Nursery World - A mixed start for the new childcare minister

Dr Richard House, a co-founder of Early Childhood Action, shares his first impressions

The new childcare and education minister Sam Gyimah’s comments in his recent Nursery World interview, are likely to elicit a mixed response from the sector. To give credit where it’s due, it’s most refreshing, first, that the minister will be open to dialogue and debate – for, if genuine, this has to be a substantial improvement on his ministerial predecessors. It’s also encouraging to hear that Mr Gyimah is concerned with helping the less well off (more on this later, however).

But alarm bells rang when I read about ‘teaching [!] democracy to two year olds’. This tell-tale choice of language is revealing, of course, raising the Truss-like spectre of age-inappropriate quasi-didactic teaching to very young children. With developmental inappropriateness seemingly still stubbornly entrenched in the DfE psyche, we can at least rest assured that the sector is now primed, as never before, to challenge head-on whatever dubious policy commitments do emanate from the DfE (via the Pre-School Learning Alliance, the ‘Too Much Too Soon’ campaign, and so on).

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