Every Child Matters and Teacher Education: A UCET Position Paper

U C E T
Universities Council for the Education of Teachers A Registered Charity (No 275082)
EVERY CHILD MATTERS AND TEACHER EDUCATION: A UCET POSITION PAPER
Gordon Kirk and Pat Broadhead
Foreword
It is a great pleasure to provide a foreword to Every Child Matters and Teacher Education: A UCET
Position Paper, the latest in a series of occasional publications which UCET has sustained over more
than two decades.
No one can now doubt that Every Child Matters, which appeared in 2003, was a seminal document.
While it represented, at one level, the Government’s response to Lord Laming’s enquiry into the
unspeakable events surrounding the death of a child at the hands of those close to her, it became
the watchword of a government policy that was committed to attacking disadvantage and creating a
more cohesive community through a revitalised educational service, that seeks to respond to all the
identified needs of children and young people. The introduction of a national system of Children’s
Centres and Extended Schools, as well as an extensive infrastructure to support professional
collaboration, is creating the context in which the needs of children and young people can be
assessed and addressed in the round rather than in piecemeal fashion by specialists working on their
own.
It was because UCET judged that Every Child Matters had profound implications for teaching and
therefore for the education of teachers that it commissioned a paper that might support the work of
member institutions as they prepared teachers for the new and challenging context. This Position
Paper undertakes an examination of the social and educational policy context of a major national
initiative; it analyses the impact of that initiative on the role of the teacher and the work of the
schools and other agencies; and it identifies six ways in which teacher education needs to be
adjusted to take full account of the changes which the Every Child Matters agenda entails. These
adjustments are not presented as prescriptions, for UCET has no power to prescribe. Rather, they are
best seen as criteria against which teacher education institutions and their partners might evaluate
the effectiveness of their work in relation to the changed context in which teachers now work.
The authors of the Position Paper, Professor Gordon Kirk and Professor Pat Broadhead, are to be
congratulated on the thoroughness of their work, and on behalf of UCET I warmly thank them for
their efforts. I know they would be the first to agree that the Paper is the product of extensive
debate within the UCET community and beyond. Between them, the authors interviewed a number
of those who have been involved in the development of the initiative at national level, as well as
those undertaking innovative work in institutions; they undertook a detailed study of the official
documentation and of the academic and professional literature; and they received and welcomed
written comments from many individuals and institutions. A draft of the Paper was widely circulated
in November of 2006 and since then there have been numerous discussions within UCET committees
and with other groups. In these various ways the Paper draws on an extensive evidential base.
I am therefore confident in claiming that the Position Paper is well-grounded and that it will be of
considerable value in carrying forward the debate within institutions and more widely, as well as in
shaping the education of teachers and other professionals. I warmly commend it to a wide
readership.
James Rogers
UCET Executive Director
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Introduction
1. As befits a representative body, UCET has a tradition of publicly affirming its stance on issues
through the generation and dissemination of position papers. Such papers perform several important
functions: they articulate policy; they assert the values which UCET espouses; they provide the basis
for discussion and negotiation with government and other agencies; they honour UCET’s obligation
to contribute to the public debate on education and teacher education; they draw on a massive
repository of expertise and experience to enhance quality and standards in teaching; and they inform
discussions within institutions about the development of their provision, offering teacher educators a
measured statement in the light of which they can evaluate their own work.
2. At its June 2006 meeting, the Executive Committee commissioned UCET’s Academic Secretary,
and the member of the Executive Committee who had been specially co-opted for her expertise and
standing in early years education, to develop a Position Paper, following consultation throughout the
UCET community and beyond, on ‘the implications, from the perspective of the higher educationbased
teacher education sector, of the ECM agenda’. The original terms of the commission indicated
that the focus of the paper should be on the early years. To avoid the danger that a paper with a
strong early years focus might reinforce the misconception that ECM relates to the early years only,
rather than presaging a transformation of educational provision at all levels, it was agreed that the
paper should dwell on the impact of ECM on teacher education in general, while devoting specific
attention to the major developments that are taking place in regard to the early years. It was
stipulated that the paper should be completed in time to be launched at the UCET conference in
mid-November, 2006. Following that launch, the draft paper was widely distributed inside and
outside the UCET community; it was discussed at meetings of UCET committees and in numerous
other national and institutional contexts; and it was the focus of a major consultation exercise. It
would be fair to record that the draft paper was warmly and even enthusiastically received. At the
same time the discussions and comments submitted indicated that certain adjustments and,
extensions and changes of emphasis were required. These have been incorporated in this final
version of the paper.
Structure of Paper
3. The paper is structured according to the following sequence:
• evidential base and fieldwork
• policy drivers of ECM
• basic principles of ECM
• integration of services
• teaching, inter-professionalism and ‘personalisation’
• the revision of teacher education
• ECM and early years provision
• staff development in higher education institutions
4. That structure moves from an analysis of the genesis of ECM and its fundamental purposes to a
consideration of the role of the teacher in the context of more integrated service provision for
children and young people. That discussion provides the basis for an elaboration of the modifications
required if teachers and related professionals are to be fully prepared for, and supported in meeting,
the challenges which ECM heralds for all who work with children and young people.
Evidential Base and Fieldwork
5. To ensure that the Position Paper was well grounded, formal interviews were held with 15
individuals or groups, eight of whom were associated with the ECM initiative at national level, being
senior members of the DfES, the TDA, the GTCE, the Children’s Workforce Development Council
(CWDC), the General Social Care Council, and the NCSL, while the other seven were based in
institutions and were closely involved in ECM-related work. Most of these interviews were conducted
face-to-face but some were conducted by telephone. The interviews followed an agreed framework
of questions, which were sent in advance to interviewees. A report of each interview was compiled
and contributed to the project database. These formal interviews were supplemented by countless
informal conversations and telephone calls with UCET and other colleagues on one aspect of ECM or
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another. The fieldwork also involved three site visits, which permitted a more extended consideration
of ECM-related provision. One of these institutions visited is involved in the TDA-funded Change
Management Project, which is examining how ECM is becoming embedded in institutions. In
addition, the interview questions were distributed throughout the UCET community with a request
for comments and case studies which portrayed how ECM is being approached at institutional level.
In all, 29 responses were received, covering programme and staff development materials, detailed
comments on the interview questions, research reports, reading lists and protocols for fostering
collaboration with schools and other settings on ECM. Finally, a detailed study was undertaken of the
extensive official documentation on ECM and its sub-themes, and a review was conducted of
relevant articles in academic and professional journals, as well as in the national press. In these
various and complementary ways an attempt was made to highlight the rationale for national policy,
to tease out the many strands of the initiative, to discover how ECM was being interpreted at
institutional level by the teacher education community, and, drawing on that welter of evidence, to
offer a credible portrayal of teacher education in the new and rapidly changing context.
Policy Drivers of ECM
6. In delineating the social and educational policy matrix from which ECM sprang it is clear that it
was a direct response to the early death in 2000 of Victoria Climbie, a victim of unspeakable cruelty
at the hands of those close to her. In the Foreword to Every Child Matters the Prime Minister
explicitly acknowledged that the Green Paper was the government’s response to Lord Laming’s
report on the case. That report had roundly criticised the fragmentation of services and lack of
accountability that had allowed a vulnerable child to be so shockingly abused. Perhaps the most
culpable feature of the case was that it was the most recent in a litany of child neglect that had
besmirched the record of children’s services over many years, extending back to the case of Maria
Colwell in Scotland of the mid 70’s. Each of these cases had appalled the public and each had
pointed to serious shortcomings in service provision. The high-profile response to the Laming Report
and the radical changes proposed in the Green Paper were indicative of the government’s
determination to ensure that at long last the necessary reform of children’s services would be
effected.
7. The fragmentation of services for children had widely acknowledged repercussions: information
was not shared, leading to a delay in providing support; there was duplication of assessments; with
the involvement of several services there was no single person with responsibility for ensuring
continuity of care; resources were not used to best effect when several agencies made a partial
contribution rather than a single agency investing an appropriate sum to provide a coordinated and
comprehensive package of support; there was scope for disagreement between individual services
about where responsibility for addressing a particular set of needs might lie; and those in need of
support could find it difficult to access services that were dispersed. In such circumstances, it is easy
to see how the same child might be identified as having special educational needs, as a truant, as a
young offender, as having a behaviour disorder, as a victim of parental neglect or abuse, and each of
these characterisations could bring the child into contact with a different helping agency, each of
which all too often operated a separate professional service, structurally incapable of seeing the child
in the round and therefore unable to address that child’s needs effectively.
8. However, Every Child Matters ranged much more widely than the circumstances analysed in the
Laming Report. Like the corresponding documents in Scotland (Getting It Right for Every Child:
Proposals for Action), Northern Ireland (Our Children and Young people – Our Pledge), and Wales
(The Learning Country), the Green Paper issued a call for urgent and comprehensive reform. All of
these documents chronicled the numerous initiatives taken since 1997, such as Sure Start Local
Programmes, the Early Excellence Centre programme and the Children’s Fund, to effect
improvements in children’s services. However, they also adduced grim evidence to the effect that
these services were still falling short. They catalogued, with worrying consistency across the different
jurisdictions, the incidence of truancy, of children living in poverty, of ill-health, of mental illness, of
offending and re-offending, of teenage pregnancy, of drug-abuse, of non-involvement in education
and training post-16, and of children who are the victims of crime. They pointed to the growing gap
in achievement between young people from different socio-economic backgrounds, to significant
under-privilege and disadvantage, and to social exclusion and social malaise on an unacceptable
scale. And they documented the cumulative effects of poverty, of personal breakdown, of living in
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stressed and malfunctioning families, and of neighbourhoods in which aspirations and opportunities
were crushed by the co-existence of multiple adversities.
9. The consensus of these official documents was that existing interventions were proving
inadequate. In the words of the Green Paper, all of us stood ‘to share the benefits of an economy
and society with less educational failure, higher skills, less crime, and better health’. Besides, failure
to make proper provision to combat exclusion increased the likelihood that subsequent forms of
social and personal breakdown would make even heavier demands on the public purse. Sound
investment in tackling the roots of exclusion was not only a way of creating a more just and cohesive
society, one in which life chances were less unequal, but also represented a wiser use of community
resources.
10. What, then, was required? Firstly, there was a need for the community to endorse the needs of
children and young people. Secondly, it was essential to structure services in a way that rendered
them more responsive to these needs. That meant that services should be organised more
coherently, with professionals and agencies working collaboratively to serve children rather than to
protect professional boundaries. Thirdly, the emphasis should lie in early intervention and prevention
rather than in belated responses to crises. By championing such an agenda ECM sought to respond
to the problems raised by the case of Victoria Climbie, but also extended the arena of reform to reenergise
a number of other national initiatives and to integrate them into a coherent strategy for
service improvement.
11. There were four other aspects of national educational policy with which ECM articulated. Firstly,
for some thirty years prior to the publication of the Green Paper there had been sustained pressure
from the early years sector for integrated services for children. That pressure led to the establishment
of Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships, which marked the beginnings of local
authority integrated service provision for children and their families. ECM provided an impetus to
such restructuring.
12. Secondly, there was the political imperative to raise standards of achievement in schools. That
imperative, manifested in the systematic testing of pupils’ achievements at different ages and the
compilation of league tables based on results in national examinations, rested on the assumption
that the raising of standards was the antidote to many of the conditions that imperilled the life
chances of young people. For their part, critics questioned whether the relentlessness of the testing
regime so exalted cognitive development that it devalued other equally important educational
objectives, and represented a highly restricted view of human flourishing. ECM of course retains the
commitment to nurture the achievements of learners but it duly recognises that learners have other
needs. The significant shift in the political discourse is from the promotion of learners’ achievement
to the cultivation of learners’ achievement and wellbeing, a shift that is encapsulated in the
neologism, edu-care, although it is fair to record that that term is regarded with some suspicion by
some members of the educational community, including some specialists in early years education.
Such specialists maintain that the nurturing of achievement and well-being have always been integral
to educational and pedagogical practice in the early years, and they claim that that broader
conception of education has progressively narrowed in subsequent phases of education in response
to changing political imperatives.
13. A third and related strand of policy concerns the extended school. The notion of the school as
the focal point for a range of services for children, families and communities was first implemented in
a major way in the UK in the New Community School initiative in Scotland in 1999. Drawing on the
tradition of ‘full-service’ schooling in the USA, these New Community Schools were championed by
the Secretary of State for Scotland as agencies for addressing children’s needs ‘in the round’,
through an ‘integrated approach in which expert advice and support is at hand, not at the end of a
referral chain to other agencies’. The early research on the 25 DfES pathfinder projects mounted in
2002 indicated that there was a lack of consensus on what constituted an extended school, or on
how student and community needs were to be identified and addressed, other than by reference to
a deficit model. The ECM initiative is interpretable as a way mainstreaming such schools, as
foregrounding them as primary vehicles for the realisation of wider social and community aspirations,
and of confirming their standing as integral features of a coherent national strategy for children and
young people.
14. The fourth of these policy precursors is workforce re-modelling. In 2003, that initiative sought to
address teacher workload by freeing teachers from non-teaching duties and enabling them to
concentrate on their core professional responsibility of promoting learning by significantly extending
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the range of support staff roles in schools. That change may have been perceived as a way of
releasing teachers from their wider professional responsibilities. ECM may be seen as a corrective to
that perception, by affirming that every teacher, regardless of specialism, has a responsibility to
contribute to the general wellbeing of learners as well as to their academic achievement. In addition,
ECM reinforced another outcome of re-modelling, by repudiating the notion of teachers as solitary
operators, by strongly endorsing the ethic of professional team-working with HLTAs, TAs, learning
mentors (many of whom have experience of other spheres of education such as youth work), and
others, and by portraying schools as appropriate contexts for inter-professional collaboration.
15. While, then, the death of Victoria Climbie may have been the spark that lit the ECM fuse, this
major initiative developed its significant momentum at least partly because it exploited the political
will and public appetite for radical change to re-energise several antecedent strands of social and
educational policy that were already in process of implementation, and wove them into a single,
comprehensive and coherent strategy.
Basic Principles of ECM
16. One of the striking features of ECM and similar policy initiatives elsewhere in the UK is that they
are unashamedly needs-centred: across the UK its fundamental purpose is to meet the needs of
children and young people. These needs have been publicly endorsed as ‘outcomes’ and are
advocated by many as an entitlement integral to all forms of service provision for children and young
people. They are expressed in these terms:
Northern Ireland: being healthy; enjoying, learning and achieving; living in safety and with stability;
experiencing economic and environmental wellbeing; contributing positively to community and
society; living in a society which respects their rights.
Scotland: achieving; being healthy; being included; being respected and responsible; being nurtured;
being active; being safe.
England: being healthy; staying safe; enjoying and achieving; making a positive contribution;
economic wellbeing.
Wales declared a commitment in to ‘tackle disadvantage’; ‘to promote equality of opportunity’; to
overcome ‘the barriers to learning’; and to reduce ‘inequality of achievement’. To that end, the aim
was to give ‘every child a flying start’ and to ‘offer a curriculum in harmony with each child’s
particular needs and interests’.
17. These are outcomes which all of those working with children and young people must be
committed to meeting and improving. They underpin the whole superstructure of services for
children and young people; they are intended to give point to every professional endeavour; and they
are to govern every engagement which the community arranges to support the wellbeing of children
and to nurture their educational progress.
18. As listed above, the outcomes are perhaps too general to act as targets for educational or social
action. In response to that difficulty, in England the five needs have been expressed as 25 ‘specific
aims’, from which there has been derived an ‘outcomes framework’ to measure the extent to which
children’s needs are being met. Thus ‘being healthy’ is expressed in more precise terms as
• physically healthy
• mentally and emotionally health
• sexually healthy
• healthy lifestyles
• choose not to take illegal drugs
19. It would be surprising, were the lists for the other parts of the UK to be expressed in more
specific terms, if any significant differences would emerge.
20. It is further maintained that these needs are inter-dependent. In the words of Every Child
Matters: Change for Children,
The outcomes are inter-dependent. They show the relationship between educational
achievement and wellbeing. Children and young people learn and thrive when they are
healthy, safeguarded from harm and engaged. The evidence shows clearly that educational
achievement is the most important way to improve outcomes for poor children and break
cycles of deprivation.
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21. The corresponding Northern Ireland document refers to the ‘interconnectedness of children’s
lives’ and to the ‘links between good health and good education outcomes’ and to ‘the links
between poverty and poor health outcomes’.
22. These needs statements are now formally embedded, in England through the Children Act of
2004, and now represent the corner-stone of services for children and young people. They have been
incorporated into the Standards for Classroom Teachers and form part of the framework of OFSTED
inspections of schools, children’s centres and local authority provision for children, as well as of
inspection regimes in other parts of the UK. The watchwords for the reformed services have become
responsiveness, prevention, early intervention, protection, support for families, all to engender and
build up through policy and practice that ‘resilience’ in children and young people, in their families,
and in their neighbourhoods that is ‘the key to wellbeing and overcoming the effects of
disadvantage’. (Edwards, 2005). It is now accepted that no single agency can achieve any of the
outcomes for children acting in isolation. Reformed provision must be based on strong universal
services with readily accessed and targeted specialist support. It is widely acknowledged that the
necessary quality of provision rests pre-eminently on two essential conditions: firstly, services need to
be reconfigured round the child and the family, in one place, to permit professionals to work in close
collaboration in multi-disciplinary teams; and, secondly, the service must be staffed by a wellmotivated
and professionally equipped workforce. How are these conditions to be met?
Integration of Services
23. Across the UK it is accepted that the traditional configuration of local education authority and
other provision for children and young people was no longer fit for purpose and needed to be
replaced by a unified structure under the leadership of a Director of Children’s Services. In England,
this change was heralded in the Children Act of 2004, which placed a duty on local authorities to
foster cooperation between agencies, including voluntary bodies, to improve children’s wellbeing,
and obliged other key agencies to safeguard and promote the wellbeing of children. The preferred
model for effecting change is the Children’s Trust, which is a partnership of a range of all the services
impinging on children, and which exercises strategic oversight of the development of children’s
services and mobilises resources and support to secure the improvement of outcomes for children.
24. It is an expectation that that integration of governance will be reflected in the integration of
front-line services. To that end, there is a commitment to have in place by 2010 a national network
of Children’s Centres and extended schools, or ‘community focussed schools’ as they are known in
Wales.
25. The commitment to extended schools was reinforced by the findings of the independent
evaluation of full-service extended schools (September 2006), which concluded that ‘extended
services can help individuals and families re-engage with learning’ and can exert ‘a significant impact
on their life chances’, and by the OFSTED conclusion that, where schools were providing access to
extended activities, children, young people and families benefited from enhanced self-confidence,
improved relationships, raised aspirations and better attitudes to learning’. The ‘core offer’ of
extended schools will be:
• high-quality wraparound care…available 8am-6pm all year round
• a varied menu of activities, such as homework clubs and study support, sport, music tuition, dance
and drama, arts and crafts, special interest clubs such as chess and first-aid courses
• parenting support including information sessions for parents at key transition points and family
learning sessions to allow children to learn with their parents
• swift and easy referral to a wide range of specialist support services such as speech therapy, child
and adolescent mental health services, family support services, intensive behaviour support and
sexual health services
• wider community access to ICT, sport and arts facilities, including adult learning
26. Schools based on such provision are thought to confer significant benefits: to enrich learning; to
extend the exposure of young people to influences that are educative; to engage parents and carers
more fully in the education of children; and to facilitate multi-agency working, co-locating those who
are in a position to offer different forms of support and fostering closer and more open
communication between them. That quality of service represents a significant improvement over the
kind of fragmentation of provision that had become all too familiar.
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27. These multi-purpose extended schools will be supplemented by the measures recently intimated
under the Youth Matters initiative: to engage young people in shaping local services; to require local
authorities to ensure that young people have access to a wide range of purposeful activities; to fund
young people directly to mount local initiatives and to take advantage of existing facilities that accord
with their needs and wishes; to encourage young people to undertake volunteering activities that are
formally recognised; to establish peer mentoring schemes in secondary schools; to enable young
people to enjoy a variety of forms of access to information, advice and guidance that meet national
quality standards; and to offer targeted support for those with additional needs. All of these
measures will fall under the aegis of local Children’s Trusts and therefore form part of the integrated
provision these trusts are expected to provide.
Infrastructure of Collaboration
28. These structural changes by themselves will not create an integrated service: they need to be
underpinned by mechanisms and procedures that facilitate communication, promote information
sharing, establish a common understanding of children’s needs, and serve to foster a culture of interprofessional
and multi-agency collaboration. To these ends, a battery of measures has been
introduced, the most significant of which are as follows:
The Lead Professional
Where a child is known to more than one specialist agency a designated professional, who may well
not be a teacher, will carry responsibility for ensuring that a coherent set of services will be provided
and for acting as a single point of contact.
Common Assessment Framework (CAF)
To reduce the unnecessary duplication of assessments and to help to embed a shared
professional approach across services, the CAF systematically records in a standard format and in
non-technical language, and based on discussions with those involved, the characteristics of the
child, parents and carers, and the neighbourhood environment, the identified strengths and needs
of the child, the forms of support provided, and a report on the effectiveness of that support.
Information Sharing Index
This electronic tool will hold basic information on every child, permitting authorised practitioners
with a concern about a child to determine whether an assessment has been made, or to indicate that
they have information on a child they wish to share with others who may have been working with
the child.
Common Core of Skills and Knowledge
This statement, which has been developed in consultation with a wide range of professional and
other bodies, identifies the core skills and knowledge that should feature in the professional
preparation of all those working with children and young people. The skills and knowledge relate to
Communication and engagement, Child and young person development, Safeguarding and
promoting the welfare of the child, Supporting transitions, and Sharing information. These have
been subsumed within the revised Standards for Classroom Teachers.
Integrated Qualifications Framework
The aim is to devise a structure of interlocking awards and transferable units of study that will create
career pathways and facilitate changes of professional direction for all those working with children
and young people.
Joint statement of inter-professional values
Developed by the GTCE, the GSCC and the Nursing and Midwifery Council, in response to Every
Child Matters, and still in draft form, this statement seeks to identify a set of shared values to which
all those engaged in inter-professional work might subscribe and which might underpin all the
engagements of practitioners with children and young people.
29. These various initiatives are intended to reinforce the ethic of inter-professional working that is
such a prominent requirement of ECM. While they are at different stages of development or
implementation, when fully in operation they will help to establish that professional community of
practice upon which the success of the ECM initiative ultimately depends. These will all be
inescapable realities of the new context of teaching.
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30. Tomorrow’s teachers will therefore inhabit and expect to flourish in a very different professional
world. They will find themselves in schools in which the proportion of teaching support staff has
markedly increased; they will be professionally accountable for their contribution to improving the
outcomes for children, in terms of their basic needs; they will require to display a deeper sensitivity
and responsiveness to the wellbeing of learners; they will work in schools - if indeed that term
remains in use – which are designed to address a wider range of professional concerns than the
schools of yesteryear, and which, far from being insulated from their communities, will become
gateways to a network of dispersed learning opportunities, and will draw on wider sources of
expertise to support learning; they will have a stronger involvement with parents and other
community agencies than in the past; they will be members of teams, in some cases in leadership
roles, in others as partners, in addressing shared professional problems; and they will be expected
to engage more frequently in discussions with others from different walks of professional life. The
effect of all of these changes will be to reinforce the teachers’ fundamental and distinctive
responsibility for exercising leadership in teaching and learning and maximising learning
opportunities.
Teaching, Inter-professionalism and Personalisation
31. There are, however, two areas in which there appears to be a degree of uncertainty. These relate
to the impact on teaching of two ECM themes which feature prominently in the official
documentation: inter-professionalism and personalisation.
32. The drive in the ECM agenda for inter-professional collaboration, for multi-agency working, for
the flexible deployment of teams reflecting a variety of expertise, has opened a debate on the extent
to which the teacher’s specialist contribution to the educational progress of learners will require to
change. While on the one hand it is maintained that much of the multi-agency work will be
undertaken by non-teaching members of the school staff, it is clear that the teacher will require to
engage with those other professionals whose work impinges directly on the classroom, notably the
HLTA, the TA and the learning mentor. However, they will also require to be aware of the roles and
functions of other members of the school or centre staff and be able to engage with them on
matters that may affect the learning of individual pupils. Besides, one of the common interpretations
of personalisation is likely to have significant implications for the teacher. On that view, there is
expected to be a loosening up of our educational arrangements, the discarding of uniform and
monolithic provision, the growth of flexibility, and the multiplication of opportunities for choice – of
type of school (Trust School, Academy, Specialist School or Extended Community School), of
educational setting (nursery or children’s centre, school, FE college or workplace), of learning
pathway (as in the 14-19 package of reforms), and of when education should occur in the lifespan
(as in the ethos of lifelong learning) – all in the interests of enabling learners to navigate their way
through the system to find opportunities for learning that are attuned to their personal needs and
aspirations. While it has been claimed that these variants of schooling, with their differing funding
regimes and modes of operation and governance, may well confer advantages on some pupils and
therefore create more inequalities, the increased diversity of provision is likely to require teachers to
exercise greater professional discretion, to be able to operate from a broader professional base, and
to engage with a wider diversity of learners, similar perhaps to what is currently expected of those
who teach in the Learning and Skills Sector.
33. There are other interpretations of personalisation. When first invoked by David Miliband in 2004,
the term was differentiated from the discredited notion of individualised learning and the
irresponsibility of leaving pupils to their own devices: it meant ‘shaping teaching around the way
different youngsters learn….taking care to nurture the unique talents of every pupil’. A DfES paper
added a gloss to the effect that, since ‘every child comes to the classroom with a different
knowledge base and skill set, as well as varying aptitudes and aspirations’, there was a need for the
adoption of ‘diverse teaching strategies’. Such a rendering of personalisation will be perfectly familiar
to teachers and would be a welcome retreat from the heavily interventionist and centralist direction
of education that has characterised the last two decades. It is an invitation to assume ownership of
the teaching and learning process, to be suspicious of one-size-fits-all prescriptions, and to reject a
model of the learning process in which a uniform curricular diet is rigidly dispensed to all. It
challenges teachers’ pedagogical resourcefulness, demanding of them the capacity to draw on an
extensive repertoire of strategies to promote learning.
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34. A third interpretation of personalisation, associated with Charles Leadbeater, the prominent
government advisor, presents a more serious challenge. The central assumption of ‘personalisation
through participation’ is that users should have a much stronger and direct role in designing,
planning and delivering services. In the educational context, such a change would empower learners
to shape what and where they learned, to determine, with help, their own targets and learning
plans, how they learned and how that learning might be assessed. The teacher’s role would be ‘to
help unlock the learners’ needs, preferences and aspirations’; they would become ‘advisors,
advocates, solutions assemblers, brokers’, their role being ‘ not to provide solutions directly but to
help clients find the best way to solve their problems themselves’.
35. One of the claims of the personalisation agenda, asserted explicitly and implicitly in all three
senses of that term, is that services for children and young people should be much more responsive
to their ‘voices’. The burden of this claim is that schools and other agencies need to be much better
prepared to engage learners in the discussion of the nature of the educational experience they are
undergoing; they should set in place mechanisms and procedures which encourage learners to
register their candid reactions to the services they are receiving and which permits them a significant
say in how these services might be better ordered to meet their needs and aspirations. A truly
personalised educational service will be one in which the power relationship between schools and
learners has been sufficiently adjusted to enable educational experiences to be co-determined, thus
increasing the likelihood that learners become much more active and willing participants in the
fostering of their capabilities and dispositions.
36. These various interpretations of inter-professionalism and personalisation, with their references to
the ‘blurring’ of professional boundaries, or the ‘fusion’ of specialisms, threaten received notions of
professional identity, subject allegiance, and the authority of the teacher. They create ambivalence
with regard to the nature of the specialist contribution teachers have to make to the ECM agenda.
These tensions may impact differentially on early years and primary teachers on the one hand and on
secondary and learning and skills sector teachers on the other.
37. There is a sense in which education in all phases is concerned with the development of
knowledge and understanding, for it would be contradictory to claim that a person had been
educated but had experienced no enlargement of understanding in one way or another. However,
the knowledge base of the curriculum has been interpreted in different ways at different phases of
educational provision. In early years education and perhaps throughout the primary school also,
learning has been fostered and the curriculum has been mediated by a single professional, relying
from time to time on the contribution of those with specialist curricular or knowledge expertise. If
the early years or primary teacher was regarded as a specialist that specialist expertise related to the
capacity to nurture the all-round development of pupils. The various traditions of human knowledge
might have been drawn on, discretely or in one or other form of integration, but they were invoked
to serve pupils’ development in the broadest sense: to enlarge their understanding; to provide a
context for the acquisition and extension of skills of many kinds; to enrich the life of the emotions; to
reinforce nascent aptitudes and to promote others; to explore what is valuable; to induce the
disposition to enquire, to create, to question, and to imagine; and to engender confidence and
enjoyment in the manifold activities of learning. Indeed, it was precisely because the early years and
primary teachers interpreted the education of young people in these broader terms that they
considered that the elevation of a limited number of areas of knowledge to a special place in the
curricular sun, and the introduction of a regime of achievement testing in these areas, to constitute
an unacceptable narrowing of the teacher’s traditional concern to address all the needs of children to
which a well grounded education should respond. Consequently, for early years and primary teachers
the ECM agenda marks, to a significant degree, a welcome return to an education that makes sense,
and the introduction of personalisation is nothing more or less than an affirmation of the principles
of learner-centred education, which their training and experience led them to endorse as cardinal to
their work in the classroom and to their conception of professional life. To be sure, ECM calls for
significant adjustments in the work of early years and primary teachers, most significantly with regard
to collaboration and information sharing. However, these adjustments are congruent with an
approach to professional work in which the fostering of human development in its widest sense is
paramount.
38. By contrast, reflecting a curriculum that is highly differentiated, secondary school teachers
undergo a process of professional socialisation which reinforces strong allegiance to the subject,
which for many secondary teachers is a badge of professional identity and the means by which their
9

specialist expertise is asserted. For secondary teachers in particular, therefore, ECM is considered to
pose difficult questions. Are teachers to be regarded primarily as learning coordinators, as generalists
with responsibility for cultivating such generic capabilities as learning how to learn, problem-solving
and critical thinking? In that event, what is to become of the teachers’ specialist subject expertise? If
indeed subject teaching expertise is to have reduced importance, will such a change of emphasis
weaken the ECM drive to combat poverty and disadvantage by raising levels of achievement? Finally,
how is that supposed retreat from subject specialism to be reconciled with a government policy
which appears to favour a strengthening of the role of subject teaching and of subject specialists, for
example through involving the subject associations in the revitalisation of the curriculum?
39. For the secondary teacher the reconciliation of these tensions rests on a reaffirmation and
reinterpretation of subject teaching. There are those who look upon subject teaching as the
transmission of slabs of content for no worthier purpose than examination success, and the subject
teacher, operating within a highly restricted pedagogical range, as having no loftier ambition than to
crowd pupils’ heads with facts. Of course, such characterisations represent an absurd caricature of
subject teaching. Properly conceived, however they are configured and inter-related, however they
differentiate and coalesce over time, subjects constitute the available ways we have of exploring and
interpreting the world of subjective experience, of analysing the social environment and of making
sense of the natural world. It is through subject study that learners acquire historical, scientific,
mathematical and other forms of understanding; and it is through subject study that learners develop
the capacity to engage in the distinctive modes of investigation and analysis through which human
experience is differentiated and extensions of human understanding are achieved. That rationale
does not by any means imply that knowledge can only be mediated through subject-specific
teaching; nor does it discount the value for particular purposes of combining knowledge that is
drawn from discrete disciplines. Clearly, for many, including early years and primary teachers, that
integrated approach is the preferred mode of knowledge engagement. Moreover, subjects are
communities of debate and argumentation, of exploration and criticism, of conjecture and
refutation; they are pursuits in which knowledge, in due recognition of its provisionality, is open to
continuous reconstruction. As such, subjects are educational resources of remarkable power, offering
unlimited scope for realising an enormous range of educational purposes, for enquiry and reflection,
for hypothesising and the interrogation of evidence, for adjudicating between the valuable and the
meretricious; for the use of the imagination and creativity; for the examination of human motive and
the improvability of the social condition; for coming to terms with the responsibilities of citizenship;
for promoting personal, social and environmental competence; and much else besides. Nor are
these purposes restricted to what is cognitive or cerebral: subjects nurture the sense of achievement,
the growth of self-confidence and self-esteem, enthusiasm and enjoyment, the self-understanding
that comes through challenge, the capacity to engage and interact with others, and the satisfactions
that derive from participation in sport, adventure, the arts and forms of service to the community. In
all of these ways subjects, whether approached discretely or in integrated mode, exert a humanising,
liberating and ultimately transforming impact on learners.
40. It would be profligate in the extreme to discard the expertise and commitment of those who
thrive in promoting learning of that quality. Fortunately, the ECM official documentation neither
explicitly nor implicitly requires any such radical and extravagant measure. On the contrary, under
ECM the educational progress of learners will depend on how resourcefully teachers will be able to
draw on their subject knowledge base, and how readily they will jettison the monocular professional
vision that is associated with the blinkered pursuit of the subject, in favour of an approach that fully
exploits all the opportunities for cognitive and affective development, and for the nurturing of skill,
insight and judgement that subject teaching at its best involves. However, that pedagogical subject
knowledge, and the capacity to ensure that it issues in accomplished professional performance,
needs to be generalised so that, within the context of subject teaching and beyond it, the teacher is
able to induce the disposition to learn, to relate the activities of the classroom to the social realities of
the pupils’ experience, to structure learning opportunities appropriately, to remove the obstacles that
can impede learning, and to energise learners to assume fuller responsibility for, and become more
effective managers of, their own learning. And in all of that work teachers will be operating from a
professional base in which subject teaching expertise and proficiency in the facilitation of human
learning will be mutually reinforcing features, rather than being so antithetical that possession of the
one rules out possession of the other.
41. On this view, there is no incompatibility between ECM and subject teaching; between teaching a
subject and enabling pupils to learn how to learn, or even being a learning coordinator or consultant;
10

etween the cultivation of learners’ achievements and fostering their wellbeing; and between
personalisation and the promotion of high standards. These supposed dichotomies are all
reconcilable in the kind of extended professionalism that is achieved through a teacher’s specialism
rather than by taking a detour round it or submerging it altogether.
42. In addition to professing the expertise of the specialist in human development through learning,
teachers in the new context need to encompass within their professional scope the capacities for
team-working and collaborative effort. A significant feature of such work will be information sharing.
ECM requires that all who engage with children and young people need to become aware of
whatever factors in children’s environment may impinge on their learning. Teachers therefore must
learn to participate in a culture of information sharing: they are in a position, on the basis of their
interactions with children, to contribute to a more rounded picture of a child’s needs and how these
might be met. In this sense the relationship between teacher and teaching assistant and HLTA is
bound to involve close and continuing professional interchange about individual learners. What is
more, teachers will be able to refer pupils with difficulties that cannot be addressed within the
classroom to the many forms of specialist support within the school or readily accessed by the school:
the mentor, the learning and behaviour specialist, the speech therapist, the family liaison worker, and
the counsellor, all of whom form a professional network of support for pupils’ progress and
wellbeing. The teacher operates within that extended professional network.
43. That obligation to operate within an extended professional network has certainly been a source
of uncertainty for some teachers. Some have responded to that uncertainty by exaggerating the
extent of the adjustment that is expected of teachers if they are to engage in inter-professional
collaboration: they go on to make the quite extravagant claim that the implication of ECM is that
teachers must become social workers. That serious mis-reading can lead to a resolute insistence on
professional boundaries in an effort to protect the professional integrity that is perceived to be under
threat. It has to be insisted, in reply, that ECM provides no ground whatever for such professional
defensiveness. Rather, ECM requires teachers to adhere to their distinctive role as specialists in
human learning, but to deploy that expertise, not in isolation, but openly and in collaboration with
others who have a contribution to make to the educational progress and wellbeing of children and
young people. That approach to professional work calls for teachers to extend their pursuit of
personal and individual efficacy, which is such a pronounced feature of early professional
socialisation, and to embrace what has been called ‘relational agency’, the capacity to contribute to
the shared solution of professional problems through collaborative working. On this view, effective
professional action includes the capacity to align one’s response to a learner’s difficulties with those
of other professionals. The ‘new’ professionalism incorporates this key dimension: it is not a matter
of insisting on a specialist and possibly unique expertise, but of practising that expertise in close
association with others in contexts in which a uni-professional approach is insufficient and the
sharing of professional perspectives therefore essential. Moreover, that kind of sharing, far from
undermining professionalism, is a confident affirmation of what professionalism in the new context
properly involves. No doubt, changes in initial professional preparation and programmes of CPD,
through the provision of shared learning opportunities and in other ways, will serve to weaken those
professional boundaries that inhibit effective action on behalf of children and young people.
However, the ultimate success of ECM will depend, more than anything, on the extent to which
teachers can be encouraged to make that conceptual shift from teaching as the individual mastery of
pedagogical skills and approaches to one in which that mastery is embedded in collaborative and
relational professional action.
ECM and Teacher Education
44. If that characterisation of teaching in the new context is valid it provides some pointers to the
kind of teacher education now required. One response, considered intermittently by Scotland’s GTC
over the past two decades, is to institute a new type of teaching qualification, one that is a blend of
subject study, sociology and psychology, health and counselling studies, and draws on community
education and social work approaches. The case for such a change is that, if established interventions
are proving insufficiently effective, there is perhaps a need to attempt a new approach, and to
introduce the teacher who would perhaps be a specialist in lifestyle education and who might
parallel the new Early Years Professional to be discussed below. However, there is no support in the
official documentation or in the UCET community for such a teacher. The consensus clearly points to
11

the need to prepare tomorrow’s teachers by making adjustments and refinements to existing
approaches which faithfully reflect the changing role of the teacher.
45. The revised standards for classroom teachers already impose certain requirements with regard to
the ECM agenda. Thus, institutions are expected to ensure that those entering the profession are
familiar with the legislative background within which they will work and the professional
responsibilities that flow from that legislation with regard to the protection and care of children. In
addition, they must be able to demonstrate that they can relate their work to achieving the key
outcomes for children that underpin ECM as well as the six areas of the Common Core of Skills and
Knowledge referred to above. Already there is widespread evidence that institutions are
incorporating these features into programmes, and one institution visited produced a grid to
demonstrate how each of the ECM aims was addressed in all the programme units of study. Beyond
that, there are six changes of emphasis that need to be effected in initial teacher education to take
full account of ECM.
46. Firstly, initial programmes of teacher education need to engage students in the analysis of the
policy context of ECM. It is to trivialise ECM to see it as amounting to nothing more than the more
careful orchestration of services for children and young people. ECM has to be interpreted as an
ambitious government initiative to improve the education and well-being of all children by
redoubling our efforts to remove children from the blight of poverty and disadvantage, to arrest and
then reduce the widening gap in achievement between children from different social backgrounds,
to render life chances less unequal, and to create a fairer and more cohesive society. Children’s
Centres, extended schools and integrated services all derive their meaning and purpose from that
central commitment. Becoming a teacher is to acquire a critical appreciation of what it means to
share that commitment. The key word in that sentence is ‘critical’: ECM is an ambitious initiative and
one that is being taken forward for compelling reasons, but teachers and representative bodies like
UCET must continue to monitor its development and impact on schools and other centres, and be
prepared to offer a measured critique of its implementation.
47. Secondly, there is a need to re-assess the place of knowledge in teacher education. However they
may evolve in response to advances in human understanding or technology, or to fluctuations of
intellectual fashion, these domains of knowledge will continue to constitute the principal vehicles
through which the educational objectives of schools and other settings are realised. However, the
approach to knowledge engagement now required, in line with the emphases that have been
explicated in the preceding section, calls for a more explicit recognition of the psycho-social and
other educational aims that are to be pursued. That is, student teachers need to understand, analyse,
apply and, importantly, demonstrate in their interactions with learners, just how the domains of
knowledge can be exploited as resources for addressing the needs of children as defined by ECM, for
equipping them with the tools of autonomous living, for nurturing their affective as well as their
cognitive development, and for cultivating a wide range of social and practical skills. They need to
learn to relate to pupils in such a way that they can make pupils’ personal and social experience the
starting point for their exploration of all that the domains of knowledge have to offer. On this
interpretation, student teachers should come to regard the ECM agenda not as an adjunct to their
central task but as deeply integral to it.
48. Thirdly, beginning teachers need to undergo sustained study of the theoretical perspectives on
child development, on human learning, on the environmental and other obstacles to human
flourishing, on the conditions which maximise learning, and on the manifold ways in which learning
is facilitated and managed. There is no doubt that it is helpful to have a system-wide statement of
the capabilities and other qualities that a teacher should demonstrate before entry to the profession.
More than anything, such statements or standards affirm what a teacher should be able to do.
However, it can be a weakness of such statements that they so emphasise technical accomplishment
in the efficient management of learning that they do not sufficiently explicate, and therefore may
devalue, the theoretical understandings that should inform teaching. The generalisability of what is
learned at the stage of initial teacher education depends on the thoroughness of the student
teacher’s grasp of the knowledge base of teaching. What is sought here is more than a superficial
familiarisation with the conceptual underpinnings of teaching but rather sufficient analytical power
to maximise the transferability of teaching skills, insights and strategies across a wide range of
contexts, thus equipping student teachers with the professional versatility that the new context
requires.
12

49. Fourthly, initial teacher education programmes will need to ensure that their students understand
the inter-professional context into which they will be moving. For example, while it is not expected
that classroom teachers will be expected to play the role of the lead professional or to carry
responsibility for completing a CAF, they may well engage professionally with those who carry such
responsibilities or contribute evidence from their own interactions with a pupil that becomes the
focus of inter-professional exchange. They are also entitled to be made aware of the various ways in
which their membership of an inter-professional culture is to be reinforced, for example through the
joint statement on inter-professional values, and the ethic of information sharing. In that connection,
it is vital that beginning teachers come to understand the importance of confidentiality to effective
practice but acknowledge that it should not suppress professional dialogues that are in the interests
of the child. Furthermore, if engagement with other professionals is to be a feature of their
subsequent careers there is probably no better time to begin nurturing inter-professional
understanding than during the initial teacher education programme. That is now being developed
through shared learning opportunities, for example in child development, understanding
communities, child protection, and other cross-professional themes, through paired placement
exchanges in which a student teacher and a student social worker take it in turns to mediate for each
other the features of their respective working environments, through the personalisation of the
student’s own professional learning, and through closer inter-faculty collaboration within higher
education.
50. Fifthly, the blend of skills developed requires to be adjusted to give greater prominence to the
subtleties of the interpersonal interaction skills required in discussions in inter-professional contexts,
in the kind of relationship with learners that personalisation requires, in handling the pressures of
team working, in exercising leadership roles, in managing the tensions implicit in the extended range
of expectations that teaching entails, in seeking to penetrate a learner’s difficulties or reluctance to
participate, in being sensitive to needs that are not always obvious, and in respecting the
confidentialities involved in information sharing. In effect, teacher education programmes will
require to devote rather more attention to the nurturing of the skills and dispositions that are
involved in collaboration and team working. How many of our existing programmes cherish the ideal
of ‘flying solo’, of demonstrating a sure grasp of the technicalities of classroom teaching and being
able to do so unaided, in a display of individual excellence? Without in any way weakening the
importance of individual mastery of the complexities of teaching, might our programmes give rather
more prominence to the demands and professional rewards of collaboration?
51. Finally, as is already occurring, teacher education institutions need to re-work their partnership
arrangements with schools. These are the settings in which many of the features of ECM are already
in operation and much of the students’ learning of ECM will take place off-campus. Indeed, it will be
essential to relate not simply to schools but to schools in their communities, in recognition of the
ways in which the boundaries between the school and the community are becoming more porous
and in order to afford the student some experience of non-teaching settings. Besides, since it is
inevitable that schools and other settings will be at different stages in the implementation of ECM
and all that it entails, teacher education institutions will surely require to develop even more intensive
partnerships and even stronger relationships of trust, so that perceived shortcomings or
disagreements in relation to ECM become opportunities for enhanced collaboration and the shared
understandings that are the fruit of conjoint professional learning.
52. It is important to emphasise that these adjustments to teacher education should not be seen
simply as additional to existing programmes, a supplementary module which creates an even more
overcrowded and compressed teacher education curriculum. Just as ECM calls for a reconceptualisation
of teaching so also it demands a re-conceptualisation of teacher education. It
demands a re-structuring of the total programme in such a way that ECM principles become
embedded and are made to permeate the student teachers’ university-based studies and placement
activities, as indeed the revised standards for QTS require. The proper response therefore is not to
look upon the six proposed adjustments as amounting to the inevitable extension to programmes
and the imposition of a net increase in burdens, but rather as criteria that might be deployed to test
the extent to which ECM principles are integral to the experience of teacher education.
53. Fears have been expressed that the revitalisation of teacher education which ECM encourages
may place institutions in a position in which they fail to meet the criteria underpinning OfSTED
inspections. There is no reason why any such conflict of interpretation should arise, for OfSTED is
bound to assess the extent to which institutions meet the criteria required by the revised standards
13

for QTS and these explicitly endorse ECM principles and require those who are candidates for
admission to teaching to demonstrate the range of capabilities and dispositions that ECM
emphasises.
54. Of course, ECM calls for more than adjustments to initial teacher education: the overwhelming
majority of those whose efforts will determine the success or otherwise of the initiative are already in
service in schools or other settings. A substantial investment of resources has been made by the TDA
and others to develop a world-class workforce for a transformed service for children and young
people. In that undertaking there is an expectation that schools and centres themselves will carry
responsibility for ensuring that their staff are fully attuned to the new demands. UCET institutions
will continue to contribute to that important work. At the same time, these institutions are extending
the range of their CPD provision to take account of ECM. For example, one of the centres visited, in
anticipation of the Integrated Qualification Framework, had set in place a comprehensive and
interlocking structure of awards ranging from foundation degrees to doctoral level work,
characterised by credit accumulation, work-based learning and flexible delivery, and involving three
institutions of higher education and ten neighbouring authorities, one of which had office
accommodation on site, and looked upon that collaborative venture as the principal means by which
the development of the whole school workforce in the authority will be taken forward.
55. As the predicted decrease in teacher education numbers begins to impact on the sector,
institutions may well see strategic advantage in these more extended forms of provision. The roles of
TA and HLTA are now established and demand for these forms of professional support for teachers
will not diminish. The demand for the Early Years Professional, discussed below, is likely to be even
greater. It is not otiose to envisage a number of institutions which, while continuing to make
provision for teacher education, designate themselves as centres for the professional education of
the whole children’s workforce, drawing on education, social work, health and other forms of
relevant expertise to offer a full range of programmes and forms of professional support, including
multi-professional master’s degrees.
56. In a different region of the country, it is planned to respond to the Children’s Workforce Strategy
by establishing a Children’s Service Professional Learning Academy. Envisaged as a partnership
involving the county council, four institutions of higher education and other agencies, the
Professional Learning Academy is committed to improve ‘ the capacity and quality of those who plan,
manage and deliver services at the front-line’ through the provision of programmes which ‘address
the skills, knowledge and understanding required for effective inter-professional and multi-agency
work’. The target groups include centrally employed county council professionals, school-based staff,
including the full range of support staff, front-line carers such as foster parents and children’s service
professionals, and professionals in private early years and childcare settings, health care and other
organisations.
57. As these and other patterns of CPD provision emerge there will be a need to establish a greater
degree of coherence and harmonisation of practice in the national arrangements for funding and
regulating professional development opportunities. Currently, in England, there are too many
separate agencies at work, some with overlapping responsibilities: the CWDC, the TDA, the Learning
and Skills Council, the NCSL, and the General Social Care Council. The direct consequence of such
fragmentation at national level is inequality of opportunity. As the front-line services these agencies
exist to oversee are brought into closer relationship with each other, it would be encouraging to see
an equivalent degree of integration of these separate regulatory bodies, and with that integration
there might emerge uniform quality standards, equivalences of CPD opportunities across what are
now separate sectors, and a single and equitable set of funding arrangements.
58. One sphere of CPD for which ECM has especially important implications concerns educational
leadership. As the range of expertise in Children’s Centres and extended schools diversifies, special
consideration will require to be devoted to the professional development of those who perform
leadership roles in such multi-professional settings. The national professional qualifications that equip
leaders in integrated children’s centres and other extended educational settings with the demanding
repertoire of skills and understandings necessary for their work will need to take full account of the
additional demands that are imposed on educational leaders by the ECM agenda.
59. These various developments may be characterised as a movement from ‘closed’ to ‘open’
systems: from a closed and separate systems of schools to one in which they are open to the
influences of other agencies; from teaching as a closed and somewhat private engagement between
the teacher and a group of learners to a more open one in which the teacher mediates learning in a
14

ange of contexts in collaboration with others; from the closed teaching of subjects to the more open
nurturing of learners’ educational progress through the exploitation of knowledge to achieve a wide
range of psycho-social objectives; and from a teacher education that was professionally isolated and
was preoccupied with technical competence in the classroom to more open and varied forms of
engagement with other professionals.
ECM and Early Years Provision
60. While the foregoing discussion has been concerned with ECM and teacher education in general,
and will therefore also have relevance to teaching in the early years, there have been such significant
developments in that phase that they warrant separate consideration. There have been three key
developments.
61. The first of these is a new curriculum: the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), a single quality
framework for services for children from birth to five. Due for implementation in 2008, and already
in circulation, this document is integral to the ECM agenda and its successful implementation in the
early years. By incorporating the extensive work undertaken in relation to the period from birth to
age three, it extends the early years curriculum from birth to the August after the child’s fifth
birthday (usually the end of the reception year), bringing a degree of continuity of learning for young
children that has generally been welcomed in the sector. However, a view was also expressed to us
that the EYFS was ‘designed for use by people who have not been trained to think about children’s
learning’. Understanding learning is undoubtedly the key to successful curriculum implementation
and it is hoped that the final version of this important curriculum specification fully recognises the
professional and other demands of early years education as a subject for lifelong learning for all
education professionals.
62. The early years curriculum (in its broadest sense) and the related literature have always been
concerned with fostering independent learning in the young child and this emphasis aligns with
current policy perspectives on a ‘personalised curriculum’. In these early years, learning through play
has long been acknowledged as central and this renewed emphasis in the EYFS is most welcome.
Some, indeed, would have preferred to see it afforded more extensive and explicit recognition. The
pedagogy of play will now need to be substantially addressed for all those intending to work in the
early years sector. Thus, for example, they will need to understand the pedagogical implications of
promoting child-initiated and teacher-initiated learning opportunities. Of course, it is not being
maintained that all learning in the early years is play-based, for such learning can incorporate
appropriately scaffolded subject or integrated knowledge for young learners. There is even a case for
play-based learning in Year 1 and Year 2, although it is maintained that such an approach is likely to
be tokenistic as long as SATs exert their impact. If substantial and increased opportunities for play are
recognised as a fundamental entitlement of all early learners, as enshrined in the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child, the early years classroom could look substantially different
over the coming years and new teachers will need to understand and implement these changing
approaches to learning.
63. The informed and skilful use of observation has long been recognised as an important feature of
the early years educators’ repertoire, integral to understanding children’s interests and development
and how these relate to curriculum planning and pedagogy. The EYFS re-affirms its centrality, after
some years on the margins of initial teacher education. Programmes will need to reflect this renewed
emphasis in their structure and help students to understand the relationships between observation,
learning, assessment and classroom/setting organisation. Observation and pedagogy are key
elements in the successful co-construction of the early years curriculum, with adults and children
both contributing to a process which the EYFS highlights as a mark of effective early years practice.
The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) offers a standardised approach to conducting an
assessment of a child's additional needs and deciding how those needs should be met. The Common
Core of Skills and Knowledge that underpins CAF can be readily integrated into ITE and related
programmes, as previously discussed; within the classroom, the contribution of teachers and other
educators to this process will arise, quite substantially, from close, well structured, observations of
children in a range of contexts. In particular, observations in the early years will be a key part of the
contribution of teachers and other educators to multi-agency working and inter-professional
dialogues for children in need. Staff in schools and other settings are well placed to recognise
changing circumstances for children, and need to understand how to share information of this kind
15

with colleagues and other professionals as part of the early identification of need that is such a key
issue in supporting children and families within ECM.
64. One of the substantive criticisms of the EYFS was the relatively limited emphasis on promoting
diversity or ‘the value of diversity’. If ECM is to manifest itself effectively in educational settings, then
all educational experiences - not just those in the early years - should inherently respect the
entitlement of all learners to have their cultural heritage and family/community experiences valued
and reflected within the curriculum and within their broader learning experiences, including their
playful learning experiences. Most especially in the early years, effective practice will need to be
inclusive of both children and parents/carers, taking full account of home and community-based
experiences. To that end, the construct of ‘partnerships with parents’ will need to be substantially
unpacked and embedded in ITE and related programmes, taking full account of the ECM agenda.
65. Those who are learning to teach need to know of these trends and of their underpinning
rationales in order to engage in these debates as professionals and in order to exercise informed and,
where appropriate, constructively critical judgements in their own classes and schools in relation to
their role as early years teachers and in conjunction with the other adults with whom they are
working.
66. The second major development is the emergence of Children’s Centres, which, with extended
schools, will provide a national network of integrated early education and full day care, health
services and family and parenting support. The government's aspiration is that all children in the
20% most disadvantaged wards will have access to Children's Centre services, a rolling programme
of considerable ambition. Current requirements are for .5 of a teacher in every established Children’s
Centre. Local authorities carry responsibility for implementation, and some have already committed
to a full-time teacher in every centre. UCET and its members must remain alert to any trends or
intentions to reduce this commitment over time, for teachers are essential contributors to young
children’s learning.
67. Children’s Centres have grown out of government policy developed since 1997. Early Excellence
Centres, (EECs) funded and directed by DfES represented the first national initiative in England to
support the integration of care and education for children and families. These provided extended day
care for children from birth to age four and a wide range of other family support services, including
adult education. They were intended to provide a ‘one- stop shop’ alongside cutting edge provision
in disadvantaged communities. These EECs were followed by the Sure Start Local Programmes
(SSLPs), which fell under the auspices of the Department of Health, and were intended to create a
range of support activities which integrated health, education and social services in innovative ways
within the community. They broke new ground in terms of ‘combined services’ to combat poverty
and its detrimental effects on children and families. While the aims of the EECs had been
predominantly educational, with teachers having a substantial involvement, the aims of SSLPs, where
the teacher involvement was lower, were predominantly health-related. The intention was to
combine the best of both in the establishment of Children’s Centres. These come under the
jurisdiction of local authorities which hold the responsibility for their development in areas of
disadvantage under the Director of Children’s Services and with local authority funding drawn from
budgets across education, health and social services.
68. The Children’s Centre teachers will need:
• a commitment to flexible, innovative multi-agency and team working
• an understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the other professionals working in the centre
• the ability to establish effective and professional relationships with colleagues from different
backgrounds
• a commitment to developing themselves and their colleagues as learners
• experience of leading early years provision
• strong communication skills, including diplomacy and sensitivity to the needs of others
• an ability to translate their own knowledge and understanding into effective practice
• a knowledge of child development and children's learning a knowledge of planning, observationbased
assessment and documentation and the importance of sharing this with families
69. These requisite attributes demonstrate that a teacher working in a Children’s Centre will need to
be an experienced professional with the capacity to draw on well-developed underpinning
knowledge.
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70. It is widely recognised that all teachers will need to understand the changing roles in the
profession relating in particular to inter-professional practice and, more recently, to looked-after
children. It is likely that teachers in the early years sector will encounter other professionals at a
relatively early stage in their career because of the need for strong home/carer-school links. While
senior staff members in schools may have overall responsibility for this aspect of provision,
nevertheless new teachers may need to engage with family link workers, social workers, health
visitors, speech therapists and others in relation to children’s needs. They must therefore understand
the importance of professional dialogues and interaction and learn respect for the contributions
made by other professional agencies in supporting children and families, key features within
workforce re-modelling and a core feature of professionalism.
71. In the longer term, ECM should involve greater levels of participation in policy and practice
development from local communities. That was a key principle underpinning Sure Start Local
Programmes and is also manifested in other government initiatives. It also underpins the roll-out of
Children’s Centres. Whilst it might be very challenging for ITE programmes to incorporate a deep
understanding of community participation in policy and practice, it is nevertheless their responsibility
to ensure that trainee teachers understand and can act upon the promotion of good home-school
links. These links are especially important in relation to young children, who are more susceptible to
the vulnerabilities created by transitions, from home to school, from setting to setting, and from
phase to phase within school. Teachers, therefore, do need to understand the implications for their
own practice and attitudes in relation to building strong relationships with parents and others who
have shared responsibility in some way in the care of children, including, for example, childminders.
72. The third key development in early years education is the introduction of the Early Years
Professional (EYP). This initiative – the establishment of a wholly new role – is intended to raise the
professional level of the childcare workforce as a whole. It was founded on the EPPE study which
showed that the key factors contributing to the quality of early years experience were ‘well-qualified
leaders, trained teachers working alongside and supporting less qualified staff and staff with a good
understanding of child development and learning’. The EYP is expected ‘to lead practice across the
EYFS’. This development certainly complicates the position of the early years teacher, and again is an
aspect of provision which UCET will continue to monitor as numbers of EYPs increase across the
workforce.
73. The EYP will be recognised as achieving a Level 6 graduate equivalent status. A teacher qualifies
at Level 6 and is a graduate who is also awarded qualified teacher status. A number of organisations
around the country are providing a range of training routes to EYP status in both part-time and fulltime
modes. Whilst all teachers in England, including those working in the early years, remain under
the jurisdiction of the TDA, the EYP is located within the auspices of the CWDC, which exercises
overall responsibility for all other members of the children’s workforce, including, for example,
playgroup workers, workers in the private sector, childminders, children and family social workers.
The CWDC will award the EYP status, thus denying the EYP the professional solidarity and other
benefits that could follow from membership of the GTCE, despite the fact that TDA and CWDC have
been asked by the DfES to work in partnership. The CWDC aims to bring an EYP to all Children’s
Centres offering early years provision by 2010 and to every full day care setting (including those in
the private, community and voluntary sectors) by 2015, whilst still retaining a commitment to
ensuring that graduates with QTS are attracted to and retained in the early years workforce. UCET
must seek to ensure that this commitment is honoured.
74. Student teachers will need to know of this emerging role, to reflect on the development of
professional relationships with EYPs, and to consider the potential value to themselves of gaining this
status in addition to their teaching qualification, possibly through the shorter, validation- only, route
to EYPS. However, the value of dual status remains uncertain. It remains unclear who would have
overall responsibility for curriculum development should a teacher and an EYP find themselves
together in a setting and this uncertainty has the potential to create inter-professional tensions
without some previous knowledge and consideration of roles and responsibilities. The
complementarities of their knowledge and experience require to be settled officially.
75. The EYP may have wider experience of the birth-three curriculum, but teachers may have wider
knowledge of learning processes; some, indeed might also claim an equally sound knowledge of
birth-three if they have followed one of the many early years programmes which cover the earliest
years. They may, for example, have qualified through an early years PGCE which followed on from a
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Childhood Studies/Early Childhood Studies degree programme. If teachers with early years expertise
are to be retained in the early years workforce these and other difficulties need to be swiftly resolved.
Staff Development in Higher Education Institutions
76. The effectiveness of the reform of programmes of initial teacher education and the new forms of
CPD will depend on how well the staff of UCET institutions prepare themselves to address the ECM
agenda. There is evidence across the country of HEIs responding positively and energetically to this
key initiative: regular engagements between HEI staff and senior managers in Children’s Centres and
extended schools about the developing professional roles of teachers; discussion of the findings of
research into inter-agency activity and multi-professional working and practice to inform programme
development at initial and CPD levels; and the creation of inter-school and inter-faculty teams to
consider multi –professional practices and programmes, in this way eroding some of the institutional
boundaries that helped to isolate teacher education in the past. For example, one of the HEIs visited
had appointed a new senior member of staff to oversee the institutional response to ECM. One of
the projects was to mount a level one module, which provided a full briefing on the ECM initiative
and encouraged participants to relate the content of the module to their ongoing professional
activities. To date, some 200 members of staff have completed the module, which is now being
made available to staff in other institutions. At a second institution a senior member of staff chairs a
steering group, which includes a ‘champion’ for each academic unit, and three cross-institution
working parties have been established to support a series of modular interdisciplinary learning
programmes, in conjunction with a neighbouring authority, for staff employed in integrated
children’s services.
77. These examples encapsulate a number of features that typify the response of HEIs across the
country: inter-faculty and inter-departmental collaboration; close and new partnerships with local
authorities; staff appointments to lead ECM developments; the involvement of relevant school-based
and other centre staff to lead discussions within institutions, reflecting the results of the GTCE survey
of 2006 which showed that a majority of teachers felt that ECM was helping teachers to make a
difference in improving education; presentations by DfES, TDA and others involved with ECM at
national level; the appointment or secondment of staff with experience of Children’s Centres and
extended schools; and ambitious plans for programme review and new programme development,
building on a wide range of staff development initiatives. This paper is a contribution to that change
process.
Acknowledgements
The authors are most grateful to those who participated in the interviews and did so with such
candour; to the many members of the UCET community who responded to the interview questions
and submitted comments and case study materials; to those who generously hosted our visits to
institutions; and to all who contributed to the discussion and revision of the draft paper.
Authors
Professor Gordon Kirk is Academic Secretary to UCET.
Professor Pat Broadhead holds the chair of Playful Learning at Leeds Metropolitan University.
June 2007
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