Collins – early years toolkit

So in the early years toolkit we’re trying to ask ourselves what do we know about the kind of practices or opportunities you have to, if you like, affect early learning environments? So we’re interested in the core elements of what happens when you introduce more language in communication into a child’s experience. What happens when you have more sort of experiential play based learning? What happens when you increase the amount of mathematics in numeracy? What about the role of technology? What about parental involvement? Common themes that won’t surprise people because that’s what the evidence itself was gathered under.  

And one of the surprise things about early years, before we go into the details of it, is we’re not overwhelmed with evidence. The first thing we should say is we should be very tentative about the findings because we haven’t done enough. We haven’t done enough research, we haven’t done enough rigorous research, we need to do more. But all we’ve done today is so far what have we learned and let’s bring that to the table so when we start doing new research we start from what we already know rather than starting from scratch.   

My first concern about the early years one is that we haven’t got enough evidence. So we need to do more.  

I think the second element is that when you’re measuring outcomes, whenever you’re controlling a study you have to ask yourself what’s going to be the final outcome you’re measuring your intervention against? Now we’ve used measures of attainment, of looking at skills of how to manipulate and manage mathematics, the number or how well the process texts or their ability to develop the early skills of literacy. Now again, they are only two outcomes. So you’ve got to think about other things that might matter to you in terms of the outcomes for children. 

So one of the implications of the absence if you like, of rigour in the research around early education – and that isn’t about the research that’s done and not very good, just enough research on early education – is too often we found ourselves locked, instead of in discussions about the evidence, locked into slightly ideological positions around the kind of provision or education we’d like to see. In the last 10 years or so though, we’ve had a wave of new findings, of new – a new deeper understanding done with rigour, which I think takes us beyond the slightly polarized ideological positions and into more nuance questions and more informed debates around what constitutes great learning opportunities.  

Now I think the way through this is to stay focused on outcomes. One of the things we want children to be able to do if they’re going to thrive at school and if they’re going to have the kind of opportunity that gives them wellbeing in general. And when you go that way you can understand that if you take the evidence on self-regulation and executive functioning it looks strong, it looks important to build that capacity. It looks like it’s a particular promise for children from families where parents might not have had high success in education or where income is low, where there’s a different kind of discourse in the home dare I say it.  

So if you want those kind of outcomes, if you want to focus on that, you need a certain kind of learning, you need play, you need interaction, you need negotiation, you need children taking strategic responsibility. You need the kind of learning that creates that sort of challenge and opportunity for children.  

If however you want children to be on the front foot when they begin literacy in schools and able to make the most of the opportunities there in terms of reading or – and writing, you may say well we need slightly more structured learning around early phonetic awareness and phonic knowledge. So that determines a different kind of experience and a different kind of provision. So, rather than one type of centre over another it’s – for me it’s about the kind of outcomes you want and therefore the learning experiences you need to create. And they’re different for different kinds of outcomes.