Schooling or play - what's best in the early years? Or are the Greens really "mad"?

Tristram Hunt, Labour’s shadow education secretary, certainly caused a stir recently by slamming the Green Party manifesto pledges on education, calling them a “flashback to the 70s”. One policy he picked out in particular was the policy to delay school starting age to the age of six.

This has made me – and a whole world of folks passionate about the early years – very, very angry.

What incensed me wasn’t (so much) that he was clearly seeking to point-score politically, using emotive language to suggest this policy would disadvantage the most vulnerable.

What really annoyed me was simply the way he elided raising the schooling start date with lack of early years provision. The way a senior frontbench politician just ignored the evidence and has sought to persuade the electorate – most of whom understandably don’t read the latest thinking on education and childhood – that raising school start dates is somehow retrograde. How the shadow education secretary just dismissed the profound and far-reaching work of all the myriad nurseries, children’s centres, childminders, play projects and yes, parents.

The Cambridge Primary Review, reporting back in 2010, was the culmination of ten years of evidence gathering, both through extensive analysis of educational research and engagement with professionals across primary schools and beyond. It was the biggest and most thorough review of the primary curriculum since the 1967 Plowden Report.

Three of their 75 recommendations to policymakers were: ?

• Extend the foundation stage to age six
• Replace Key Stages 1 and 2 by a single primary phase from six to 11
• Examine feasibility of raising school starting age to six

This was at the time, shockingly, totally rejected by Labour. As though it was an affront and again as though it was damning to the most disadvantaged. Charitably, and possibly naively, I thought they’d just been really badly briefed.

Conservative Home, the online magazine, in a piece on early years in 2013, at least had the decency to recognise that “it’s a debate whose participants tend to talk at cross-purposes, because those who favour an older starting age usually also favour high-quality pre-school education for the children they’d take out of the primary system.”

So really it comes down to what we mean by “education”.

I see education in the park, in the fields, in the cracks in the pavement. Play is not the opposite of education, it’s how children learn who they are, how they fit in this world and how the world fits around them. From birth and throughout life. For children in the earlier years – yes up to the age of seven – it is particularly important that they have plenty of time to direct their own play, in rich, safe (but not too safe!) environments, inside and especially outdoors. For children growing up in poverty, with disabilities, who are at risk for whatever reason, it is triply important.

As a reception teacher in Skipton I remember the five-year-olds coming into my class, going to the home corner and either trying to eat the toys or hit each other with them. Their core strength and ability to concentrate wasn’t sufficient yet to sit and listen to a fifteen-minute story. Their motor skills weren’t good enough to hold a pencil. They didn’t have “special needs”, they had just never been allowed outside and grew up in homes with few toys and where they weren’t allowed to play with what was lying around. The TV was their babysitter. Their parents loved them, they weren’t at risk as such, but boy did they need to start schooling later. My Victorian classroom could not have been more unsuitable.

I’d also point you at Sandfield Natural Play Centre, Liverpool, winner of the UK Nursery Award by the NDNA in 2011 and holder of an Outstanding Ofsted assessment. There children are outdoors, they don’t explicitly have literacy hours, but they do climb trees. And all the feeder primaries say the children coming into their Reception (and for some brave parents year 1) are brilliantly ready to start learning, to start schooling.

Reading through the (minimal!!) information available 100 days before the election on early years policy commitments from the three parties, it is the Green party commitments that are explicitly evidence-based. It may be that Conservative and Labour really think their commitments to two-year-olds in nurseries is indeed going to provide the rich and challenging environments young children, especially “the disadvantaged”, need.  

But it does no side any favours if they ignore the wealth of evidence that schooling simply isn’t what two- to six-year-olds need. It’s play.

Cath Prisk runs her own social enterprise Outdoor People, and is a trustee for The Wild Network. She was formerly director of Play England