I mean no disrespect to the many organisations and individuals who are actively campaigning for racial justice in the early years by observing that the profile of this issue has fallen over the last decade. So, it is welcome to see early years trainer and author Jane Lane team up with Lord Ouseley (former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality) to campaign for the revised EYFS to include more on promoting racial justice.
They argue that there should be stronger requirements to monitor incidents of racial discrimination, and that without all the supplementary materials that were included in the original EYFS framework, practitioners will lack information on how to promote racial equality and tackle discrimination.
It has been argued that we should not intrude on the innocence of early childhood with issues like racism. But attitudes are formed early, for good and for ill. Children come into early years settings with ideas and beliefs which they have picked up from their homes and communities, and sometimes these will include hostility to children and adults from different ethnic groups or religions. Left unchallenged, such attitudes can end up having terrible effects.
Why don't early years settings and schools do more to acknowledge such tensions and challenge racist attitudes? Probably because staff feel worried about getting something wrong - we can feel that we lack confidence and knowledge of what to do for the best. One way forward would be to give more prominence to the existing EYFS guidance on promoting racial justice, through discussion and training. Instead, the proposal is to remove this from the EYFS pack - and perhaps send, albeit unintentionally, the message that this no longer matters so much.
