Nursery World - Network Whispers - Data loss, phonics and scams

Nursery World and NDNA join forces for a behind-the-scenes column

DELETED FROM HISTORY? Data geeks have complained that the (now slimmed down) DfE provider’s survey has stopped collecting as much detail about Early Years Teachers or Children’s Centres as previously. ‘We think it is political,’ said one. As Pamela Calder wrote in ‘Is childcare working?’ (Nursery World, 29 April), ‘If we don’t have the data to take a measure of how things are, then we can’t see if things are improving.’

PHONIC PANICS Bold Beginnings controversially asserted that the ‘core purpose’ of Reception should be ‘the teaching of reading, including systematic synthetic phonics’. Now parents at one school have received a letter asking them to practise past test papers with their six-year-olds ‘as often as possible’ and been provided with resources so they can gen up on digraphs, trigraphs and phonemes. One parent-teacher said, ‘I am furious that the Government are introducing testing at younger and younger ages and sympathetic with my child’s teachers that their time is being wasted on this nonsense.’

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