School Readiness Report - June 2023
We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who participated in our school readiness survey, we could not have written and published our first ever official report from Growing Together Developing Early Years…
We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who participated in our school readiness survey, we could not have written and published our first ever official report from Growing Together Developing Early Years. As a company we feel that it is important that we give back to the early year’s community, but also that we ground what we do in research, developmental theory and lessons from high-quality practice.
Our school readiness report had 3 aims:
· What are early years practitioner’s perspectives of what school readiness is?
· How many children in early years settings are perceived to be school ready?
· What challenges do children face in the area of school readiness?
Over the coming days and weeks, we will be sharing snippets of our findings from the school readiness report via blog posts and our social media channels. Also, raising interesting comments and thoughts about where to go next with the recommendations and what does the early years sector need. You can access and download the full report for free.
Abstract
This is a piece of explorative research of early years practitioner’s perspectives on school readiness with England. The research found that nearly half of all practitioners felt that 50-74% of their cohort starting school in 2023 are ready to start school. Practitioners discuss that children’s school readiness is impacted by a factor of developmental issues such as delayed speech and language, increase in screen time and the covid-19 pandemic. There are increasing concerns that children’s communication and language development and personal, social, and emotional skills are below the expected level to be school ready; and this has had a detrimental effect on the children who are starting reception class in September 2023.
5 Top Tips for Parents: To help their child be ready to start school.
As a parent or carer, we can often feel a lot of pressure around getting our children ‘school ready’. We might have well intentioned parents, grandparents’ friends, who start conversations with “When so-so started school they were writing their name!”…
As a parent or carer, we can often feel a lot of pressure around getting our children ‘school ready’. We might have well intentioned parents, grandparents’ friends, who start conversations with “When so-so started school they were writing their name!”. As we live in a society that loves to compare and shows everyone’s best lives not their struggles this can often leave people feeling unsure, or like we are not doing good enough.
In our previous blog what is school readiness (read here), we discussed how school readiness is much more then perhaps the societal perceptions that have been held for many years. But actually, it is making sure that children have the underpinning communication and language, personal social and emotional and physical development in order to be ready to start school. So, for example, they can listen and follow instructions, they can express their wants and needs to others, they have good large and small physical movements, and they can play alongside others.
1. Share books – Books are a great way of supporting children’s communication and language development. Also, it can help to create a love for literacy from a young age, is great for supporting personal, social, and emotional development as you bond with your child as you read. Also, books can help to support your child’s listening and attention skills.
2. Sing nursery rhymes – There is lots of research out their showing how fantastic nursery rhymes are for supporting children’s communication and language development. As well as their early literacy development. Meme Fox is often famously quoted for saying that children who know 8 nursery rhymes by the age of 4 years old are some of the best readers at the age of 8 years old.
3. Visit the park – Visit the local park and climb tree, roll down a hill, play on the swings, climb on the climbing frame and apparatus. Or take your bikes and scooters and go for a ride. Children need to have developed their proprioception, vestibular senses, and gross motor skills before they are ready to sit and show control over a pencil.
4. Support your children to dress themselves – Practise doing fastenings for example, zips and buttons on clothes so that children can do this independently themselves. Encourage children to dress themselves in the morning. Teach them how to know which way round they put their shoes on, for example, using a sticker cut in half that they have to match up to get their shoes the right way round.
5. Practise your route to school – Familiarity can help with the transition to school. So whether you will be walking, biking or taking the car practising the route to school and talking about what you see on the way can support children to become familiar and confident with the experience.
School Readiness Series: How Can We Support Children to be School Ready?
So, the big question is what does this look like in reality? What is the support we give our children, so that we help them to be ready with the very best start through our early year’s provisions. We are going to break down the understanding of school readiness into areas, allowing us to discuss practical examples for each one.
Our last blog that you can find here, discussed what is school readiness regarding supporting our children to be ready to start reception class. This blog is going to consider how early years practitioners, from childminders to nurseries or preschools can support children within their care to become school ready. When we are thinking about school readiness, we want children to be confident, resilient, independent and to be managing their own self-care when they start school and children who have a good level of development in the prime areas of development.
So, the big question is what does this look like in reality? What is the support we give our children, so that we help them to be ready with the very best start through our early year’s provisions. We are going to break down the understanding of school readiness into areas, allowing us to discuss practical examples for each one.
Supporting Self-Care
When we think about self-care in the early years we are thinking about those physical skills or actions children develop to look after their bodies. For example, being able to dress themselves, feed themselves or brush their teeth. These everyday life activities that crucial to a healthy body and mind. Self-care is also about learning to look after our emotional well-being to be kind to ourselves and learn to regulate or behaviour and respond to our emotions and what we might do (we discuss supporting emotional well-being later in the blog when we look at supporting PSED).
Ideas to support children with their physical skills to support their self-care:
1. Busy fastening boards – that include a range of different cloth fastenings for children to practise.
2. Practise using knife and forks in playdough.
3. Self-service snack and encouraging children to pour their own drinks.
4. Sticker shoe trick to help children put their own shoes on. Cut a sticker in half and stick half inside each shoe, the children have to match it up to put their shoes in the right feet.
5. Cooking activities with children that encourage them to use tools and knifes.
6. Finger gym and fine motor activities, developing the muscles and coordination in those hands.
7. Water play to develop children’s all important hand eye coordination.
8. School uniform dress up – (great for also supporting children’s emotional well-being, as well as giving them the opportunity to practise)
Ideas for supporting children to learn about their hygiene needs:
1. Nose wiping stations.
2. Visuals in bathrooms showing children when they might need to wash their hands and how to wash hands.
3. A curriculum that promotes oral health (see our previous blog here).
4. Role-play, e.g. washing, dressing and looking after the baby dolls.
Supporting Physical Development
When children start school we often have a societal view of wanting them to be able to hold a pencil correctly to form letters. But what we want for our children goes far beyond this, because actually there is so many skills that children need before they are ready to write. For example, we need to have developed our gross motor skills, our shoulder pivots, elbow pivots and wrists pivots. Before we then go on to strengthen the muscles in our hands and fine motor skills. We need to have developed our core-body strength and stability so that we can sit and write. We need to have hand-eye coordination, and developed our vestibular and proprioception sense.
Therefore before we challenge children to form letters and hold a pencil we need to be working on those skills through encourage active play, climbing running, dancing, parachute games. We need to give children the opportunity to explore large scale mark-making such as mop painting, painting with rollers using those gross motor skills. As well as mark-making at different angles in order to develop elbow pivots. We need to roll down hills, squat and listen as we look at bugs and have endless opportunities to be physical within our enabling environments.
Building Children’s Confidence, Resilience and Independence
Starting school is a big transition for most children and they are likely to be feeling a variety of emotions, big and small, good and bad. All emotions are okay and what we want is for our children to be resilient and be able to bounce back from different and difficult situations and show autonomy over their learning. For example, it is okay if I have to wait for my turn on the red bike; because I can apply the skills I have learnt in preschool, such as I can ask someone when they finish to let me know. Or we could use a timer to help us take turns. Also, when children are independent in their learning we see higher levels of motivation and learning, as they take ownership over what they are doing.
So we want to work on building children’s confidence, so that they are willing to have a go, see what happens and develop their own curiosity. This can be fostered through a curriculum and pedagogical approach that is open-ended, child-initiated and that promotes curiosity and enquiry based learning. For example, Harry found a ladybird in the garden and was talking to his friends about it. He looked closely at the dots and wings. This led onto a discussion about where we should put the ladybird and the children use non-fiction texts alongside a member of staff to find out about where ladybirds live and to make a home for it. The children also went on to do more bug hunts and insect related activities.
Personal Social and Emotional Development
By the time children start school we want them to be able to begin to take turns with others. Remember this is a hard skill and sometimes, especially if it is something very important to us, we still may need a little bit of support with sharing. But we want to to be able to share those resources, take turns in games and also in conversations, understanding that is a two way flow of information. There are many games or activities out there that we can do to support children with turn-taking throughout our continuous provision and adult-led activities:
Orchard toys games - orchard toys have a variety of games designed for this age range that are great for promoting simple turn taking.
Taking it in turns to be helpers - for example, snack helpers.
Using timers with popular toys as a resource to help children take turns.
Games such as sound lotto.
Puzzles that children have to work collaboratively together to achieve.
We also want children to be able to express their emotions and share how they are feeling with others, and to be able to self-regulate their behaviour. For example, I know that I am feeling cross, I cannot control this feeling, but I can take a break from my friend or do something physical to help me manage this feeling. This is also, going back to self-care helping children to learn to respond to their emotional needs and to take care of themselves.
Communication and Language Development
When children start school we want them to have the basic communication and language skills to be able to communicate effectively with adults and peers. To be able to listen and follow simple 2 part instructions, to enjoy listening to books and rhymes and join in retelling stories and singing nursery rhymes. We want them to be able to listen and focus on a conversation, staying on topic and following it and to be confident to communicate their wants and interests to others.
There are many ways that we can support children’s communication and language skills, through sharing a range of books or singing nursery rhymes. To making sure that we have language rich environment and communication friendly spaces. For children we have concerns about we can use intervention tools such as WellComm to support their communication and language development. High quality interactions between staff and children are also crucial in supporting early communication and language development. As well as offering a variety of phase one phonics activities that is going to help children to begin to listen, tune in and talk about different sounds that they hear.
School Readiness Series: What is School Readiness?
With last week being the day that expectant parents across the UK find out what primary school their children had been accepted into the term ‘school readiness’ has come back into focus. ..
With last week being the day that expectant parents across the UK find out what primary school their children had been accepted into the term ‘school readiness’ has come back into focus. As schools, nurseries, childminders, preschools, and families get ready for those all-important transitions into reception in September 2023. And teachers in primary schools and families across the UK are helping children to prepare and become ready for their transition into Key Stage One.
School readiness has been a term that has been widely used in the past several years, particularly alongside the focus of concerns that more and more children across the UK are not ready to start school. For example, Watkins (2018) from Save the Children discussed how the UK government claims that 1 in 4 children are not meeting the expected level of development before starting school and how we are already letting them down. This has shockingly increased in the covid-19 pandemic where reception class teachers reported in a government survey that more then half their children were not ready to start reception and 88% of teachers and teaching assistants were having to spend more of their time with children who were not reaching their developmental milestones (Lawler 2022).
So, this leaves us with the question of what does school readiness actually look like? PHE (2015, p.4) defines “School readiness is a measure of how prepared a child is to succeed in school cognitively, socially and emotionally.” Although, it is worth noting that there is no national definition of school readiness and is somewhat a debate of what age group school readiness applies to; is these children starting school in reception or is it getting them ready to begin their journey into the national curriculum and key stage one? (Ofsted 2014). This is before the then criteria differ from setting to setting as to our own pedagogical beliefs, curriculum and what we view as being school ready.
For the sake of this blog series, we are considering what school readiness looks like for those children that are going into reception class in September. Below is an image of page 6 from the document Improving School Readiness Creating a Better Start for London by Public Health England (PHE) (2015). Highlighting their views of what school readiness at the age of 4 looks like and the skills, development, and experiences we are expecting our 4-year-olds to have.
This document is also a very useful document for highlighting the why (intent) behind focusing on school readiness in the UK and the benefits of investing in school readiness to support children’s development, learning and the impact on future outcomes.
Another, popular poster that is commonly used with early years settings is The Road to School poster by Nursery Resources. This poster shares similar skills and attributes that as an early year’s community we are looking for children to be able to do to be school ready. As well as the steps to starting school from PACEY.
Find a downloadable version of this here from PACEY.
To me as an early year’s consultant being school ready is having a good level of development in the prime areas, communication and language, physical development, and personal, social and emotional development. As well as having begun to develop a lifelong love for learning, based in being curious and inquisitive. It is being able to talk about your own emotions and coregulating alongside experienced teachers. It is being independent for example, dressing yourself, feeding yourself, being able to make choices, having confidence to talk to others that are in your class. It is having the basic communication and language needs to listen and pay attention, to communicate their needs and to share ideas and make friends. It is also about have good gross motor and fine motor skills ready for learning. Everything else will come at the time that is right for the children. Because these3 areas of learning are going to underpin everything, so being school ready is making sure children are strong and confident in these areas of learning!
References:
Lawler (2022) Half of all children are not ready for school [accessed online 28.04.2023]
PACEY (year unknow) Steps to Starting School, [accessed online 28.04.2023]
https://www.pacey.org.uk/Pacey/media/Website-files/PACEY%20general/Steps-to-starting-school.pdf
Public Health England (2015) Improving School Readiness Creating a Better Start for London [accessed online 28.04.2023] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/459828/School_readiness_10_Sep_15.pdf
Watkins (2018) Mind the Gap Getting Our Children Ready for School [accessed online 28.04.2023]