Showing posts with label eyfs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eyfs. Show all posts

Monday 18 June 2018

From The @TES Blog: Year 1 Should Be Like EYFS, Not Vice Versa


This piece that I wrote for the TES outlines a few questions that I have been asking myself about formalisation of teaching in the Early Years and in KS1 and beyond. It has met with a lot of praise from concerned Early Years practitioners and a certain amount of questioning from those more opposed to the ideas that I raise:

A key component of any phase of a child’s education is preparing them for the next stage, with an eventual goal of preparing them for the big wide world of work. Of course, this isn’t the only purpose of education – there are many immediate benefits, too. However, we try to ensure that Year 6 children are secondary-ready, we prepare our university-bound sixth formers for lectures and self-directed study and we want those leaving Reception to be "school-ready".

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Perhaps we need ask not how we can get children school ready, but how we can get school ready for the children?

Sunday 17 June 2018

Things You Should Continue Doing In The Early Years (And What The Research Says About Why)

Here's another blog post I wrote for the Bradford Research School blog. It is in response to the EEF's guidance report 'Preparing For Literacy', which can be downloaded now for free.

Much of what goes on in Early Years is misunderstood by those without experience of working with the youngest children in our education system. Early Years practitioners can feel like they are continually having to defend their working practices against those who have little understanding of the ways children develop and learn in the Nursery and Reception years. The fact that there are proportionally fewer Early Years teachers than say, Key Stage 2 teachers, or Key Stage 4 teachers, means that they are under-represented in education as a whole.

And nothing is as bad as when an agency produces a report telling the experts how to do it. So, does the EEF’s latest guidance report ‘Preparing for Literacy’ just teach the proverbial grandmother to suck eggs?

One benefit of engaging with research is that often it can confirm that what is being done already has an evidence base. Sometimes, after reading up on a particular working practice, one might discover that nothing needs to change, and that actually the things they are already doing are likely to be effective. Often, teachers will be convinced that their practice is effective because their own assessment of outcomes appears to prove it. For these teachers, checking with research findings can confirm that what they are doing has worked elsewhere too.

With that in mind, here are some common Early Years practices that the ‘Preparing for Literacy’ guidance report confirms as best bets; these are things you should definitely continue to do in your Nursery and Reception classrooms...

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Friday 15 September 2017

9 Important Changes to the Primary Maths Curriculum and Assessment

In response to the DfE's latest documents, I wrote this for Third Space Learning. It's a summary of the key changes in the way primary maths will be assessed over the next few years:

On 14th September, just as we were all getting settled into the new school year, the DfE published not one, but two documents of considerable importance: ‘Primary assessment in England: Government consultation response’ and the 2017/2018 ‘Teacher assessment frameworks at the end of KS2’. Both documents reveal changes that will no doubt affect our approach as teachers and leaders.

Whilst the most imminent and significant changes involve writing and reading, there are also some interesting developments in Maths.