OpenEYE consists of a unique, multi-disciplinary team of experts who have come together through a shared concern about Early Childhood in the UK. They have the support of an increasing number of childminders, parents, practitioners and teachers. Additional support comes from a prestigious group of international researchers, authors and early childhood experts. OpenEYE is an entirely voluntary group who give their time freely to the cause.

Over the last three years we have produced a series of regular newsletters and the newsletter archive can be read online here. We hope to soon be sending out an update about new OpenEYE developments.

To join our email list and subscribe to any newsletter updates please use this link. There is no charge and you may unsubscribe at any time.

OpenEYE held its second national conference in June 2010.

Each of the key speaking American professors – Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Lilian Katz – made an eloquent case for playful learning before formal instruction, and Dr. Sebastian Suggate shared his research into early reading, showing that later readers who start at 7, by the age of 10, actually surpass those who start at 5.

The psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman spoke with a punch about the adverse effects of screen-based technology in the early years. He said, instead of screens that can induce ADHD, a child needs real experiences to create new neural circuitry in the brain that becomes intelligence and empathy.

By their questions it was clear that the roomful of teachers, parents and educators were, with us, committed protectors of the child’s right to a childhood of imaginative play uninvaded by politicians’ prescriptive curricula and harmful screens. A DVD of the conference is now available.

Like Open Eye, they call for the creation of a consortium of early childhood researchers, developmental psychologists, paediatricians, cognitive scientists, master teachers and school leaders to develop comprehensive guidelines for effective early care and teaching that recognise the right of every child to a healthy start in life and a developmentally appropriate education.

These views accord with those of the Open EYE Team and give substantial weight to our concerns. We have consistently expressed the view that the EYFS statutory framework for learning & development has the potential to be damaging to the emerging love of learning so inherent in the nature of the young child, with its developmentally inappropriate requirements.

Whilst Open EYE recognises the concerns of parents that children should learn the 3Rs, it is important to emphasise that these basic skills are easily achieved through a less formal and more age appropriate approach when children are given sufficient time, in a developmentally appropriate way. This fact is borne out by the reports from many European countries, where children start school much later, but where the 3Rs seem to present much less of a problem.

The Cambridge Review is highly encouraging to the OpenEYE group with its commonality with what we, and others, have been saying to the government now for two years; but which seems to have been systematically ignored.  The title of our film ‘too much, too soon’ seems to have hit the nail right on the head and, though the findings of this Review are all very encouraging, they will need to be ‘actioned’ before we can feel confident about any positive impact on improving the well-being and future success of our youngest children. It is gratifying to the Open EYE group to see the connectedness between early years and later now being given serious attention in an holistic way.

1 September 2009. The Open Eye Campaign has issued the following press release to mark the first anniversary of the Early Years Foundation Stage:

The Open EYE Campaign has continuing concerns about the EYFS, one year on….

(1) It is still far too early to say whether, taken as a whole, the EYFS has been successful or not. Not least, we will need to see a substantial number of post-implementation Ofsted reports to find out whether settings are being appropriately assessed and advised by Ofsted inspectors in relation to their interpretation of the EYFS.

(2)  There are severe doubts as to whether practitioners are prioritising the quality of their settings in relation to children’s real developmental needs, rather than prioritising how many ‘brownie points’ they can earn from Ofsted. Whilst the two are not necessarily unrelated, choosing the latter over the former is likely to have dire consequences for children’s development.

(3)  The issue of the literacy goals has not been addressed at all, despite continuing complaints and representations from across the early years field (including a recent public admission by strong EYFS supporter, Bernadette Duffy, that the literacy requirements have no research base), and the Rose Review’s missed opportunity to recommend that these controversial goals be held back for at least a year – when all the evidence and informed opinion points to it being the correct and appropriate change to make. For example, the recent ‘Early Education’ (EE) questionnaire results, based on the QCA’s EYFS survey, has thrown up significant disquiet about the literacy requirements of the EYFS. In addition, the EYFS recommendations made in the recent Select Committee’s report underline these concerns – viz.: ‘…we draw the Department’s attention to the near universal support for the reconsideration of the Early Learning Goals directly concerned with reading, writing and punctuation’. This further belies the current claims about the alleged ‘universal embracing’ of the EYFS.

(4) We are also very concerned, however, that as many as 7 in 10 of respondents to the EE questionnaire did not question the EYFS literacy goals. This suggests that there may well have been a kind of compliant, uncritical acquiescence to the state’s imposed but misguided model by many early years staff – a possibility that has concerned Open EYE all along.

(5) There has been a woeful lack of precision about what the term “EYFS” is actually referring to in virtually all public discussions about the framework, and it has increasingly become a non-discriminating generic term (rather like ‘hoovers’ for ‘vacuum cleaners’). There is much in the practice guidance which, as a framework, can be a useful resource as long as the age-related grids are not taken too literally. However, this usefulness should not be used as an expedient smokescreen for obscuring those politicised aspects of the compulsory framework which are highly contentious, have no evidence base, and which many practitioners and academics are continuing to challenge strongly.

(6)  The recent QCA’s EYFS questionnaire survey is inadequate and methodologically flawed, with questions that are non-sensical, and leaving little if any space for critical comments about the EYFS to be made by practitioners. Any results it produces must therefore be treated with extreme caution.

(7) Re childminders: approaching 1,000 citizens have now signed the Downing Street petition asking that the EYFS be dis-applied in the case of childminders. The government has responded with extraordinary complacency to the precipitate decline in the number of registered childminders, at a time when it is arguing that we need a growing supply of childcare places. It seems that the government simply dare not admit the obvious – i.e. that the concerted decline in registered childminders since EYFS was introduced is directly linked to the inappropriate bureaucratisation and ‘schoolification’ of childminding that the EYFS introduces. Recent Ofsted documentation for childminders also explicitly states that childminders have a legal requirement to provide an ‘educational programme’ for their children. This represents yet another ratcheting-up of the insidious ‘schoolification’ of early childhood experience, which many authoritative commentators, including Open EYE, believe to be undermining the psychological foundations of a healthy childhood.

(8)  The one completed attempt to date to apply for a principled exemption from EYFS, by a childminder from Warrington, was summarily refused, and for reasons which are very difficult to understand. Whilst this is being pursued with the Department, it does confirm Open EYE’s fears that the EYFS exemption process has been deliberately designed to make it virtually impossible for anyone to succeed in negotiating it successfully. Following the recent concession on exemptions for Steiner settings, as a matter of equity, it is essential that any other settings which object philosophically or pedagogically to the statutory EYFS learning requirements can also be granted exemption, for the Steiner movement’s concern that the literacy, numeracy and ICT requirements are inappropriate is shared by many non-Steiner practitioners throughout the field. Open EYE would also hope to see a positive response to any exemption application made on the grounds of a deeply held personal conviction, whether of institutional or parental origin, as this would demonstrate a true commitment to diversity and parental choice in matters of education.

(9)  As predicted by Open EYE, the non-statutory, age-related development matters grids are being used to represent normal development – in spite of the fact that they are deeply flawed, and in some cases non-sensical.  Children are now being routinely assessed against these grids, and local authorities (through the LA outcomes duty) are making judgements about settings based on the numbers of children who appear to achieve well. Children and settings deemed to be failing are targeted for extra support. This ‘audit culture’ should have no place in early years, where children’s development is naturally varied, and where any pressure is likely to cause anxiety and damage to self-esteem.

(10)  Finally, it is concerning that, far from encouraging the school starting age to remain at 5 and beyond, there is now a new policy arising out of Sir Jim Rose’s recent primary review, to get children into school as soon as they are 4. This is highly regrettable, and there is certainly no research evidence to support such a policy shift. It also strongly suggests that the recommendation by the government’s own Early Education Advisory Group, that the government should review school starting age and extend the EYFS to the end of year 1, is being ignored by the DCSF.

END OF PRESS RELEASE

OPEN EYE’S SUBMISSION OF EVIDENCE TO THE ROSE REPORT 2009.

In the meantime, the campaign against the statutory nature of the learning and development requirements of the EYFS continues apace. We hope that the new Minister for Children, Young People and Families will be open to our concerns.

As far as we know, this is the first decision made on an exemption application. Open EYE is disappointed but not surprised that the first application for exemption has been refused. We’ll be posting a fuller response here in the next few weeks.

This response has now been redrafted as a formal submission of evidence to Sir Jim Rose. Please click the link to

22/7/09 – final version of submission posted on website. The link to the original draft has now been disabled.

Setting aside the wider question of the degree to which such consultations are ever genuinely open rather than mere rubber-stamping exercises, we first wish to highlight the narrowly defined consultation questions, being deliberately skewed, it seems, towards presupposing precisely that which should be open to consultation. Nowhere in the questions, for example, does it ask ‘providers’ to share their experience of collecting the EYFS profiling data to date, and the extent to which the process is burdensome – an extraordinary omission in a consultation about the efficacy of extending that very profiling assessment procedure, and the ‘costs’ thereof.

Settings which previously used these assessments in a loose and deliberately informal way will now immediately have to bureaucratise and formalise the process  – which will likely fundamentally compromise the quality of attention they can give to their children, and also further institutionalise an assessment process which many believe to be harmful, unnecessary and wasteful. It is therefore untrue and misleading to assert, as the DCSF cost assessment document does, that “There will be no change in burdens on early years providers in completing the EYFS profile” resulting from the proposed changes.

It will also mean that settings such as Steiner Kindergartens, which on principle reject some of the key EYFS learning requirements, will be placed in the intolerable position of having to submit very low or ‘zero’ scores on certain measurement indices which, they believe, it would be abusive to their children for them to measure. It is totally unacceptable that early-years professionals’ professional autonomy be further eroded in this way, and that some settings may well henceforth receive ‘bad marks’ not because they are poor settings, but because they reject on principle the government’s ideological and highly contested approach to mandatory literacy and numeracy ‘requirements’.

The proposed developments also represent a further consolidation and entrenchment of an assessment system that we already know many early-years providers to be finding intolerable to work with, and a major intrusion into the quality of their work with young children. This development also represents a significant further curtailment of parents’ basic right to be able to choose an early-years setting in which their children are not subject to the ‘normalising’ gaze of the State, which a rapidly growing number of parents find so objectionable.

Many believe that the EYFS as currently constituted, with its accompanying bureaucratisation and schoolification of the early-years sector, will have a negative impact on quality provision in the longer run; and these changes actually entrench still further what is already a deeply flawed framework.

Next, the extract in section 3:3 indicates once more that the DCFS does not really understand the significance of demanding the Profile from all children at the end of the academic year in which they turn 5, as they still seem to imply that the EYFS extends to the end of Reception – which it should, but it doesn’t! The document states that the profile will be completed “in almost all cases” by reception class teachers in maintained schools or equivalent classes in independent schools. This is not accurate, as a noteworthy number are completed by nursery settings when their children are still four, as many are five before the 31st August in that year. This is just one more reason why the EYFS should be extended to the end of Year 1.

It is also extraordinary, finally, that in the DCSF’s ‘impact assessment’ document, the costs of the intended changes are merely estimated in crude financial/salary terms, without any consideration being given to the impact of these changes on quality of provision and experience. This lacuna is symptomatic of the mechanistic, utilitarian philosophy that underpins and informs the ‘delivery’ of the EYFS, with its preoccupation with assessment and compulsive ‘outcome-itis’.

The consultation can be completed on line by following this link and clicking on “Respond online” – parents as well as practitioners and local authorities are able to send a submission.

Richard House and Kim Simpson, for Open EYE