More than 250 academics and writers have written a letter to The Daily Telegraph condemning efforts by Ofsted, the UK’s education inspector, to have more children enrolled in ‘early education’.
The head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, has said children should be enrolled in pre-school from the age of two.
However, the writers and academics, who include Philip Pullman of ‘Golden Compass’ fame and child-care expert Penelope Leach, have said, “The determination to dragoon England’s young children into unconscionably early quasi-formal learning is catastrophic for their well-being, and is setting up many for failure at a very young age.”
The letter reads in full:
SIR – ‘The erosion of childhood’ is becoming a theme of concern to citizens across the political spectrum.
The latest salvo in this “paradigm war” for the heart of childhood has been discharged by the head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw. In a letter to all early-years inspectors, he instructs them to judge nurseries mainly in terms of preparation for school. They must “teach children the early stages of mathematics and reading”.
This utilitarian shift from experience to content betrays an abject (and even wilful) misunderstanding of the nature of early childhood experience. The determination to dragoon England’s young children into unconscionably early quasi-formal learning is catastrophic for their well-being, and is setting up many for failure at a very young age.
England’s early years education and care is safe in the hands neither of Sir Michael Wilshaw nor of the current incumbents at the Department for Education. We urge Sir Michael and the DfE to stop digging in their current “schoolifying” hole, and step back from this misguided drive to over-formalise England’s early-years sphere.
The alternative might be that these policy-makers end up precipitating the first wave of professional “principled non-compliance” with government policy that our education system has known in living memory. Any government that underestimates the strength of feeling on this issue, and the resolve to resist it, does so at its peril.
