood educationalists have turned the issue of 'readiness' on its head to focus on schools rather than children (see Dunlop & Fabian, 2003). Certainly, some children are not 'ready' to sit at desks and do paper-and-pencil activities for long periods of time when they turn five or six years old. But that does not mean that they cannot benefit from any kind of education.

The appropriate policy question here is not what children need to know or be able to do when they get to school, but what schools need to do to meet the social and educational needs of the children who walk through their doors.

A growing number of educationalists and teachers have adopted a broadened conceptualisation of 'readiness', in which it is regarded as a condition of schools as well as individual children. It is understood as the match between the readiness of the child and the readiness of the environments that serve young children.

This contemporary understanding of readiness acknowledges that the sources of readiness are not only the child's emotional, cognitive, linguistic and social abilities, but also the contexts in which children live and interact with adults, teachers, and other community members.

In Part 2 of this series, in Nursery World on 15 November, we will focus on current research which is throwing new light on the key early emotional, social and cognitive developments that equip young children as learners and as individuals in society, and on the early experiences that limit or support these aspects of development.

In Part 3 we will look at the evidence coming out of a range of successful early years interventions that support these developmental aspects and analyse the characteristics that make them effective.

David Whitebread is a senior lecturer in Psychology and Early Years Education and Sue Bingham is a former early years practitioner and a PhD student of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

This series of articles is based on a report commissioned by TACTYC (The Association for the Professional Development of Early Years Educators) entitled School Readiness: a critical review of perspectives and evidence, written by David Whitebread and Sue Bingham of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. The report is to be launched at the TACTYC Research into Practice conference in York, 11-12 November, and will be available from TACTYC (free to members) after the conference. TACTYC can be found online at www.tactyc.org.uk

REFERENCES

• Allen, G (2010) Early intervention: the next steps. An Independent Review on Early Intervention Delivery to Her Majesty's Government

• Allen, G (2011) Early Intervention: Smart investment, massive savings. An Independent Review on Early Intervention Delivery to Her Majesty's Government

• Donaldson, M (1978) Children's Minds. London: Penguin

• Dunlop, A-W and Fabian, H (2003) (Eds) 'Transitions'. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, Themed Monograph 1

• Field, F (2011) The Foundation Years: Preventing poor children becoming poor adults. An Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances to Her Majesty's Government

• Goswami, U and Bryant, P (2007) Children's Cognitive Development and Learning. (Primary Review Research Survey 2/1a), University of Cambridge Faculty of Education

• Tickell, C (2011) The Early Years: Foundations for life, health and learning. An Independent Report on the Foundation Stage to HM Government, Department for Education

• Vygotsky, L (1978) Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.