Opinion: Political control freaks

Earlier this month I read with interest Baroness Shirley Williams' piece in the Guardian education section, 'The winnowing out of happiness' (3 March), where she writes, at some length, that the prevailing and intense control from central government is hurting schools.

I agree with her and I would take it further in saying that it also hurts children and our wider society. I also warmly welcome both her willingness to take some responsibility for contributing to this state of affairs, and her honest desire to shift the status quo in bringing back the joy of learning - for teachers and children.

What really irritated me as I read the piece, however, was the extent to which the catalogue of deficits born of Government initiatives since 1988, and which Baroness Williams eloquently outlines, were virtually all predicted by researchers and academics in the field through the late 1980s and on into the 1990s. Did the Government listen? No. They deemed these to be the rants of the self-serving and commissioned their own research. Do I sound a little irritated here? If so, it's because I am wondering how far research is likely to inform policy and practice in the future as the pendulum swings, and because I wonder whether 20 years from now it will be swinging back again with nothing gained. I continue to worry about the impact of all of this on our youngest children and on those children who come after them, the as-yet unborn.

I have spoken in this column before about the top-down pressures of prevailing policy, that have squeezed playful learning out of many early years settings or turned it into opportunities for measuring children against very limited learning outcomes, ticking the boxes and getting children to perform for an adult-dominated, policy-led agenda. In seeking to turn the tide, I am hoping the Government might be prepared to commission research into better understanding the relationship between play and learning in the early years; there are researchers looking at this across a range of aspects.

Good practice here bears relevance across the age-range and good practitioners have much to share with their colleagues who are working with older children. Let's build from the bottom up this time, shall we?

- Pat Broadhead is professor of Playful Learning at Leeds Metropolitan University and chair of TACTYC