The practitioner role

Practitioners need to help each child to learn. They must recognise the child's current understanding and achievements and know what the child's next steps could be. This may involve the practitioner and the child working together in an activity chosen by the child. The practitioner can help children to achieve something new, that they could not yet do independently. It may involve the practitioner in talking with the child to establish what he or she understands.

The practitioner also needs to know what misconceptions the child holds about, for example, how letters represent the sounds in speech. Such information will provide the evidence for the practitioner's judgement about what the child needs to be taught and helped with. In these processes, both the child and the practitioner play an active role together.

Ready or not

On the other hand, when the children are all expected to do the level one worksheet in the writing scheme in the same week, they are just passive recipients. There is no planning here for the children's different types of understanding about writing, or for their different levels of fine motor control.

Likewise, practitioners are taking a passive role if they are simply waiting for signs that a child is 'ready', according to an assessment checklist, to start to learn about reading or writing.

With the 'readiness' approach, the most capable children in the eyes of the practitioner receive more interaction and teaching, whereas the less capable children are left with less support and planning. Once these kinds of gaps open up, they can widen rapidly. The children who experience early success get positive feedback and then more teaching. They achieve more success. The children who experience failure start to feel that they are incapable of learning about reading and writing. They will soon become disaffected.

Hard evidence

Practitioners need good and manageable systems for recording children's achievements. At the heart of this is collecting evidence of what children are actually doing. This means writing regular observations and analysing them to determine the next steps of planning and teaching. It means talking regularly with parents and carers and coming to a shared viewpoint about each child's interests, needs and achievements.

This process of assessment needs to be mapped on a framework of children's learning and development, if it is going to help the child to make progress. Otherwise practitioners may be building up a lot of information about children, but finding it difficult to turn it into effective planning. The Sheffield Early Literacy Development Profile (included in Cathy Nutbrown's Recognising Early Literacy Development, Paul Chapman Publishing, 15.99) requires more practitioner time than most settings could manage. But it can be used as a starting point to developing your own 'map' of indicators that children are learning about literacy.

Outcomes

Practitioners in the Foundation Stage often experience huge pressures for future outcomes. Planning activities for three-year-olds from the starting point of an early learning goal which is for five- to six-year-olds is hardly likely to result in effective teaching. Practitioners must take a clear stand based on evidence about children's learning, and produce evidence of children's progress from their own settings.