Speaking at a Westminster Education Forum event, Michael Freeston, director of quality improvement at the Pre-school Learning Alliance, said the underlying theme appeared to be ‘a change from children as active agents in their own learning to more as recipients of what is presented to them'.
He added that the ELGs, which are used to measure children’s progress at the end of Reception, had too narrow a focus on reading books at the expense of maths, overall communication and creativity.
Communication and language had been ‘downgraded’ to listening and speaking, he said, while it is ‘criminal’ that being imaginative was ‘reduced to performing'. 'That’s doing it for the audience - that’s not doing it for the child’s learning’ he said.
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