Introduction
Social and economic inequalities are growing, with the richest moving further ahead and the poorest falling further behind (Ball, 2017; Dorling, 2019). Education is affected by these inequalities. In 2017, The Sutton Trust, an organisation focused on increasing social mobility in the UK, reported that the poorest children were 11 months behind their better-off peers when starting school (Stewart & Waldfogel, 2017). Furthermore, research has shown that the lowest attaining children fall further behind as they go through school (Andrews, Robinson & Hutchinson, 2017). In 2019, just under 30% of 5-year-old children in England were not reaching a âgood level of developmentâ, and the gap between the highest and lowest attaining 5-year-old children was increasing (from 31.4% in 2016 to 32.4% in 2019) (DfE, 2019). Poorer children who are developmentally behind when they first enter school and continue to struggle to âcatch upâ their more affluent peers, also struggle to get good qualifications and find well-paid, stable employment (Save the Children, 2012, 2013; Waldfogel & Washbrook, 2008). Thus, social and economic inequalities persist.
In an attempt to increase social mobility, neoliberal government policy has closely targeted parenting practices, particularly in children's earliest years. UK governments have constructed a particular idea of âgoodâ parenting, involving the creation of a supportive home learning environment to ensure young children's âschool readinessâ and future educational success. The idea that what parents do when their children are very young is key to their future educational and economic success has been echoed in the media and by various influential organisations. For example, the government's Social Mobility Commission claims that:
to improve social mobility in the United Kingdom it is important that public policy does not shy away from the issue of parenting and what the government could do to support families in the earliest years of a child's life to help all parents be the best parents that they can be.
(Clarke & Younis, 2017, p. 4)
Similarly, Ofsted, a government quango, states, âif we get the early years right, we pave the way for a lifetime of achievement. If we get them wrong, we miss a unique opportunity to shape a child's futureâ (2016, p. 3). Even the Duchess of Cambridge concurs that âgoodâ parenting benefits society as a whole. Drawing on influential government-commissioned reports, the Duchess promotes the idea that supporting parents in their children's earliest years is crucial for tackling disadvantage (The Royal Foundation, 2019). Thus, a particular construction of parenting, based on parents ensuring children's educational success from as early as birth, has become normalised.
However, the pressure on parents to provide a particular type of home learning environment is problematic. As a mother, a former primary teacher and a tutor of parents, I noticed primary schools expecting all children to arrive âschool readyâ, possessing a prescribed set of knowledge and skills, and blaming parents if they did not. At the same time, I found that mothers, who tend to bear the greatest responsibility for young children, often feel ill-equipped and unsure how best to support their young children's development. In addition, poorer (often lone) mothers bear the greatest burden as they have to try to ensure their young children achieve school success without the resources (and time) that other mothers may take for granted. This led me to ask how local resources support parents to provide the type of home learning environment that government policy has promoted as key to children's âschool readinessâ and future success.
This question is particularly significant in the current context. Over the last 10 years, UK governments have pursued an austerity agenda, dramatically reducing different forms of state support. Reductions in local authority funding have meant cutting and streamlining community resources and services, severely affecting public libraries and children's centres, which have traditionally supported parents and young children. Many resources have closed or have had to limit their services significantly. And as I write this, the global COVID-19 pandemic has meant the closure of community resources that still exist, including schools to the majority of children. Whilst more affluent children are able to learn from home due to having technology and more space, poorer children may have to share a device with siblings, complete paper-based tasks or continue to go into school if they are deemed âvulnerableâ enough. At the same time, parents (predominantly mothers) are expected to take on the role of teachers through supervising and assisting with tasks set by their children's schools. Huge inequalities in children's home learning environments mean that poorer children have less chance of closing the gap between themselves and their better-off peers (Montacute, 2020). Meanwhile, for younger children yet to start school, early childhood education and care (ECEC) providers are struggling to stay viable due to lost income, families are unable to meet together, and parents face additional stress and hardship through ill-health, caring responsibilities and unemployment. As a result, young children are at even greater risk of not acquiring the âschool readinessâ that government policy demands. Thus, it is vital that we understand how local resources might be used to tackle educational inequalities.
As early as 1975, the UK government report A Language for Life (commonly known as The Bullock Report) stated that the best way to support children's learning before they started school was to help parents understand and support children's literacy development. Professionals, such as Health Visitors, were to encourage parents to share books with their children from a young age and to introduce them to other types of print such as letters, labels and traffic signs. A child would then see reading as a purposeful activity and develop the right attitude towards it â âfrom the beginning it should be established as a thinking process, not simply as an exercise in identifying shapes and soundsâ (DES, 1975, p. 100). Thus, young children's literacy development was closely associated with reading for a real purpose and a way of making meaning. However, more recent government policy has constructed literacy differently.
At the same time as emphasising âschool readinessâ, government policy has shifted from thinking about young children's literacy as a purposeful, meaning-making practice towards a set of skills that can be tested. This is because, in their quest to boost social mobility and global competitiveness, neoliberal governments have become increasingly concerned with measuring educational attainment at every stage. By reducing literacy to a set of skills, it can be measured. In my former role as a primary teacher and literacy leader, I was acutely aware that young children's literacy learning was becoming ever more rooted in acquiring decontextualised skills, such as decoding and spelling using synthetic phonics, and naming parts of speech and grammatical forms, with little reference to meaning-making. But this meant a move away from the âwhole bookâ approaches to literacy learning that parents were familiar with, making it difficult for them to know how to support their children's literacy learning in meaningful ways and leading me to ask how local resources were helping parents to support their young children's readiness for âschoolâ literacy.
Through case studies of four community resources â Sure Start children's centres, pre-schools, a public library and privately run parent and child early education classes â examined through the lenses of place/space and literacy, the book shows how policy is enacted at a local level. Concepts borrowed from Henri Lefebvre, Carol Bacchi and Basil Bernstein provide the theoretical foundations for the book, allowing understandings of how government policies shape the practices and pedagogies of different professionals, and how educational inequalities and contradictions are created before children start school. In doing so, I shed light on the need to address how as well as what resources are provided if we want to give poorer children a greater chance of achieving educational success.
The book is based on a study that I carried out between 2015 and 2018 in an English town. Through a sharply focused ethnographic, place-based approach, I am able to offer a new contribution to existing research on early intervention, parental engagement, early childhood and âschool readinessâ, and bring new case studies of family and community literacies. Thus showing that a place-based methodology, where multiple lenses are applied to complex educational issues, can advance our knowledge about the nature of educational inequalities and possible solutions (Butler & Sinclair, 2020). In doing so, I hope this book will assist policymakers and early childhood professionals from different local, national and international contexts to think carefully about how to support parents and children more equitably so that learning opportunities might be maximised and educational inequalities tackled.
I now proceed to setting the scene for my study. I employ Henri Lefebvre's (1991) concept of (social) space to analyse the town, providing geographical and historical context. I also summarise the ethnographic methods that enabled me to provide a rich and credible description and analysis of the people and places involved in the provision of four community resources.
