By Margaret Edgington, Richard House and Lynne Oldfield

It is now almost two years since we first announced the launch of the Open EYE Campaign for open early years learning in The Times and the TES, and set out in detail our concerns about key aspects of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework in England.

We wish to introduce some tempered realism to recent uncritical statements by prominent authorities in the field about the alleged successes of the EYFS since its inception in September last year.

We believe that such viewpoints do not at all represent accurately the full reality of EYFS on the ground one year after implementation.

Open EYE wishes to acknowledge the many positive aspects of the EYFS, e.g. the admirable principles and the necessary welfare requirements. We are certainly not calling for a wholesale dismantling of the EYFS, and we have never done so.

However, we continue to express serious concerns, now shared by many across the sector, as to the inappropriateness of the statutory learning and development goals, and the uses to which they are being put.

The statutory learning and development requirements
In December 2007, we pointed to the conflict between the Unique Child EYFS principles and the legislated requirement for the attainment of “early learning goals by the end of the academic year in which they reach five”.

We highlighted the danger of a young and under-trained workforce focusing on “delivering” outcomes and gaining a distorted view of child development through uncritical use of the age-related “grids”.

More recently, we have strongly criticised the “audit culture” mentality which has entered the early years sphere via the Local Authority Outcomes Duty.

Many of the much-criticised “teaching to test”, assessment-driven characteristics of the primary school are now invading our nursery settings.

Ed Balls, Secretary for Children, Schools and Families, wants (and believes it to be appropriate that) our children “hit the ground running”, and the language of industry and the managerialist audit culture is rapidly colonising the art of education – with the alien discourse of “targets”, “outcomes”, “delivery”, “rolling out” etc. increasingly dominating the sector, and limiting the ways in which we can all think about our delicate, subtle work with young children.

Children’s author John Dougherty recently described his storytelling session in a local school, with teaching assistants sitting by the children with clipboards to assess the session against the EYFS profile targets.

Where was the role model for attentiveness and listening? What message are we sending out to our children? What happens to the practitioner’s quality of awareness when boxed in with prescribed assessment targets?

Has the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) commissioned any independent qualitative research into key questions like these, and their impact on the quality of practitioners” work with their children?

Sadly, we think not.

The “overwhelmingly positive” responses to the EYFS recently claimed by Sue Ellis, Director of the EYFS, therefore need to be viewed with considerable caution.

Statistics do not by any means reveal the reality of children’s experiences, or those of the teachers “delivering” the inescapable compulsory targets.

Any claimed “commitment” to the EYFS needs to viewed against the reality of the “compulsion” to “deliver” (and the consequences for your setting if you don’t), and the propensity of early years practitioners to comply with, and make the best of, whatever the Government might dictate to them.

How many young early years workers in their early to mid 20s will have the confidence and the articulacy to stand up against Government impositions that, in their heart of hearts, they know to be unnecessary and harmful – especially when training increasingly offers little if any space for critical thinking about the EYFS framework?

We continue to maintain that the learning and development requirements are unnecessary and over-prescriptive.

The centralisation of education
Open EYE member Wendy Ellyatt recently outlined the threat to educational creativity and innovation from “rigid Government-imposed frameworks”, producing a conformist culture in early years education.

She compellingly argues that this is particularly inappropriate due to the fluid, constantly changing nature of early childhood development.

The recent announcement that Steiner schools in England have obtained exemptions from certain learning and development requirements obscures the fact that they are still required by legislation to assess children against targets that bear little relation to their own values and curriculum; for not least, the EYFS profile remains compulsory even for these settings.

A registered childminder, Pat Adams, has been refused EYFS exemption despite full and enthusiastic support from parents; and the exemption process itself is so daunting that even on the most generous of readings, it cannot in any way be taken as a genuine demonstration of respect for healthy diversity or parental choice in matters of early years education.

With a heavily legislated state-imposed curriculum for pre-school children now in place, where can parents go if they sincerely believe that the literacy, numeracy and ICT goals of the EYFS are inappropriate?

Although the Steiner exemptions have given welcome publicity to the right to apply for exemption on the grounds of educational differences, there is little understanding that a second ground for exemption exists.

This is from the Human Rights Act of 1998, Chapter 42, Article 12, which gives “parents the right to choose their children’s education in conformity with their religious beliefs or philosophical convictions”.

When Annette Brooke, the Liberal Democrat MP and Shadow Minister for Children and Families, asked Dawn Primarolo to define this possibility, the Minister for Children replied, “The term ‘religious and philosophical convictions’ is a concept that is understood in case law, such as that on the European Convention of Human Rights.

“It refers to a cogent and serious belief-set or conviction worthy of respect in a democratic society” (our italics).

The exemption route remains very much of an obstacle course which is exceedingly difficult and onerous to negotiate.

Yet even if the exemption process were to be reformed and simplified, this would still not rescue children in maintained settings from the unsatisfactory aspects of the EYFS, particularly if the school entry age is lowered to four.

The profile remains statutory for everyone – even if successfully exempted from the learning and development goals, or unfunded. We still maintain that this legislation is a breach of the basic human right to educate children according to personal convictions, and that it represents an unjustifiable legal intrusion into the non-compulsory pre-school domain.

John Tranmer, the new chairman of the Independent Association of Preparatory Schools (IAPS) recently spoke out in the Daily Mail against the “loss of freedom” for private, voluntary and independent providers to choose their own curriculum for the under-fives, made more puzzling by the fact that – as yet! – there are no mandatory curricula for older children in independent school settings.

He said, “It is fundamentally wrong that the government, or more accurately a collection of pseudo-educationalists and bureaucrats, dictate to us”, and he vowed to campaign to reverse the imposition of the EYFS, and to encourage members to apply for exemption.

Such centralisation of education, particularly in the early years, is deeply disturbing.

Open EYE believes that these aspects of what is in some respects an admirable framework are needlessly repressive, and represent undue interference from the government in the pre-compulsory school domain.

School starting age
We also now find ourselves confronted with the conflict between the recommendations of the Rose and the Alexander (Cambridge) reviews – the former being Government-sponsored, the latter being independent.

Sir Jim Rose recommends a new school starting age of four, whilst the Cambridge review recommends that the EYFS be extended to the sixth birthday.

The cavalier dismissal (not to mention the gross misreading) of Professor Robin Alexander’s Cambridge Primary Review by the Government (and by the Conservative opposition) strongly suggests that pre-decided politicised agendas are taking precedence over rational argument and evidence, and we find this deeply disquieting – not least because the delicate early years sphere is surely the very last place where ideologically driven agendas should prevail.

Open EYE has consistently advocated that a genuinely play-based EYFS should be extended to the sixth year.

Conclusion
Despite some 10,000 signatures on Open EYE’s 2008 Downing Street website petition, recommendations from the Government’s own early years advisers that certain of the learning and development goals are inadvisable, and many subsequent expressions of concern, no effective response has yet come from the government.

We believe there to be a grave danger of what is, in some key respects, inappropriate legislation being uncritically accepted by a compliant workforce, as the framework rapidly becomes unquestioningly institutionalised.

Although we certainly have no wish to see the EYFS dismantled in its entirety, we therefore agree with the recent call by Purnima Tanuku, Chief Executive of the National Day Nurseries Association, for a “reviewed and (much) improved” version.

To sum up, we have serious concerns that the inappropriate aspects of the EYFS legislation, and particularly the learning and development requirements, are becoming uncritically accepted by a compliant workforce, and embedded and “normalised” as a result.

Open EYE will continue to call on the Government to downgrade the legal status of the EYFS learning and development requirements to professional guidelines only.

We also advocate a truly independent, root-and-branch review of the EYFS, which will enable teachers to make the necessary distinction between those aspects of the EYFS which are progressive and helpful, and those which are not.

Above all, for the sake of all children in their earliest and most vulnerable years, we need to find the courage and the wisdom to get this right.

Open EYE can be contacted at www.savechildhood.org.

Margaret Edgington is an early years consultant and trainer.

Dr Richard House is Senior Lecturer in Therapeutic Education at Roehampton University, co-editor of Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos, and a trained Kindergarten teacher.

Lynne Oldfield is director of the London Steiner Waldorf Early Childhood Teacher Training, and author of the book Free to Learn.