Nursery World - 'Tests deny children play-based learning'

Young children are being denied the chance to learn social and intellectual skills through play when they start school by the Government's emphasis on tests and league tables, claims an academic study.

Pat Broadhead, a research professor of education at the University of Northumbria, who has been studying play-based learning over the past 20 years, said the worst culprits were nursery classes attached to schools because they 'are busy preparing children at the age of six and seven for SATs, and then there are the pressures of league tables on the schools too'.

Professor Broadhead, whose book Early Years Play and Learning - Developing Social Skills and Co-operation has just been published (Routledge Falmer, 17.99), said nursery schools and day nurseries were also feeling the effects of downward pressure to introduce children to a formal curriculum at an ever younger age.

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