This phrase has very quickly established itself in every day dialogue in education and in the media and for me it just slips too glibly off the tongue, considering the huge hidden agenda (deliberate or not) behind it. It reminds me most of ‘oven ready’ chickens which are processed to be easy for us to cook and eat, rather than having to draw, pluck and dress a bird as we would have had to do many years ago. The point here is that those chickens are prepared according to a pre-determined method, probably on an assembly line and they all end up looking more or less the same, even though when pecking in the dirt before their demise, they each had characteristics which made them recognisable as individuals. Those differences might have been too subtle for me to notice, but I’m pretty confident chickens could recognise them in each other.
What has this got to do with school readiness? Well, I think it has everything to do with it and I think it is the education system, not individual schools or teachers (many of whom do an amazing job against all the odds) which is causing the problem. Children are all born as perfect little beings with their own unique individual differences. They may have different hair, eye or skin colour; they may be chubby or skinny; some may have a disability, but essentially they are all unique little individuals who are already able to intuitively discover, learn about and adapt to the world they find themselves in. Rousseau and Piaget talked about this many years ago and now contemporary research into brain development is showing this to be absolutely the case. So why then, as soon as children reach the age of five (not many years of lifetime, even though children have learned an extraordinary amount in this short time) does it become necessary to forget about their amazing individual talents and fascinations and to begin to ‘pre-pack’ them for the school system they are about to join?
The term, ‘school readiness’, implies, for me, that children are essentially ‘imperfect’ and need to be standardised to fit the system. It seems to me that the child is not at the centre of this thinking – probably nowhere in it at all. It is as if we are preparing children to fit in to a system which isn’t actually designed to nurture and support them as individuals to reach their own chosen goals, but rather to get children ready to become passive receivers of facts, be good at sitting still, to know how to queue up quietly and above all, pass the required assessments in order to ensure that the school is meeting its targets – the school, not the children!
So what happens when you are fitted into something that isn’t the right size for you? If it’s too small, it will inhibit movement and growth. If it’s too big it will chafe and get in the way. For me, that’s what is happening to children who are in a system which isn’t developmentally attuned or developmentally appropriate. It seems that all the well-founded theory about children’s development has been conveniently forgotten and the mantra of ‘raising standards’ has become the order of the day. Of course, in order to raise standards, we are told that children need to be ‘school ready’. I would certainly agree that in order for all children to reach their full potential, they need a wide range of well thought through and well delivered, developmentally appropriate, play-based experiences. If every child had access to this, either in the home or in a pre-school setting, then children would certainly be very likely to flourish when they started more formal education. They would indeed to be ready to take on the challenges that formal schooling has to offer.
The question for me is – are schools ‘child ready’? I fear they are not. The National Curriculum seems to be bearing down onto Early Years, creating the pressure for reading, writing and mathematics to be formally taught at an increasingly younger age. This will not have the effect of raising standards – just the opposite in fact. Children need to develop a conceptual understanding of the world before we start to introduce formal systems. These formal systems will of course be absolutely essential for future success, but only if children learn them in a way that makes sense, enabling them to be used naturally for future learning. You only have to look at the literacy and numeracy rates in the UK (about 1 in 5 adults functionally illiterate and/or innumerate) to realise that our current system has flaws. There are many things which can be done to change this but focussing on ‘school readiness’ in our current system isn’t going to help. We shouldn’t try to ‘pre-pack’ individuals to fit into a flawed system – we should be looking closely at the system itself and asking if it is fit for purpose in the modern world. We need children to grow into flexible, free-thinking and innovative individuals in order to succeed in a fast changing world – they are already equipped with the possibility to do this – our education system should nurture these abilities, not close them down with narrow, production line thinking.
I believe, the more we constrain young children through an inappropriate system the more unnecessary pressure we put on them (whether intentional or not), leading to a generation of young people who are worried about their ability to succeed and who feel they are failing to come up to the mark. Feeling like this is not good and can only be damaging to the individual’s emotional health, both in the short and the long term. Surely we want children and young people to be confident in themselves, up for a challenge and able to fully develop their individual abilities, together with the emotional well-being this would bring. I know this is what I wish for children and young people and I believe so do many others, both within and outside the education system. When the policies that shape our education system take account of children’s natural developmental processes, the system itself will become ‘child ready’ and be capable of ensuring everyone, whatever their individual differences, reaches their full potential.
Just need to say.... 