Nursery World - Falling on deaf ears

Small children don’t necessarily listen to advice, but as adults we should be better at listening too, says Sue Cowley

Small children don’t necessarily listen to advice. ‘Roll up your sleeves, so you don’t get paint on them,’ you say, but still they trail their clean sleeves through it. ‘Watch out for the nettles, they sting!’ you warn, but still the children come crying to you when they get stung. Children need to learn through experience and by making mistakes. It’s not enough for us to give them advice; they have to understand why the advice was important in the first place.

As adults, we should be a bit better at taking advice – at listening to those who know what they are talking about. But the DfE has a remarkable track record of not listening to the people who have to put their policies into practice. When the Reception baseline was mooted, many of us advised against it. Millions of pounds and thousands of teacher hours later, the DfE says that the baseline is not reliable enough to measure progress: the very thing that we pointed out in the first place.

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