Having worked with children with speech, language and communication difficulties for twenty five years I am constantly surprised when I meet typically developing pre-school children with whom I can hold complex conversations. Children who are abl…
What is well-being and what does it look like? The Foundation Stage Forum has been working with national trauma, wellness and resilience expert Jane Evans to work out what exactly the Early Years Foundation Stage asks us to do.
by Gill Jones, Ofsted Early Education Deputy Director. on
An important part of having the confidence to learn is that young children must be and feel safe. Of course, a young child’s sense of risk is very different from an adult’s. So that means early years leaders have to do all they can to support child…
‘Listening’ in the early years is used to mean valuing and responding to children’s thoughts, ideas and feelings, offering genuine choice and involving children in decisions that affect their daily lives
Narrowing or closing the gap has become a hot topic in education. This is perhaps not surprising as it would appear that how well children do both at school and later in their careers is a postcode lottery which reflects parents’ income. Politician…
Time to throw open the gingham curtains and use what we find behind them to create a space that gives our children the freedom to be independent, motivated learners who can choose from a range of engaging and challenging resources that will promote…
For those of us interested in such matters, the received wisdom is that the number of men actually working with young children as part of the Early Years workforce in England represents around 2% of the total. This figure, despite much hand-wringin…
It comes up on the FSF sufficiently often that I have begun to wonder if we, in early years, are perhaps looking for ‘an answer’ – the Next Step ‘Holy Grail’ as it were. Sensibly, we all know that there cannot be an answer, children are all different…
Kate Cairns invites us to consider the interaction between resilience and trauma, the key aspects of resilience, and the links between resilience and experience in the early years of life. Humans are not born able to regulate stress. At birth the b…
This is the first article in what will be a series examining questions such as ‘What are next steps?’, ‘Who decides which next steps are appropriate?’, ‘What is the best way to record next steps?’ and ‘How often should next steps be reviewed?’
