‘School Readiness’ Pressure is Forcing the Formalisation of Early Years Education
Without a clear definition of what being 'school ready' actually means, EYFS settings are being forced into a narrow formal focus to prepare young children for the next stage…
- by Louise Kay
Despite ‘school readiness’ being at the forefront of contemporary early childhood educational policy in England there is no clear definition of what this means for children and teachers.
Without this in place, the phrase is left open to interpretation and contradictions by policymakers and the early childhood community, exacerbated by the media who regularly report that a significant number of children are ‘not ready for school’.
At the end of their Reception year, children are assessed as to whether they have achieved the ‘Good Level of Development’ (GLD), in other words they have reached the following Early Learning Goals: Personal, Social and Emotional Development, Communication and Language, Physical Development, Mathematics, and Literacy.
This is then used by the government as a measure to establish a child’s ‘school readiness’.
Confusion arises, however, when the phrase ‘school readiness’ is used interchangeably to refer to both the transition into Reception from a home, Nursery, or pre-school context, and that of the transition from Reception into Year One.
This is problematic, as the two transitions require significantly different skills.
On entry into Reception, there is an emphasis on skills such as being able to separate from a main carer, share and take turns with other children, toilet and manage personal hygiene independently, and communication and language skills.
The outcomes required to reach the GLD at the end of Reception and for the transition into Year One include more instrumental Mathematical and Literacy skills such as writing sentences and adding and subtracting single digit numbers.
Year on year, the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP) data highlights how children find the Reading, Writing and Numbers outcomes the most difficult to achieve.
Furthermore, there are specific groups of children who struggle to meet the expected outcomes of the GLD including boys, children in receipt of Free School Meals, children with a Special Educational Need, summer born children, and Gypsy/Roma children.
As a result, some children enter Year One in a deficit position, destined to playing catch up with peers whose personal and cultural experiences puts them in a more advantageous position to be successful within this framework.
There has been an ongoing trend in recent years, whereby more instrumental outcomes in mathematics and literacy are being pushed down into the early years which could go some way in explaining the difficulties children are having reaching certain outcomes.
However, there is still a bridge between the end of Reception and the expectations of Year One, so even the children that have achieved the GLD are having to make a substantial curricular transition.
This places additional pressures on Reception teachers, and the children they are teaching, as additional outcomes are pushed down into Reception in order to ‘ready’ children for the next stage of learning.
Further tensions are created around the ‘school readiness’ agenda when it is considered that the GLD is often used as a performance management tool for the teachers and an accountability measure for schools.
This again creates pressures for teachers and children, particularly when there is a focus on the instrumental outcomes of mathematics and literacy.
Over the past four years, the EYFSP data shows an 11% increase in the number of children achieving the Writing Early Learning Goal, which suggests there has been a pedagogical shift to ensure children can write, and read back, their ‘phonetically plausible’ sentences.
It must therefore be questioned whether the early years is becoming more ‘formal’ in its approach to teaching in order to achieve these mathematical and literacy outcomes.
Currently England has a school starting age of five but, due to a one-point entry into primary school, the reality for most children is a school starting age of four.
As part of the ‘school readiness’ agenda and the GLD, children are being subjected to a high-stakes assessment framework when some of them have not yet reached compulsory school age.
By extending the Early Years Foundation Stage and adjusting the school starting age to six in line with the majority of Europe, pressures being placed on teachers to ensure the current construct of ‘school readiness’ and the top down push towards formal learning outcomes would be alleviated.
Furthermore, it is important that early childhood education continues to foster holistic development and acknowledge the socio-cultural contexts that children exist within, rather than focus on ‘readying’ children for school.
Louise Kay specialises in early years education and is writing a thesis on school readiness. She is also a research assistant at The School of Education, University of Sheffield. Follow her on Twitter at @_winsdale_.
