Exemptions process

As regular visitors to the site will know, Open EYE does not consider the applications process for exemptions from the EYFS learning and development requirements to be fair or adequate.

We are in the process of setting up a new website specifically to help both parents and providers who wish to apply for exemptions. It’s still in the early stages, but please visit and bookmark it, at www.eyfs-exemptions.co.uk.

Meanwhile, the official government exemptions guidance can be found here.

Petition response

The government has finally responded to the Open EYE petition on the 10 Downing St website, over 2 months after it closed. You can see the response here.

Apologies and news

First of all, many apologies that the site hasn’t been updated for a while – it doesn’t mean nothing’s been happening with the Open EYE campaign (quite the reverse!), but Open EYE is an unfunded and entirely voluntary campaign run by people with full-time jobs and we don’t always have the time we need to get everything done.

As for news:

OpenEYE held a highly successful profession seminar on the 4th October bringing together many of the top experts in the field. Chaired by Wendy Scott and Sir Christopher Ball, the aims of the seminar were:

• To discuss ongoing concerns about the introduction of the EYFS and why these have arisen
• To share current thinking on age appropriate development and learning environments for early years
• To contrast and compare how Early Years policy in the UK differs from that of other European countries.
• To examine different approaches to early development and learning
• To share research on childhood stress and wellbeing in the UK
• To provide an open and dynamic platform for ongoing dialogue

Please click the links to see more information about the seminar (all documents are in PDF format):

Seminar summary

Wendy Ellyatt : Early Learning – International Perspectives

Sally Goddard Blythe :  Developmental Readiness – The Key to Learning Success

Kim Simpson: The Whole Truth, The Whole Child

Lynne Oldfield: the Steiner Waldorf Foundation Stage

Opposition to EYFS launch widely reported

The past week has seen a deluge of media coverage surrounding the legal deadline for implementing England’s new EYFS, which came into law from Monday 1st September, and with which the entire early-years sector in England has to comply by law, unless they manage to negotiate an exemption from the minister. Open EYE has been inundated with media inquiries, and we have appeared on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme (Kim Simpson), Sky News (Kim and Sue Palmer) and BBC Radio Wales (Richard House) – to name just a few of campaign members’ recent media appearances.
It is most telling that website ‘comment boards’ for responses to EYFS articles in the Daily Telegraph (61 posted comments to date), The Times (22 posted comments to date)  and for MSN News (71 postings to date) contain comments that are virtually unanimous in criticising England’s EYFS, for all manner of reasons – and with very few postings actually supporting it. See also the Daily Telegraph report, ‘Pre-school children to start work on ‘nappy curriculum’ of 69 education targets’, 30 August.

It seems quite clear that the Zeitgiest is turning – and Open EYE will be re-doubling its campaigning efforts in the coming weeks and months, as the shortcomings we have highlighted in England’s EYFS begin to manifest. Our eyes will also be open and alert to see how the recently launched Welsh Foundation Stage fares – as in crucial respects, it is very different from, and far more child-centred than, England’s EYFS – specifically:

(1)    A gradual, graduated and above-all careful introduction: when the Welsh Education Department saw that there were some initial glitches (in their case, regarding the funding of the new framework), rather than rush on with implementation, they have been appropriately cautious and graduated with its introduction – unlike in England;

(2) The Welsh Foundation Stage crucially runs up to seven years of age – i.e. TWO FULL YEARS longer than England’s – which immediately makes an enormous difference;

(3) The Welsh FS places social and personal development (which includes spiritual development) at its heart – unlike the chronic bias in our own EYFS’s assessment profiling process towards early literacy and numeracy.

(4) Following the Scandinavian model, Wales’s FS quite explicitly places the outdoors and experiential learning at its core – again, a substantial difference in emphasis from the English EYFS.

Scotland has not, as of yet, introduced, or even decided upon, an early-years Foundation Stage – and as in the Welsh case, they are seeking to draw upon the widest international experience before deciding upon what is best for their children. One has to ask why such a systematic and responsible process seems to have been lacking in England’s case.

DCSF Rocked by New Open Letter and Lead Report in The Times on EYFS ‘Concessions’

 

The Times newspaper leads today with an article featuring Open EYE’s less-than-impressed response to the DCSF’s new labyrinthine and unduly complex exemptions procedure. In the same issue, the letters page also features a new Open Letter orchestrated by the campaign’s Richard House, Graham Kennish and Kim Simpson, following our first letter published in The Times last November. This new Open Letter makes the case that the government’s recent alleged ‘concessions’ amount to little more than ‘crumbs thrown at the table’, and leave in place mandatory early-years practices which are widely believed to be inappropriate for many children. The letter is signed by over 80 notables across education and related fields, including such prominent figures as:

Sir Christopher Ball, Steve Biddulph, Professors Tim Brighouse, Pat Broadhead, Tricia David, Rita Jordan, OBE (Emeritus), Lilian G. Katz (USA), Susie Orbach, Pat Petrie and Sami Timimi – and Jean Liedloff, Alfie Kohn, Dr Penelope Leach, Michael Morpurgo OBE, Philip Pullman, Sue Palmer and Tim Smit.

 

EYFS – Too Much, Too Soon; EYFS exemptions – too little, too late

The new Open EYE campaign film, TOO MUCH TOO SOON, is here:

Meanwhile, you may have seen that the Children’s Minister, Beverley Hughes, recently and belatedly announced a procedure whereby settings can apply for exemption – providing, of course, that they can (a) find the relevant page on the DCSF website, (b) understand the procedure, and (c) clear all the hurdles. To save you the trouble of hunting it out, you can find the information here. See what you think.

“Hidden” research casts more doubt on EYFS

Research commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools & Families – but then left unreleased by the Department until a Freedom of Information Act request forced its disclosure – has raised further questions about the Early Years Foundation Stage, according to a report in Monday’s Guardian.

Meanwhile, anyone who missed the recent edition of ‘The Learning Curve’ on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 7th July, can listen to it here. The programme begins with a follow-up item on the EYFS, with Margaret Edgington of the Open EYE steering group, Lib Dem Shadow Minister for Children, Annette Brooke MP and DCSF Early Years adviser Professor Ted Melhuish discussing the EYFS and its discontents. Well worth a listen.

Dept for Children, Schools and Families EYFS announcement, 30th June 2008

OpenEYE considers the 30th June statement by Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes of the DCSF to be quite inadequate in face of:

•  the approximately 7,500 signatories to its Downing Street petition;
•  the serious concerns of her own early-years advisors expressed in a jointly signed letter to her;
•  the Parliamentary Early Day Motion (# 1031) now signed by over 80 MPs;
•  the grave concerns about some of the EYFS Learning Requirements shared by all eight professional witnesses who gave evidence to the recent special meeting of the Parliamentary Select Committee;
•  the devastating critique by the Independent Schools Council in their letter to her; and
•  the stream of cogent and detailed concerns expressed by international and UK professionals, parents, educational bodies and coalitions such as ourselves, on radio, TV and in all major newspapers.  

Just two out of 117 profile scale points were mentioned in the Department’s announcement, and these are only to be reviewed, and then only in 2010, rather than immediately suspended as a sensible precautionary move. Given the widespread view across the early-years field that these requirements are developmentally inappropriate and potentially harmful, it is both arrogant and irresponsible for government to be gambling with our children’s well-being in this way, when simply to suspend these requirements pending the results of further research was an eminently feasible option.

With regard to exemptions, Minister Hughes would appear to have conceded that the primary legislation passed in 2006 cannot continue to be ignored. Until her announcement, she had steadfastly refused to allow whole settings to seek exemption from any of the Learning and Development Requirements, yet this was quite explicitly provided for in the original legislation. However, with the stipulation of a two-year time limit, her concession appears to be grudging, for it still goes against the intention of the original 2006 legislation – and as we suggest below, it may still be calculated to avoid it.

The proposed time-limited exemption is only for ‘particular elements’ (yet to be clarified), it is conditional on an unknown application process, assessed through the QCA, under unknown criteria by an Ofsted inspector, and only where ‘the majority’ of parents support it.         

The final approval will then presumably be in the hands of the same Minister who has shown herself to be intransigently committed to pursuing the incompatible strategy of legally imposing an Outcomes Duty on all LEAs and forcing them to pursue the EYFS targets laid down each year, while incongruously continuing to insist that there are no tests, no ‘curriculum’, and no goals, and that everything is ‘flexible’, ‘aspirational’ and based on play.

If any settings do succeed in negotiating this bureaucratic exemption procedure, such settings, pursuing a quite different pedagogical philosophy, will then be ‘monitored’ throughout the two years, presumably by the same Ofsted which will be simultaneously enforcing LEA pressure on all practitioners to increase their childrens’ profile scores by the time some of them are only 4 years old. The complete absence of clear criteria by which those same Ofsted inspectors would determine whether an exempted setting is a ‘successful’ setting, leaves those practitioners open to two years of stress and uncertainty – and this may well be enough of itself to ensure that settings don’t even attempt to start going down the exemption route. 

More generally, not that long ago, the very idea that nurseries would have to apply, cap in hand, to a government department for exemption from a government-imposed developmental framework for pre-compulsory school-age children would have been seen as utterly unthinkable. 

OpenEYE continues to challenge Beverley Hughes and the DCSF to produce a single piece of convincing and methodologically sound research evidence or professional support for the statutory imposition of target-driven literacy and numeracy goals on the under 5’s. For its part, Open EYE can produce at least 32 recent research studies and statements from professionals and educational groups which indicate such a strategy to be ineffective, unjustifiable or, more importantly, that it has potential harmful side-effects for a child’s longer term confidence, feeling of self-worth and future academic achievement

Special Parliamentary Commitee meeting on EYFS

On May 21st, the Children, Schools and Families Parliamentary Committee (chaired by Barry Sheerman MP) held a special evidence-gathering meeting on the EYFS, arising in part from Open EYE’s meeting with Mr Sheerman in January. Coming hot on the heels of 70 MPs having signed EDM # 1031 raising Open EYE’s concerns, a welcome window of opportunity now exists for a comprehensive, dispassionate investigation into EYFS.

The Times newspaper of May 22nd reported that in a document ‘shelved’ by her Department, Ms Hughes’s advisors recently strongly advised the revision of EYFS’s more developmentally inappropriate literacy Learning Requirements. Every Committee meeting witness expressed shortcomings about the age-inappropriateness of some EYFS Learning Requirements. Other press reports of the event were released by the Press Association, by the Daily Telegraph, and by the Daily Mail (please scroll down to second article – Ministers press ahead with toddler curriculum – on the Daily Mail page).

Needless to say, Open EYE will let our website visitors know when there is more news about these exciting Parliamentary developments.

A video of the meeting is available at the UK Parliament website, although it appears that video accessibility is limited on this site.

Updates:
A helpful and comprehensive report on the concerns raised at the Select Committee meeting has been published in Nursery World magazine.

The magazine also reports on a new Open EYE initiative to devise an alternative, more child-centred and developmentally appropriate framework that could replace the EYFS; and in a published letter, an up-to-date perspective is given on the campaign’s hopes in the light of the Select Committee’s special meeting on EYFS.

Meanwhile, a report by Melanie Defries in the latest issue picks up on the human-rights issues raised by the EYFS.

 

The Childminder Connection, as EYFS Continues to Unravel

This week, data showing a disturbing and consistent trend of decline in the number of registered childminders have precipitated a spate of media stories speculating about the link between this decline and the impending EYFS – e.g. in Nursery World magazine, the Daily Mail, and in the Daily Telegraph. In addition, a feature on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on 16 May (listen again here)
has precipitated a cascade of postings on the Woman’s Hour messageboard.

These reports are entirely consistent with our own experience at Open EYE, with many childminders having contacted us over recent months, some in despair, about the unnecessary over-bureaucratisation of the EYFS, and their intention to give up their childminding careers altogether.