Pre-school Learning in the Community

Strategies for Change

G. A. Poulton, Terry James

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138488168
• eBook ISBN: 9781351041607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Much of current educational theory and research at the time was concerned with the effect that pre-school education should have in accelerating development throughout the years of compulsory schooling. This book, originally published in 1975, is an important contribution to the debate since it shows how the stages of pre-schooling affect the child, the family and the neighbourhood community.

The authors point out that pre-school stands at the intersection between the informal socialisation of the home and the more disciplined learning which takes place at school. Much research appears to show that poor progress in primary school results partly from adverse family circumstances; but it reveals just as plausibly that the formal measures of progress used by both the research and our schools are reflecting a limited view of progress and one which does least justice to the norms and values of families which do not share established academic goals. For this reason a cultural shock is experienced by many children on joining school. The authors argue that pre-school, as a transitional phase, could do much to reduce the shock, but that many of the efforts made for the under-fives simply expose them earlier to the contrast between home and school learning situations. They recognise that parents are educators and play a prominent part in the intellectual and social development of their children. They also stress that the effect of pre-school children on the social or psychological well-being of parents and children will be limited unless it takes account of and reaches out to the community to which they belong. The authors offer several alternative approaches to pre-school organisation and content of the time and examine some specific examples, such as the Pre-school Playgroup movement and the Leicester Home-Start scheme.

The book arose out of the authors' participation in several educational projects, including the Educational Priority Area Project which ran for three years during 1969-71. In particular it draws on their working experience which was based at the Red House Education Centre in a South Yorkshire mining community near Doncaster.

Part 1
Research and development in early education

1
Criteria for success or failure

The impending expansion of pre-school facilities in this country partly reflects the importance which has come to be attached in recent years to two trends of thinking about children's development. One of these is the discovery, or rediscovery, of the fact that children can be exposed with benefit to instructional processes earlier than the school system operates. In the context of this book, this thinking requires little argumentation since it is self-evident that learning takes place from birth onwards; what is of more concern to us is the means by which the various learning processes to which the child is exposed are organized and are changing. This brings us to the second trend in thinking about children's development, which is the recognition of both family and school as socialization agencies of considerable significance in that development. Given that the home is an informal agency while schools are relatively formal, regularized institutions, then playgroups and nurseries naturally stand at a crucial and transitional stage in the continuous socialization process. This stage sharpens the more general relationship between home and school which has become the subject of a great deal of writing in the sociology of education, a discipline which has contributed, the notion of cultural differences between homes and schools. The fact that there can exist differences between the prevailing educational climates presented to the child in the family on the one hand and the classroom on the other gives rise to potential conflicts and misunderstandings between teachers and parents which allow no straightforward resolution.

Belonging to a pre-school group, whether it is voluntarily organized or set up by the local authority, brings these possible disparities of approach into focus, but can also provide the opportunity for their successful combination in a process of teacher-parent collaboration. As with relations between the home and the primary school the informal and formal learning contexts may be in conflict with each other, or, given a combination of luck and circumstance, in harmony with each other. Luck is the opportunity that a parent has to find a local group, or school, which promises to develop, as well as act as custodian of, the child; or it is the teacher's chances of looking after children whose parents have some feeling about their children's development. Circumstance, as it is conducive to harmony between parent and teacher, is a matter of shared educational values; this can be a happy state unless the academic ambitions of the parent for the child are too demanding for his balanced development. Much of the literature of educational sociology is, however, devoted to studying the failure of the link between home and schools and has become particularly relevant to the provision of pre-school places, particularly places for the children of families who experience forms of disadvantage, especially the 'cultural disadvantage' which is taken to exist where the home's and the school's values are misaligned. Whatever the relevance of the concept of disadvantage in making educational provisions, a matter to be taken up shortly, it is at least true to say that not all families are equally well placed to prepare their children to take full advantage of the facilities offered by the formal education system.

The contribution of research

The influential cultural studies of education in Britain have tended to concentrate on social class differences in attainment or opportunity.¹ While these studies foreshadowed in several ways the current concern that education should take account of pupil's background and circumstances, their emphasis was differently placed. The general effect of these British studies in educational sociology was to draw attention to inequalities of educational opportunity between social strata: children of middle-class parents were found to have greater than average chances of obtaining grammar-school places, of performing well in examinations, of using linguistic codes which assisted their progress through academic and professional life, and so on. Valuable as such findings are especially for highlighting the effects on selection procedures for secondary and higher education, they offer little help to the professional educator since they offer few clues to what it is about working-class membership or cultures that has this apparently inhibiting and cumulative effect. Rather more sophisticated sociological analyses would be required to investigate those effects. Concentrating on problems of the outcomes of education, rather than access to it, other more recent studies have attempted to locate specific causes of underachievement by relating large numbers of background and circumstantial variables to performance on psychological or attainment tests. The rationale of these surveys has been to explain levels and variation in test scores in terms of a number of presumed influences from the child's domestic, personal and school situations. The difficulties about using such results for reform are fairly evident, and the studies can only approximately be described as a form of sociological analysis; yet this type of research seems to have had a remarkable effect upon the course of home/school strategies and upon thinking about the sources of failure at school. It seems to us that as well as overestimating the home's contribution to achievement in school, surveys have often given rise to optimistic expectations about the applicability of their findings. If it were discovered, for instance, from a survey of home circumstances and reading ability that the type of education received by the parents, the number of books they kept at home and how much television the family watched each day had, on aggregate, an influence on reading achievement or progress in school, then in all probability an actual relationship between these variables exists. Empirical findings such as these can make valuable contributions to theory and are viable in policy discussions; however, their value in designing strategies or arguing for deliberate reforms is limited by certain methodological difficulties, the chief of which are as follows.

Findings such as those being discussed relate to a historical context from which it is invalid to predict that they will apply in a new context; it may be, for instance, that an association is discovered between low average achievement and large school classes, or large schools, or large head teachers, for that matter. It does not follow that a deliberate change of size will result in higher average achievements for the pupils, because the relationship between size and achievement is unlikely to be directly causal, or so simple that variation in the one completely explains variation in the other.

As well as the fact of causality, the direction of causation is difficult to establish. For instance, if families' educational aspirations for their children were found to be associated with the children's performance, it is not clear whether performance affects aspirations or vice versa, or whether all levels of performance, high and low, are involved in the relationship, or indeed whether there is a mutual feedback process operating between aspirations and performance. Any attempt to improve children's performance by affecting their families' aspirations could, on the strength of this evidence alone, turn out to be not the most efficient approach, and (since the evidence takes account neither of the direction of causation nor of different levels of aspiration and performance) possibly counter-productive in some cases.

To attain reasonable reliability, survey findings need to be generalized over large portions of the sample, which therefore needs to be large itself; there will tend to be many individual cases in which the discovered relationship does not hold. Unfortunately, the probability that a majority will benefit is not always a good recommendation for reform (as for instance, when an otherwise effective vaccine produces a fatal reaction in 1 per cent of the population). An example from the educational field would be the (fictitious) finding that most children achieve greater social adjustment in nursery classes if the room is noisy and active rather than in quiet rows of desks. If applied indiscriminately, a policy of noise and activity might have a quite unexpected result for children with agoraphobic tendencies, unexpected, that is, if one truly believed that the same conditions could be ideal for every child.

Sometimes factors may be identified which have a strong association with each other but either the relationship or the factors themselves are not readily amenable to change. Children's performance and father's socio-economic status are often said to stand in such a relationship. Here the relationship is presumably not very direct but operates through the mediating effect of attitudes and predispositions that are themselves often associated with socio-economic status; perhaps the kind of indirect relationship indicates a further type of fallacy which is possible in interpreting research findings, that of ignoring 'intervening variables'. The main point of this example, however, is to show how a quite powerful determinant is out of reach for reform purposes. In other words, changing jobs will not, of itself, ensure an increase in one's children's academic performance, although it may indirectly achieve that result in some cases by affecting the intervening variables too. It is no good to overeat if you want to gain height, even though there is in the population as a whole a strong tendency for the tallest to be the heaviest. If households with no inside toilets or hot running water tend to produce underachieving children then converting corridors into bathrooms will not boost achievement, although it may be a possible beginning in ameliorating depressive living conditions.

Possibly the first directly influential survey report in the field in question was the national survey conducted for the Plowden committee and published in volume 2 of Children and their Primary Schools.² This report is significant also in this discussion for its almost direct impact on the subsequent development of compensatory strategies in primary education (the educational priority areas) and in the encouragement of parents' involvement in earlier education. Probably all of the difficulties listed above apply to using that study as a guide to action; there have, in addition, been several published criticisms of the Plowden committee's findings³ and its surveys.⁴ It is difficult to endorse all these criticisms but attention should be drawn to the method of statistical analyses used in the survey (stepwise multiple regression), which has a particular effect on the results connected with parental influence.

The list of 'explanatory' variables, which were expected to account for a large proportion of the variation in the test scores of primary school children, were grouped empirically into school factors, teachers' characteristics, home circumstances and parents' aspirations and encouragement. By establishing the contribution of parental factors first, then determining the proportion of the remaining variation in test score which was attributable to the other groups of variables taken in order, it follows that maximum estimates of parental contributions were obtained. The groups of variables were taken in chronological order of presumed influence on attainment, parents' and home factors having prior claim. If the contributions of all factors were taken at once, quite probably some parental and home circumstances would still account statistically for a fair proportion of the variation, but the teachers' and schools' shares would increase. There seems little justification for allowing parental and home factors to absorb variation first, leaving less for other types of influence. Even that which is due to domestic factors will almost certainly operate partly through teachers, who perceive and react to children's home backgrounds: several studies (see especially Pidgeon⁵ who reviews many of them) have demonstrated the quite strong effects of teachers' perceptions of background characteristics upon pupils' progress or performance.

It would be churlish to deny that important relationships between parents' aspirations, home circumstances and the children's school attainments exist; but it is possible that evidence has been presented by the Plowden study, and others which support it, which exaggerates parental influence at the expense of other factors. Some of these other factors have been taken into account, such as teachers' and schools' characteristics, and some, like the values of the local education system or the resources available relatively to the rest of the country, have not generally been considered. More importantly, underlying the home's and parents' power over children's development, there may often be a range of cultural factors which either restrict or maximize the potential educational development of children; or rather they appear to affect development, for the causal chain between cultural background and educational attainment cannot, in the nature of the phenomena, be direct, and will consist of many intermediate links. Many of the cultural factors are well recognized because of the publicity attracted by studies of attainment and family background, especially those factors which are claimed to restrict the relative progress of children from poor or uneducated homes by depressing standards of living, and by curbing aspirations and motivations, on the part of parents, children, and of teachers, too.

The limitations of survey evidence which were noted above will restrict the value of studies which relate children's backgrounds to their development in the process of policy formulation, and undoubtedly popular misconceptions have arisen which continue to affect thinking on the cultural aspects of psychological and physical growth. With careful interpretation, nevertheless, the research can offer useful insights. Rather than reject altogether the contribution of research to understanding in this field, it would be wise to examine the most detailed and careful research available, to see what it has to say on the subject of home influences, and to consider if there are any indications for fruitful action. The most comprehensive study in recent years of development and its concomitant variables has been the National Child Development Study carried out by the National Children's Bureau.

The National Child Development Study

The development and background of the 17,418 children who were born in England, Wales and Scotland between 3 and 9 March 1958, or rather as many of them who could be traced and had survived to the age of seven, were the chief objects of investigation in this study.⁶ Surveys at two points in time (at birth and at 7 years) had been conducted, and further follow-up surveys were planned at 11 and 15 years, so that the study has a valuable longitudinal feature. The study is one of impressive administrative efficiency which achieved an amazingly high response rate from the children, their parents and their teachers seven years after the sample was originally drawn: just under 16,000 provided information at seven years old and over 14,000 at both birth and the age of seven. The study considers both physical and psychological characteristics at the age of seven and constructs predictive models which are intended to link these with antecedent circumstances at birth or with the conditions in existence at seven in the family or at school.

While the prediction of physical development by factors surrounding birth is generally on safe ground because of the longitudinal character of the study, the arguments for relating family circumstances to psychological development rely on evidence gathered at one point in time; further follow-up surveys will overcome this difficulty to a large extent.

The social background factors whose relationship with development are investigated include: family size, parents' education and social origins, parental interest in their children's education, the parental situation, whether the mother works, family moves, household amenities and overcrowding. National, regional, social class and sex differences are also investigated, and so too are behaviour at home and school. It is more or less true to say that each of these variables is found to have some kind of bearing, not always very direct, upon achievement and adjustment at seven years old.

The formal measures used to assess achievement and adjustment and to relate them to circumstances were the Southgate reading test, a problem arithmetic test and the Bristol Social Adjustment Guide. The Goodenough 'draw-a-man' test was used but not reported in that volume. The choice of measures is a point of critical importance in our argument since it has had profound implications for the way in which the study's findings have been used in subsequent policy discussions and reviews; for the two achievement tests are, perhaps inevitably, very strongly related to major primary school objectives, and furthermore, they embody middle-class values as the report makes clear:

Attainment tests at best measure reliably what the author of the test and its users judge to be desirable. Most tests of intelligence are designed essentially to predict future performance in school work .... Teachers, research workers and others must use some framework as a basis for evaluation. That the framework embodies ideas, attitudes and expectations which are more commonly met in middle-class homes and therefore amongst middle-class children, is perhaps inevitable in our society (p.29).

The Bristol Social Adjustment Guide is even more evidently biased towards the teacher's point of view since it consists entirely of teachers' ratings of a child's social behaviour in school; what the teacher perceives as appropriate social adjustment may very easily consist in behaviour which is more convenient when handling a (possibly overcrowded) classroom.

The researchers' approach to the problem of a cultural bias in the measures is to suggest that since none can be 'culture-free' it does no good to throw them away and that they should be used with reservations. Unfortunately reservations have a habit of being overlooked in commentaries on research studies, and something of the sort has happened, but more of this later.

There are some further aspects of the study which limit the possible interpretations put on the data in a way which has been largely ignored, even though the limitations were in most cases pointed out by the authors, and some of them are very similar to those general limitations of survey data noted earlier.

1 The choice of variables on which to collect information naturally imposes restrictions on possible findings. Apart from the tests and assessments of children, the information fell mainly into the categories of family circumstances and practices, physiological conditions, and school organization. An area not within the study's scope was the neighbourhood and community environment in which the child lived, although the authors frequently achnowledge the significance of such factors. Apart from these large portions of (necessarily) unaccounted-for influences on achievement, there is the possibility that the variables which are included are 'standing in' for other, possibly more direct, influences on the person-to-person (e.g. mother-to-child) level with which they are statistically related in the sample. These two possibilities imply that there may be powerful determinants of achievement not accounted for by the study.

2 The type of analysis which is applied to the data also affects the findings. Some acknowledgment is given in the report that there may be influential groups of factors related to, but not completely identified with, home circumstances, by including father's occupation as an explanatory variable in the analyses. This variable, renamed 'social class' in the report, is claimed to represent a set of influences whose composition is largely unknown but which together possess great power in explaining differential achievement. In many of the analyses presented, the presumed effects of single variables upon achievement or adjustment are estimated after other variables in that set have been taken into account. Sets of variables which empirically hang together are taken and 'social class' is included in many of those sets so that the separate influence of father's occupation can be omitted from the remaining influences; frequently, father's occupation absorbs more variation than other variables in the set, showing that it represents an important correlate of the various tests and assessments. Plainly the work a father does (or rather the way in which it is classified by the Registrar General) cannot normally affect his son's or daughter's school career other than indirectly, through, for instance, the father's education...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Research and development in early education
• Part 2 Pre-school and the community
• Notes
• Index