Moving the goalpost

I was concerned at seeing that 72 per cent of respondents to the QCA consultation were happy with the proposal to alter the Early Learning Goal linking letters to sounds (News, 26 October). I can only assume that many of the respondents have not worked directly with groups of four-year-olds, and wonder whether early years practitioners thought, like me, that their response to the same question in the consultation on the Early Years Foundation Stage would be passed on to the QCA. Since there has been a deliberate effort to align the EYFS with the Primary Strategy, this is not an unreasonable assumption. It is disingenuous of the DfES to use the QCA result as an argument in favour of going ahead with the proposed change, in view of the results from the Foundation Stage Profile this year, which show once more that linking letters to sounds, along with writing, are the Early Learning Goals reached by the lowest percentage of pupils. Raising the level of difficulty is likely to result in yet more children being labelled as failures.