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Quality in Early Years Settings and Children’s School Achievement


FSFRebecca
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Whilst we wait for the workforce review to be published and the decision regarding the GCSE maths and english requirements to be released we can ponder the findings of The Centre for Economic Performance (London School of Economics and Political Science) discussion paper:

 

The abstact of the piece explains that:
"Childcare quality is often thought to be important for influencing children’s subsequent
attainment at school. The English Government regulates the quality of early education by setting
minimum levels of qualifications for workers and grading settings based on a national
Inspectorate (OfSTED). This paper uses administrative data on over two million children to relate
performance on national teacher assessments at ages 5 and 7 to the quality characteristics of the
nursery they attended before starting school. Results show that staff qualifications and childcare
quality ratings have a weak association with teacher assessments at school, based on comparing
children who attended different nurseries but attended the same primary school. Our results
suggest that although children’s outcomes are related to the nursery they attend, which nurseries
are good cannot be predicted by staff qualifications and OfSTED ratings; the measures of quality
that Government has focused on."
Neil Leitch (Chief executive of the Pre-school Learning Alliance) has responded saying "We hope that this research will end the widespread misconception that private and voluntary providers are of lower quality than maintained settings simply because they are less likely to employ graduate staff members, and prompt further research and debate into what ‘quality’ in the early years actually means.”
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I worry about these reports...there are so clearly SO many discrepancies in this !

 

Perhaps as settings we should start to ask our receiving schools to provide us with this information at the end of reception in order that we can monitor and evaluate our services? suspect they wouldn't let us but it would be good to ask!!!! perhaps if they didn't give us the childs name just the results in comparison to the rest of the cohort??

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Perhaps as settings we should start to ask our receiving schools to provide us with this information at the end of reception in order that we can monitor and evaluate our services? suspect they wouldn't let us but it would be good to ask!!!! perhaps if they didn't give us the childs name just the results in comparison to the rest of the cohort??

Might be worth seeing if your LA does anything (if you still have a team that is) as we have been providing this for settings for several years. I'm sure we are not alone. It's done by numbers not individual children's names.

 

Trouble with these reports is that there are so many variables and so many settings with small numbers of children leaving each year, that making statistical conclusions is tricky at best. I've yet to plough through the report though, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised?

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I worry about these reports...there are so clearly SO many discrepancies in this !

 

Perhaps as settings we should start to ask our receiving schools to provide us with this information at the end of reception in order that we can monitor and evaluate our services? suspect they wouldn't let us but it would be good to ask!!!! perhaps if they didn't give us the childs name just the results in comparison to the rest of the cohort??

I still don't have a lot of faith in schools really wanting to know where we've assessed them on entry to have a true picture of 'progress' by the end of reception :-/

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I worry about these reports...there are so clearly SO many discrepancies in this !

 

Perhaps as settings we should start to ask our receiving schools to provide us with this information at the end of reception in order that we can monitor and evaluate our services? suspect they wouldn't let us but it would be good to ask!!!! perhaps if they didn't give us the childs name just the results in comparison to the rest of the cohort??

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I am on a primary school site and most of my children move onto the school itself.

I did ask the school for this info to support my SEF and forthcoming inspection.

School found info for phonics and have provided it for me. 91% of my children achieved GLD!!! How proud am I? 2 of the children who did not achieve GLD were on our SEN watch list and did have isp support.

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The data they are using however is after a year of being taught in school in reception. Surely the only way to really assess the impact would be to assess children against the same skills and criteria when they end nursery? They are talking about nursery yet using reception data!

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I still don't have a lot of faith in schools really wanting to know where we've assessed them on entry to have a true picture of 'progress' by the end of reception :-/

The EYFSP isn't a progress measure though and once that is done it's really only the gld that matters.

Cx

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The data they are using however is after a year of being taught in school in reception. Surely the only way to really assess the impact would be to assess children against the same skills and criteria when they end nursery? They are talking about nursery yet using reception data!

I think that was the point though catma...I would like to know if the children coming from my 'quality' setting...where they are taught by a highly motivated team, who are not qualified teachers...are at the same level above or below their cohort . Does what I do have lasting impact?? of course this also relies on the reception class teacher continuing this upward movement!

I also have a tricky cohort with nearly 50% now eal (16 languages this year!) and a higher than average percentage of children with SEND

I think tapestry will create some issues for me this year too, in as much as the schools I send most of my children to tend to downgrade them in order to show a higher level of attainment when they go to school but with it all recorded and evidenced i'm wondering how they are going to do this?

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You put it better than me FM, but the point I was trying to make, if we send them in working well in 40-60m+ even with no staff above L3 qualification and they are then taken back to 30-50m because it suits the schools to show more progress at the end of the EYFS, where/how will it show that those children came in higher than average and why they achieved GLD, surely they need to ask us for the date we send to schools to get a true outcome of this....if that makes sense :-/

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but surely if the EPPE project was able to track childrens progress that would be possible?

We already do moderation with our schools / peer moderations and QA'S !!! but not at the end of reception! (unless we have reception age children with us ...then we have the same moderation process as in school.)

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This article in the TES supports the quaility view - but we are left with the question 'what is quality?' It is different depending on what you want to get out of early years - is it financial quality (i.e. cost effective)? or is it care quality (i.e needing more staff that the ratios say) or is it education quality? (I.e does every early years setting need teachers?) - seems to me that there are reports out every day which contradict each other .....

This report from Save the Children makes a clear link between the acheivement of children and the presence of a qualified teacher in settings. " (we are) calling for an early years teacher in every nursery in England – focusing first on the poorest areas that need this support the most."

This is a good synopsis of the different arguments: Charity disputes research which claims qualified nursery teachers have 'tiny effect' on children's learning

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This article in the TES supports the quaility view - but we are left with the question 'what is quality?' It is different depending on what you want to get out of early years - is it financial quality (i.e. cost effective)? or is it care quality (i.e needing more staff that the ratios say) or is it education quality? (I.e does every early years setting need teachers?) - seems to me that there are reports out every day which contradict each other .....

I think that is really the point - the EPPS/EPPSE etc all used published ratings scales so although they were defining quality one way it might not be agreed as the same in other places. The reason there were so many UK addenda to ITERS and ECERS for example is because we are a bit different to the USA where the scales were developed.

Cx

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