Children in most affluent countries now spend some time in early childhood education and care (ECE); and school performance and lifelong learning have become increasingly important for governments. Not surprisingly, the relationship between ECE and compulsory school education (CSE) has moved up the policy agenda. But what should that relationship be?
This is the subject of a new book, Early Childhood and Compulsory Education; Reconceptualising the Relationship. In it, authors from Belgium, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US discuss this crucial relationship, drawing on national experience and perspectives. But they also respond to an essay that starts the book, which looks in particular at three possible relationships: readying, partnership or meeting place.
The simplest is ‘readying for school’. In this relationship, ECE assumes a subordinate role of preparing young children to perform well in CSE, by ensuring they acquire the knowledge, skills and dispositions required to be a successful learner in compulsory education, for example ready for the rapid acquisition of literacy and numeracy and able to participate in classroom regimes. ECE is seen as the lowest rung on a ladder of educational development, providing a foundation for later educational progression. In a hierarchical system, primary education becomes the frame of reference for ECE, just as ‘secondary’ school becomes the frame of reference for the upper years of primary education, and university or college becomes the frame of reference for the upper years of secondary school
Starting Strong, OECD’s cross-national review of early childhood policies, noted the spread of this relationship: ‘in the early childhood field, an instrumental and narrow discourse about readiness for school is increasingly heard’ (OECD 2006: 219). Starting Strong finds this type of relationship is most prominent in countries that have adopted what it terms a ‘pre-primary approach to early education’, for example France, the Netherlands and several English-speaking countries including Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK and the US: ‘These countries tend to introduce the contents and methods of primary schooling into early education’ (page 61).
SCHOOL READINESS
We can see the ascendency of this relationship in England. The English Department for Education, in its ‘Business Plan 2011-2015’, announced plans to develop new indicators of ‘readiness to progress to the next stage of schooling’, including one set for early years to primary, as well as another for primary to secondary school (English Department for Education, 2010a, p.22).
A 2011 report on early intervention commissioned by the UK government recommends that ‘the United Kingdom should adopt the concept of the foundation years from 0 to 5 (including pregnancy)... Its prime objective should be to produce high levels of "school readiness" for all children regardless of family income’ (Allen, 2011, p.46; original emphasis). While the Early Years Foundation Stage ‘defines what providers must do...to ensure [children] are ready for school’ (English Department for Education, 2012:.4).
This emphasis on readiness for school is symptomatic of a widespread trend to ‘schoolification’, an expressive term for compulsory education ‘taking over early childhood institutions in a colonising manner’ (OECD, 2006: 62). This downward pressure can lead ECE ‘to adopt the content and methods of the primary school’, with a ‘detrimental effect on young children’s learning’: inappropriate practice and a narrowing of education to fit the demands of a conservative and cognitively-focused compulsory school sector. It undermines an understanding of the child as a competent learner from birth, willing and able to participate in education; the implied assumption is that education proper starts at 5 in primary school – and that the main task of ECEC is to ready children ‘to progress’ to that experience.
THE STRONG AND EQUAL PARTNERSHIP
The second relationship considered in the book is drawn from OECD’s Starting Strong: ‘the strong and equal partnership’. This is one of 8 policy lessons, which together constitute key elements in a successful ECEC policy. The way this particular policy lesson is expressed – not only a strong partnership, but equal too - recognises that the relationship is not just a matter of closeness, but also one of power. A strong partnership may not necessarily be an equal one, especially given the powerful gravitational pull of the compulsory school: the partnership can bring benefits, but it may also entail dangers.
The report goes on to describe the kind of partnership it advocates in more detail, making it clear that ECE has much to offer CSE: 'Strong partnerships with the education system provide the opportunity to bring together the diverse perspectives and methods of both ECEC and schools, focusing on the strengths of both approaches, such as the emphasis on parental involvement and social development in ECEC and the focus on educational goals and outcomes in schools...ECEC and primary education could benefit from the knowledge and experience of young children accumulated in each sector, and in the process help children and families negotiate the transition from ECEC to school' (OECD, 2001: 129: emphasis added).
There is, in short, a mutually beneficial dialogue to be had between ECE and CSE in a strong and equal partnership – not a monologue.
THE MEETING PLACE
The third relationship comes from a report written in 1994 by two academics – Gunilla Dahlberg and Hillevi Lenz Taguchi – for a Swedish government committee. The title of the report is Preschool and school – two different traditions and the vision of a meeting place, from which I take the name for this relationship between ECE and CSE: the ‘meeting place’. The focus of the report is very much Sweden: Swedish history, traditions, education systems and so on. But its analytical method is more widely applicable, and its proffered solution to the problem that the method reveals can inform discussion well beyond Sweden.
Dahlberg and Lenz-Taguchi note the same general tendency in the relationship between ECE and CSE as Starting Strong: ‘one can clearly see internationally.... that the education system tends to go further down in age’. This downward pressure on ECEC, ‘schoolification’, has potentially serious consequences - for children, for curriculum and for pedagogical work. But how to get a more equal relationship?
The core of the problem, as the authors see it, is that ECE and CSE have different traditions, leading to quite different understandings of education and learning. In particular, ECE and CSE in Sweden have two separate images of the child – ‘the child as nature’ and ‘the child as a re-producer of culture and knowledge’ – so that ‘the pre-school [what Swedes call early childhood centres] has taken a position opposite to that of the school’.
In a later book, Dahlberg describes this image of the child as nature as ‘an essential being of universal properties and inherent capabilities whose development is viewed as an innate "natural" process – biologically determined, following general laws...[in] a standard sequence of biological stages that constitute a path to full realization’ (Dahlberg et al., 2007: 46). This tradition and image values a holistic view of the child; free play and creativity, giving rise to free and self-confident people; free expression of ideas and feelings; fun; and the here-and-now.
CULTURE AND KNOWLEDGE
By contrast, the Swedish school is ‘dominated by the reproduction of the prevailing culture and knowledge’, and hence an image of the child as a ‘re-producer of culture of knowledge'. This child is understood as starting life ‘as an empty vessel or tabula rasa...[needing] to be filled with knowledge, skills and dominant cultural values which are already determined, socially determined and ready to administer – a process of reproduction or transmission’ (Dahlberg et al, 2007:44).
There is a greater emphasis, than in the image of pre-school’s child, on the future and economic life. The school is subject centred, meaning that ‘the basis for all activities is linked to the learning of concrete subject knowledge...with the transfer of concrete and assessable knowledge as the goal.’ These subjects are mostly decided and organized by others, and not the children, in contrast to the ‘pre-school’s tradition of child-centredness, where the ideal is that the child, as much as possible, should choose the contents and forms of expression’.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Not one sector colonising the other as in readying, nor each sector simply taking on the better bits of the other as in the strong and equal partnership. Instead Dahlberg and Lenz-Taguchi propose early childhood and compulsory education coming together in pedagogical ‘meeting places’ to create new and shared ‘common view’ about education. This, the authors suggest, might be based on a new and shared image or understanding of the child not as nature, not as re-producer – but as a constructor of culture and knowledge and an investigative child:
The idea that the child is a constructor of culture and knowledge builds a respect for the child as competent and curious – a child who is filled with a desire to learn, to research and develop as a human being in an interactive relationship with other people. It is a rich child. A child who takes an active part in the process of constructing knowledge.
What we have here, the opening essay in the new book argues, is the basis for a radical approach to education. Through the meeting place relationship, it is possible to envisage the whole field of education – ECE, CSE and beyond - co-constructing and working with:
- shared images of the child, the teacher, the school itself – for example, the child and teacher as co-constructors of knowledge; pre-school and school as places of encounter and collaborative workshops capable of many projects;
- shared understandings of learning and education itself - for example, learning as meaning making and education in its broadest sense;
- shared values – for example, democracy and experimentation as fundamental values;
- shared ethics – for example, an ethics of care;
- shared curricular goals, built round broad thematic areas;
- shared pedagogical approaches – for example, a pedagogy of relationships and listening;
- shared practices – for example, project or thematic work that strives for connectedness, the use of ateliers and atelieristas, and a central role for pedagogical documentation.
COMMON IDEA
What emerges here is a common idea of education that flows across the years and through different types of educational institution, rather than a disconnected set of different educational ‘enclosures’, each with its own understandings, goals and practices, each readying students for the next level up, and requiring a series of ‘transitions’ from one educational enclosure to another.
This approach to education – as a lifecourse project with common understandings, values, goals and practices - opens up the possibility of a truly equal relationship between different parts of the education system, a relationship in which, for example, teachers of 16 month olds and of 16 year olds would be able to dialogue and document together in a relationship of mutual learning. Not just able, but wanting to do so.
So there are alternatives, more indeed than the three considered here. It is, of course, perfectly acceptable to argue for readiness for school as the defining relationship. But only if it is understood to be just one alternative. The failure to recognise, value or engage with such diversity is a worrying symptom of the impoverishment of today’s politics of education.
Peter Moss is Emeritus Professor of Early Childhood Provision, Institute of Education University of London
Publications referred to
Allen, G (2011) Early Intervention: The next steps. (http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/early-intervention-next-steps.pdf, accessed 5 December 2012)
Dahlberg, G. & Lenz Taguchi, H (1994) Förskola och skola – om två skilda traditioner och om visionen om en mötesplats [Pre-school and school – two different traditions and the vision of a meeting place]. Stockholm: HLS Förlag
Dahlberg, G, Moss, P and Pence, A (2007, 2nd ed) Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care. London: Routledge
English Department for Education (2010) Business Plan 2011-2015. (http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/d/department%20for%20education%20business%20plan.pdf, accessed 5 December 2012)
English Department for Education (2012) Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage. (http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/e/eyfs%20statutory%20framework%20march%202012.pdf, accessed 5 December 2012).
Moss, P. (ed) (2013) Early Childhood and Compulsory Education: Reconceptualising the relationship. London: Routledge.
OECD (2001) Starting Strong I. Paris: OECD
OECD (2006) Starting Strong II. Paris: OECD
