Since late 2007, the Open EYE campaign has challenged key aspects of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), most particularly its controversially statutory learning and development requirements, its developmentally inappropriate ‘Early Learning Goals’, and the impact on practitioners’ thinking of a relentless, ‘assessment-mindedness’, determined far more by England’s uniquely early school starting age than by any serious concern for young children’s general well-being.
While small children in the rest of Europe are free to play, England imposes a school mentality from earliest infancy. With a new coalition government less ideologically and personally identified with the EYFS, hope was initially raised that the worst mistakes of the original framework would be rectified, or, at the very least, substantially ameliorated. However, the Revised EYFS falls tragically short of addressing its well documented shortcomings, and as such it is hugely disappointing, and a missed opportunity whose scale is difficult to overestimate.
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