Search

In the context of an ongoing policy crisis in relation to the qualifications of the early childhood workforce in England, this paper first rehearses the context and long overdue need for reform before presenting a framework for career structure and professional early childhood education qualifications in England. This framework is designed to address difficulties of recruitment, retention, and progression, and thereby raise the status of qualifications and the roles they enable early years practitioners to undertake. The paper ends by reiterating the importance of qualifications for those working in early childhood education, what they need to study and how what they study equips them for their various roles.

Intervention to raise the literacy achievement of disadvantaged groups in society has focused on preschool literacy development because it is predictive of later educational achievement and because research has shown that key strands of literacy emerge very early in childhood. Intervention programmes to promote emergent literacy are likely to be more effective if they involve families rather than children alone but meta-analyses reveal effect sizes for family-based programmes are variable and generally lower for disadvantaged families. This article suggests reasons for limited effectiveness and reports a study of a preschool intervention programme that used a particular conceptual framework, and approach, in working with families to extend their facilitative (rather than instructional) teaching of several strands of emergent literacy. Disadvantaged families with three-year-olds were invited to join a long-duration, low-intensity programme before school entry. Home visiting was a core component of the programme, alongside community based and centre-based activities, supplemented by other means of communication. A randomised controlled trial, involving 176 families, was used to investigate effects on children's literacy at the end of the programme and two years later. The intervention was found to be effective; effects persisted at follow up for children of mothers with low educational levels. Practice, policy and future research implications are discussed.

This paper reports an original approach to family literacy in two UK men's prisons. Brief consideration of family literacy research precedes consideration of specific issues of imprisonment and literacy, and recent initiatives for incarcerated fathers. The significance of the study lies in the demonstration that theories of early literacy development can successfully be shared with imprisoned fathers, and related practices incorporated into the literacy-oriented family visits. A rigorous interpretivist approach highlights the importance of prisoners learning about children's early literacy development. Although the opportunity to see their children provides a strong motivation to enrol on the programme, the paper argues that the men's manifest engagement with the ideas and activities in the workshops and the literacy-oriented family visits indicate successful programme adaptation: primary success lies in influencing fathers' concern to support their children whilst incarcerated, though impact on their resolve to desist from crime and re-establish their fathering roles is also notable. Implications for policy and practices to enhance incarcerated parents' involvement with their children's developing literacy are discussed.

This paper examines the schematic underpinnings in the drawings of a four-year-old girl, Thea. The paper reviews literature on graphic representations, signs and meaning-making before discussing schematic "form" in children's drawings, the theoretical background for the study. The paper discusses ethical issues and methodological approaches to the study where data include drawings made at home and school, Thea's recorded talk about drawings, and video recordings of her drawing sessions over a four-month period. These were coded manually and using "NVivo" to identify schemas. The paper discusses examples of Thea's exploration of enclosure and trajectory schematic "form," which are represented by rich "content" derived from her experiences and imagination. The paper concludes that Thea's drawings included many schematic signifiers with clear evidence of complex thinking around enclosures and of vertical and horizontal trajectories. The paper evidences the importance of listening to children's talk as they draw in order to understand more fully, the meanings they are making. Through signs, symbols and personal narratives, Thea used drawing as a meaningful semiotic space where her persistent schematic concerns were manifest.

This paper explores the changing roles of families in children's developing literacy in the UK in the last century. It discusses how, during this time, understandings of reading and writing have evolved into the more nuanced notion of "literacy." Further, in acknowledging changes in written communication practices, and shifting attitudes to reading and writing, the paper sketches out how families have always played some part in the literacy of younger generations; though reading was frequently integral to the lives of many families throughout the past century, we consider in particular the more recent enhancement of children's literacy through targeted family programmes. The paper considers policy implications for promoting young children's literacy through work with families.

Children's friendships are often neglected by teachers and researchers. This phenomenological study conducted with seven children aged five and six years explores young children's perceptions of their everyday friendship experiences. This multi-method study used role play interviews, drawings and persona doll scenarios to consider children's everyday experiences of friendship in school. The paper discusses the importance of socio-cultural aspects of children's friendship including: imaginary friends; losing friends; protecting time and space to develop friendships and children's routines and practices as they form and maintain friendships. Data and findings are discussed, leading to an original conceptual framework: a "Pedagogy of Friendship." This is designed to help children make meaning from their friendship experiences and also provide practitioners with the opportunity to nurture and scaffold children through their friendship experiences in schools. We suggest that there is a need to raise the profile of children's friendships in early childhood education and generate an educational perspective on friendship. Finally we conclude that listening to children's views of friendship indicates that the application of the framework of a "Pedagogy of Friendship" would be beneficial to children's all round learning and development.

In this paper, we identify ways in which the learning of very young children can be supported by practitioners developing a schematic pedagogy which focuses on structures of children's thinking. First, we provide a critical overview of relevant literature on schemas and schematic approaches to pedagogy. We then outline an original study undertaken to identify and support the learning of seven young children. Taking one child, whom we call Annie, we illustrate how her attention to the fine detail of elements of her home and group environments as she played offered strong clues to her pedagogues about her persistent interests (schemas). We show how careful observation by practitioners can be used to understand and support future learning encounters through a schematic pedagogy, and we consider implications of such an approach for practice in toddlers' early learning.

This paper argues that, because young children's response to the world is primarily sensory and aesthetic, early years curriculum should give due attention to the arts. There is an urgent need to better conceptualise ways of working with young children in relation to the arts. The paper is based on three key and permeating ideas: first, that human beings need the arts for holistic development; second, that there have been many attempts to integrate the arts with other areas of learning in the early years; and third, a more robust and clearly articulated conceptualisation of arts-based learning in the early years is needed. The paper critically reviews the international literature relating to these three key areas and concludes that: early childhood education must pay due regard to the innate human need for aesthetics in the design of curricula; on the whole, young children's experience in the arts has not been nurtured in ways which support their artistically-attuned development; and arts-based learning in the early years are not clearly conceptualised. The paper reports an example of arts-based learning involving professional artists working with children and aged six months to five years in preschool settings in England an outcome of which was a conceptual framework for arts-based learning. The paper identifies the need to provide children with greater "recognition" of their efforts in the arts and more adult "models" or users and makers of art. It further concludes that where arts-based approaches to learning are derived from research, and refined through embedded practice, children are able to learn in ways which are naturally suited to their human condition and therefore better equipped to take part in cultural and artistic elements of life as identified in the United National Convention on the rights of the child. (Contains 7 figures and 3 notes.)

In this article I discuss my growing worry over the use (and nonuse) of photographs of young children in social research. Taking a view of child protection as paramount, I situate the discussion in the context of ethical governance of research, young children as research participants, changing views of childhoods, and the juxtaposition of the Arts with/in Arts-Based Educational Research. The article sets out a worry over the increasing tendency to pixilate--and hence distort--images of young children for inclusion in research reports or presentations. This (largely unchallenged) practice is slipping into research conventions whilst at the same time research governance and research involving children profilerate. The article argues that the pixilation of photographs of children, may represent a further "crisis of representation" and is an example of the "Othering" of young children in research. (Contains 2 notes.)

This paper emerges from a view that the growing body of self-reflective qualitative research designs elsewhere in education is insufficiently represented in early childhood enquiry. Research of this sort has a rich capacity to inform critical understanding with experiential data that reveal the remarkable within the quotidian; more specifically, it has the potential to give some access to the "small secret stuff" of childhood that--though often observed in literary work--is frequently obscured in social science report. Our own experiences--not least of the world of children from which we are all graduates--are no less overshadowed in most of our critical accounts. In this paper the exploration of my own childhood provides a ground for an autoethnographic enquiry realised through nine short stories. The paper first describes the visual/sensory ethnographic process, which gave life to the accounts before presenting the stories themselves. It then argues the usefulness of reflexivity and autoethnography in early childhood education research, and a conclusion urges further reflective enquiry from the early childhood education community. (Contains 5 figures.)

This article reports a multi-method evaluation of a one-year small-scale preschool family literacy programme with bilingual Pakistani-origin families in the UK. The programme was implemented mostly through home visits and included provision of literacy resources, some postal communication and group meetings. The study was conducted in collaboration with the Sheffield REAL (Raising Early Achievement in Literacy) project. Take-up and participation were high (with significant involvement of older siblings) and no families dropped-out. Families' views, obtained through interviews at the beginning and end of the programme, were extremely positive in terms of increased understanding of how to support their children's literacy development, impact on their confidence and literacy achievements, and how they valued the programme. Outcomes for children showed significant gains over a control group. The family literacy programme was found to be both feasible and effective. (Contains 6 tables and 2 figures.)

Relatively few studies of family literacy programmes have investigated parents' experiences and whilst a number of such programmes have been specifically aimed at fathers, little is known about the involvement of fathers in programmes which target both mothers and fathers. This article reports fathers' involvement in a family literacy programme and their home literacy practices with their young children. The article provides a definition of family literacy and describes the context of the study, which was carried out in socio-economically disadvantaged communities in a northern English city. Fathers' participation in their children's literacy was investigated through interviews at the beginning and end of the programme (n = 85) and home visit records made by teachers throughout the programme. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of these data indicate that, while fathers' participation in the family literacy programme was not easily "visible", almost all fathers were involved to some extent in home literacy events with their children. During the programme, teachers shared information about literacy activities and the importance of children having opportunities to share literacy activities with their parents. Data indicate that fathers who were not mentioned by mothers as having been involved in their children's literacy were significantly more likely to be on a low income than those who were reported as being engaged with their children in home literacy activities. Fathers in the study were involved in providing literacy "opportunities", showing "recognition" of their children's achievements, "interacting" with their children around literacy and being a "model" of a literacy user. Although involved in all four of these key roles, fathers tended to be less involved in providing literacy opportunities than mothers. While fathers and sons engaged in what might be described as traditionally "masculine" literacy activities, fathers were more often reported to be involved with their children in less obviously gendered home literacy activities. The article concludes with discussion of implications for involving fathers in future family literacy programmes. (Contains 5 figures.)

Relatively few studies of family literacy programmes have investigated parents' views, despite their importance for the future development of this kind of programme in early childhood education. This article reports on a family literacy programme from the perspectives of the parents involved in it. The study was carried out in socio-economically disadvantaged communities in a northern English city. Parent experiences were investigated through interviews at the beginning and end of the programme (N = 85) and home visit records. Interviews with a control group (N = 73) of parents who had never participated in a family literacy programme were also conducted at the end of programme. Take-up and participation rates were extremely high for child-focused components of the programme, but the adult (parent-focused) education component had lower take-up. Parents expressed extremely positive views about the child-focused component of the programme and all felt it had benefited children. There was evidence, according to parent report, of programme impact on family literacy practices. Implications for family literacy programmes are discussed. (Contains 8 figures and 2 tables.)

This paper reports a study to investigate the views of early childhood educators working in a range of early childhood settings in four European countries, Denmark, Greece, Italy and the UK. Recent research into European perspectives on early education, special educational needs and inclusion is reviewed highlighting: a multinational call for action on teaching children with learning difficulties; issues related to the inclusion (and exclusion) of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties; the prevalence of inclusive policies in parallel with some exclusive practices and attitudes, and issues of professional development to support educators' work with children with learning difficulties. Secondly, the rationale, aims and research design of the Comparative Approaches to Preschool Education: Special Educational Needs (CAPE: SEN) study are outlined. This survey of 113 European early childhood educators working, in the main, in mainstream/generic settings used three methods of data gathering: questionnaires, email conversations and face-to-face interviews. The paper draws on extracts from the data to discuss four themes: educators' personal/professional experiences; professional development; inclusion and exclusion; and the roles of parents. In conclusion, four structures to which future cross-cultural studies need to be related are identified.

This article first offers an overview of policy contexts in the four countries of the UK. Second, it reviews recent research into perspectives on special educational needs and inclusion in the preschool years. Third, the rationale and research design of a study to investigate preschool educators' perspectives on these issues are outlined. Five key themes are discussed: their personal experiences; their professional development; their views of childhood; their thoughts on inclusion and exclusion, and their beliefs and practices around the roles of parents. The article concludes with discussion of the importance of greater cross-system understanding of curriculum, pedagogy and educational ethos and identifies the need for further research. (Contains 5 tables.)

Draws on the experiences of the Sheffield Early Literacy Development project to explore ways in which teachers can be equipped to work with parents to promote early literacy development. Raises issues related to the training of teachers who work with parents. Advocates the use of a variety of training options and maintains that training is essential. (Author/LB)

Raising Early Achievement in Literacy is a British family literacy project in which educators recognize that adult learning is different; parents are experts on their own children and have views on literacy; and bilingual parents may have different needs. Listening to families is a key principle of the project. (SK)