Nursery World - A competent system?

Mathias Urban argues that caring for nursery age children is a public good and a public responsibility, and that early childhood education is about how we as a society imagine our future.

Four seemingly unconnected pieces of information:

1. One in five children in the UK lives in a cold and damp home, one in ten lacks a warm winter coat and one in 20 grows up suffering from hunger and malnutrition. The Government of one of the wealthiest countries in the world has officially abandoned targets to end child poverty, and among the members of the G7, a club that combines more than 64 per cent of global net wealth, the UK is the only country where inequality continues to rise.

2. The Early Years Foundation Stage profile will no longer be compulsory from next year. It will be replaced with an on-entry assessment for all children that must produce a single numerical score, based on 'binary decisions about a child's performance across a range of indicators'. The results will be used as a means of determining school effectiveness.

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