21. Feb, 2022

Catch up or recovery?

The three key elements which are paramount this year for successful transitions and progress through the Early Years and Keystage One can be gleaned for the Ofsted Framework.

  • Subject leaders and teachers have identified pupils’ learning gaps and new starting points and have responded positively to findings in their curriculum planning.
  • Leaders have built or adopted the curriculum with appropriate coverage, content, structure, and sequencing and implemented it effectively.
  • Leaders are clear on how the school has adapted and prioritised the curriculum

In many schools initial assessments for children in the Foundation Stage and Years One and Two, reveal that many have significant gaps in their overall development – not just reading, writing and Maths, but in their physical, emotional, social, and executive functioning skills.
Unless these barriers are addressed cumulative dysfluency will become an issue as children will have limited or no prior knowledge or experience to draw on, the end game here is a lack of confidence, low self-esteem, a fixed mind set and the tendency to opt out if something becomes tricky.
Dysfluency makes it very difficult for knowledge to ‘stick’. Children at the lower end of the school are, in essence, novices and have little to draw upon and so are more likely to make mistakes because they lack a body of knowledge and vocabulary stored up in their long-term memory, allowing new learning to be assimilated more easily.
 
Young Children at school will need time and space to practice the components of learning, across a wide range of developmental areas, this is quality teaching. With practice and time these components become composite bodies of knowledge that can be transferred across a multitude of learning aspects.
It is vital that leaders and teachers clearly understand the research behind the revised framework, notably Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory, understanding leads to demystification and greater clarity of purpose. Briefly, CLT concerns the architecture and development of long-term memory – how the brain processes and stores information. All conscious processing occurs in the working memory, which has limited capacity, whereas long-term memory can store a limitless number of schemata –which are multiple elements of information combined into a single representation (schema or composite) with a specific function. 
There is an argument for Maslow's before Bloom's, and I would agree with this. Many young children have missed out on the fundamentals of development - all the unwitting learning that takes place in the Foundation Stage and Key Stage One - the sharing, the building up of relationships, the falling out with peers, managing feelings, taking turns and waiting, understanding that others have needs, talking to a wider group. All these are precursors to later learning and attainment.
Routines and expectations must underpin children’s personal, social, and emotional development so they feel safe, they are secure, stimulated, and happy in their learning. Teaching must start from where the children are in their development and be targeted to ensure gaps in learning are addressed, that misconceptions in understanding are discovered so the cumulative dysfluency does not become an issue and allow children  sufficient time to practice and become confident. WHAT IS THE RUSH?
Teachers and leaders are reporting that for many children learning is not yet ‘sticking’. More attention needs to be given to where the children are and what is it that they might need more of? These are the key questions, and assessment and observation must be utilised fully to plan for needs. Taking learning from where the children are and what they know and can do, rather than ploughing through a curriculum. It might take some children longer to embed certain concepts, but this is because they do not, yet, have the requisite knowledge or developmental skills required.
I would suggest that, on occasion, just slow down slightly and pay heed to working memory and the actual level of development of some of the children – there is a lot of ‘catch up’ and recovery to undergo and we need to ensure that new knowledge and skills are fully embedded and committed to long term memory so that children are ready for that next stage.