What does a curriculum to develop essential skills for children look like in the early years foundation stage? A report by the Early Intervention Foundation (bit.ly/EIFreport) identifies four key competencies in early cognitive development that might form the basis of a powerful, evidence-informed curriculum. It focuses on the development of the cognitive capacities of young children rather than their physical development. But, nevertheless, these early competencies are predictive of later school achievement, and this report could help to focus our attention on what matters early on - before children start school and in their first school experiences.
The first competency is a knowledge of objects: understanding and learning about them, and having a broad range of opportunities through which to experience them. Next comes the development of a theory of mind - the child’s ability to understand and predict the thoughts of others, associated with their sensitivity to feedback.
A knowledge of numbers is third: crucially, this involves an approximate number system (to make sense of concepts such as “more” and “less” ) and a precise number system (to be able to understand the exact value or amount of things).
Fundamental transformation
The final competency is language development. As the report highlights, the other three provide a structure for language to develop on. It explains that learning language “fundamentally transforms a child’s thought processes by providing children with words to describe and think about many of the core concepts fundamental to each cognitive system”.
The report shares a range of activities and experiences associated with developing each competency in the first five years of a child’s life. It emphasises that no single approach has been proven to be most effective, but a common thread that runs through the evidence is talk and reading. Talk is crucial, but talk with - and not at - children makes the difference. It is the serve and return of conversation that helps a child to develop, and books can provide an easy starting point.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) guidance report, Preparing for Literacy, highlights the importance of developing shared reading practices in the classroom as a vehicle for developing talk (bit.ly/PrepLit).
It suggests using a framework, such as “Peer” (prompt, evaluate, expand, repeat) to support practitioners’ talk with children: prompt the child to say something about the book; evaluate their response; expand it by rephrasing and adding more; repeat the prompt to allow them to extend their own answer. This framework has been shown to be easy to adopt and effective at developing shared reading practices.
Supporting parents to share texts at home can be effective but, as the EEF’s guidance Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning highlights, simply providing them with books is unlikely to be effective (bit.ly/WorkParents). Helping parents to use frameworks such as Peer is more powerful.
Megan Dixon is director of literacy at the Aspire Educational Trust
This article originally appeared in the 8 February 2019 issue under the headline “Conversation can unlock early years cognition”
