Nursery World - Smoke and mirrors

The Government’s communications around the early years and teaching could have been written by a satirist, says our columnist Michael Pettavel

Michael Pettavel: 'I now judge from the walk and not the talk'

Am I alone in looking at the comments that the DfE posts – whether online, in response to news articles or its daily coronavirus updates, diligently sent to schools and nurseries – and not knowing whether they are actually written with an element of comedic intent?

The sage advice, enlightening teachers and other education professionals of their deeply considered solutions (to problems that don’t necessarily exist), can seem vacuous and patronising.

Take the recent justification for the baseline testing (which more than 80 per cent of Reception teachers feel is a useless waste of their time) – that it will allow children to have ‘valuable one-to-one time with their teacher at an early stage’. Wow, why in all the years of teaching a Reception class did I never think that spending time with children would be important? How helpful to be told this, and of course this wisdom will revolutionise teaching and more than makes up for the irrelevance of years of training and experience!

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