Mon, 22 Dec 2008

Loosening the restrictions of modern childhood

By Rosemary Usselman and Tom Raines

LONDON (NNA) – The restrictions of a modern childhood, the importance of learning through play outdoors and the role of the teacher as the determining factor in the quality of learning were some of the topics discussed at an education conference held in London last month.

The conference, “Movement, Play and Emotional Relationships as a Foundation for Learning”, was organised by the Alliance for Childhood in collaboration with the University of East London. The Alliance for Childhood was established in 1999 as a campaigning organisation for a right understanding and treatment of children.

Christopher Clouder, co-founder and international director of the Alliance for Childhood, opened the conference by introducing the four main speakers to an audience of people with a professional interest in childhood.

He stated that studies in the UK indicated that 80 percent of children between the ages of three and five were in some form of nursery care, but with a lack of quality provision many of these places failed to meet the real needs of the child, leading to problems in the longer term.

However, he noted that the quality of children’s lives is being increasingly highlighted in many countries, with more governments recognising the need to spend more money on early childhood provision. Clouder explained that one of the tasks of the Alliance was to draw attention to and report evidence on the adverse effects of bad policies.

He mentioned that a report on “Social and Emotional Education”, funded by the Spanish Marcelino Botín Foundation, had just been published containing statistics gathered over a ten-year period from schools in Spain and other European countries. The report concluded that well-rounded educational provision brigs direct benefits in the areas of emotional well-being, academic achievement and social behaviour. (See separate NNA report of 8 October 2008).

Developmental readiness for learning was the theme of the presentation by Sally Goddard Blythe, consultant in neuro-developmental education and director of the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology (INPP) in Chester, England. Evidence was shown of how unhampered physical activity in the early years of life contributes crucially to the neurological development necessary for mastering the skills of reading, writing and numeracy.

“Movement is nutrition for the brain,” she said, but many children nowadays were not being allowed the time to engage in physical activity. Research carried out in schools where compulsory education begins at four years of age revealed that almost half of the children displayed indications of an immature central nervous system.

Children were being forced to read and write before they had developed the supporting physical skills and later on risked experiencing specific learning difficulties, under-achievement and behavioural problems arising from frustration.

Blythe advocated the reintroduction of physical assessment for children of school entry age. Up until the early 1980s it was the practice in the UK to assess three aspects – attention, balance and coordination – to see whether a child was considered ready to begin school or not. When this assessment was carried out in a recent study it was found that up to half of school children at 5-6 years of age were not ready for formal learning and that in 35 percent of 8-9 year-olds there were still traces of “retained infant reflexes” that should have been grown out of – an indication that these children had not developed sufficiently to take on some of the demands school makes on them.

It was when these demands did not match the developmental readiness of the child that inappropriate behaviour and learning disorders manifested. The physical activities the child had experienced since birth were linked to its neurological development and if sufficient opportunity was not afforded the child to crawl, run about and play, then the ability to sit still and focus attention on one task were impaired, hence disorders such as attention deficit disorder (ADD) were increasingly being encountered in schools, but the cause was not properly recognised

Blythe would also like to see more consideration given to the gender differences between boys and girls, because they naturally develop different skills at different stages and presently these are not given the importance they merit. Nor are dates of birth and premature births in relation to the start of the school year considered, with the result that children in the same class can be months in front of, or behind, each other in terms of natural development, yet all are expected to master the same tasks at the same time – and those that cannot are labelled as having “failed” to reach this or that target.

Blythe wishes to increase awareness amongst parents, teachers, trainee teachers and the general public of the importance of physical activity in supporting neurological development and would like to see implemented in schools daily physical intervention programmes (such as the INPP Schools” Programme), trials of which have been carried out in a number of schools and results of which showed a marked improvement in children’s interactive skills, concentration and self esteem. Children with ADD – which is so often treated through medication – also showed improvement. Blythe showed a number of striking illustrations to support the merit of such an intervention programme.

Education consultant for outdoor provision in the early years Jan White, scheduled to give a presentation on children, movement and outdoor play, was unable to attend the conference, however Joan Almon, director of the US Alliance for Childhood, author of many pieces on play, international consultant on early childhood education and former co-chair of the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America, stepped into the breach and began by giving a definition of “play” as “a set of behaviours that are freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated,” observing that if children direct what they want to do and organise themselves it is play; however if adults do the organising, then it tends to be sport. She spoke about the necessity to provide the proper environment where children can play.

Almon drew attention to a disturbing phenomenon in the USA of “script teaching”, where school lessons are conducted by reading entirely from a script, which left no element of freedom for either the teacher or the pupils. She likened play to a bubbling spring full of energising life forces, but feared that for many of today’s children the spring was dammed and no longer free flowing.

Nature play had just about disappeared from schools and parents’ fear of “stranger danger” had contributed to the culture of keeping children indoors, depriving many of them of the opportunity to take healthy risks when playing outdoors, engaging with the natural world, which has been found to be an essential experience that helps children gain confidence.

Whilst watching children play, Almon had observed that their games were a reflection of all manner of real life situations and helped the children develop social skills, such as cooperation, which employers today are finding lacking in young people who come to work with them. Children of different ages playing together also promoted interaction and cooperation skills.

Studies showed that kindergartens generally were almost entirely instructional, with many devoting almost all of their time to preparing children for testing of reading, writing and arithmetic and allowing perhaps only half-an-hour a day for free play. Testing of children under the age of eight years was unreliable; judging a child on the results of one test taken on one day could not possibly give a true picture of the child’s abilities, yet decisions were made on such results which can have important and detrimental consequences for the child’s future.

Jenny Drake, a former primary school teacher with 20 years” experience, but more recently a maths consultant and senior lecturer in education at Winchester University, spoke about love in the classroom. She shared some of her own experience that meeting the children “where they were”, not where she wanted them to be, brought rewards for both the pupil and the teacher.

Love, she reminded us, means “approving of children” and approving of their differences; for how can we treat them all the same when they are all individuals? In addressing the issue of what a child needs, quality time, words of affirmation and physical touch were high on the list, though the latter has become a sensitive issue in today’s schools and Drake questioned whether it was right for all children to be punished by withdrawing human touch in the classroom because of a few inappropriate incidents.

The final speaker was Penny Wilson, a play worker in London’s adventure playgrounds. Working with local authorities and communities of the housing estates of East London, where many playground areas originally designed for children’s use now lie deserted and empty of equipment, she is responsible for persuading authorities to provide areas in convenient locations that can be made safe and appropriate for children and young adults to use.

She revealed that many of the inhabitants of the housing estates have never known what it is like to play freely out of doors. Her task was to change this situation by creating proper play environments in which parents would be more confident to allow their children to play, and educating them on the importance of outdoor play and activity for children’s health and emotional well being. Lack of understanding for this creates “play deprivation”, a factor that has been shown to contribute to criminality.

Play workers do not organise play, but provide suitable environments in which children can play safely without direction or domination by adults. There is now a tendency to produce lots of equipment for playing with, but not enough emphasis on quality time to engage children in creative play – that which they will naturally generate themselves. Playgrounds can restrict play by fixing activity around equipment rather than allowing “digging in the dirt”, playing with sticks, water and so on. Research has shown that all around the world children play in much the same way when left more to their own devices.

In her role of play worker, Wilson had been invited to the USA and travelled to New York, Chicago and Washington sharing her expertise with communities looking to reintroduce the concept of safer outdoor play areas for young people. Here in the UK the government has promised £3m for the provision over three years of 30 new play sites.

Christopher Clouder concluded the meeting by pointing out that despite the many challenges “we can make a difference”.

END/nna/cva

For more information contact The Alliance for Childhood, Kidbrooke Park, Forest Row, East Sussex RH18 5JA England or visit their website: www.allianceforchildhood.org.uk

Item: 081222-01EN Date: 22 December 2008

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