Can I Go and Play Now?. Greg Bottrill
dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and at Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.
How true and how damning. The adult world seems perennially to want children to be seen and not heard, but the hundred is there in spite of this. We hear the hundred every day. Children want you to hear their joy, their representations of the world, their understanding, their delight, their inquisitiveness. Unfortunately, we are often guilty of not listening; of not taking heed; of not paying attention; of only truly having brain space for our own planned activity, our own impositions, our own pressures. And children soon learn that you aren’t listening. They soon discover that the adult world is detached from theirs, that they have to do what you want them to do, to jump through the hoop, to follow-the-leader, to tiptoe through the bluebells. Children’s marvel, their desire to invent and their dreams are nothing if they are denied the opportunity to be.
If only we could find a way to listen ...
If only we had enough faith ... enough faith to not steal ninety-nine, enough faith to agree with children that the hundred is there. Enough faith to be on their side for once, to think like the child that you once were and to see the world through their eyes. Isn’t that what we want our children to do: marvel, dream, laugh, sing, love, think?
It all seems so glaringly obvious. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would deny that those things aren’t the cornerstones of what children should experience. But how many days within the school system does this truly happen for children? The block to all this is, of course, the adult world. The world that we alluded to at the beginning of this chapter: measuring, analysing, rapid progress, closing the gap, data outcomes, performance. None of these things matter to children – they are too in the moment, too joyfully oblivious. So, it is the adult world that is drowning out their voice, telling children that the hundred is not there. It is the adult world that denies the marvel, the dream, the love, the thought.
Now we as adults can’t just walk away from the adult world and its pressures, and arguably we have a duty to work within the system that we have. We can’t just pretend that it doesn’t exist – after all, your performance management relies on the outcomes of the adult world and without these, dear reader, you would most likely find yourself out of work. So there needs to be a way that both worlds can meet, and happily there is. Your passport to this approach relies on you to feel deep down that children have a voice and to be open to hearing it.
You as a practitioner need to have an ingrained sense of what it is that children truly need
Children don’t need adults who are only there because they didn’t know what else to do in life; they don’t need adults who are only there because they see themselves on a career ladder; they don’t need adults who merely have good intentions; and they certainly don’t need adults who can only think like an adult. Children need you to listen, to watch, to participate – you as an adult literally need to get down with the kids.
You cannot access the real world of children if you cannot or are unwilling to do this. All too often we see teachers entering the profession with personal ambition or with the lack of integrity to stop for one moment and question or challenge what it is we are doing with children day in and day out. Increasingly, the obsession with MATs and Ofsted-driven outcomes blinds us as adults – we are being led on a merry dance by a piper who calls the tune but is somehow playing a broken pipe. The blanket approach based on accountability and outcomes completely misses the true and richer nature of childhood, of child development. It closes its ears to the child’s voice and instead blah-blahs over the top of it until it is drowned out. The child has to be at the centre of our thinking, of our nurturing, and for this to truly happen then we must put metaphorical masking tape over our mouths, prick up our ears and listen.
Education needs people who have pedagogy at the heart of their desire to be a teacher
Your own personal belief is vital for you to be a truly effective practitioner. Too often we see schools that are driven by a hunger for data outcomes and not by the children’s best interests or personal development.
Early Years must resist the top-down mentality of seeing children as product and as outcome. Early Years holds the key to successful child development. However, nine times out of ten we see the immediate closedown of this in its truest sense once children arrive in the Year 1 classroom. It takes a brave heart and mind of school leadership to see children being truly enabled in Key Stage 1. School is and has always been a top-down pyramid where Year 6 and often the Year 6 teacher’s attitudes filter down. This often leads to children being compartmentalised, boxed up and factory-ised because leadership doesn’t understand Early Years. It is frequently the case that a general teaching degree places very little emphasis on Early Years. There’s a perception that Early Years isn’t ‘proper’ teaching.
This immediately creates a barrier between the worlds of Key Stage 2/Key Stage 1 and Early Years. Early Years somehow becomes something different and other worldly. It transfers itself unfortunately into the workplace once students become teachers. All too often teachers say, ‘Well, it’s just Early Years, they soon grow out of it, play isn’t learning, they’ll start proper school in Year 1.’
The tragedy of this is that it gets passed on to parents who then begin to see Year 1 as proper school or where their children begin to learn. This has a huge impact on how Early Years is perceived. What needs to occur is a revelation that Early Years and its practice is the most important time of a child’s school life and one in which they will do their crucial learning. By ‘learning’ I mean their perception of what school is, what teachers are and, most importantly, who they, as children, are and what they can achieve. Since we are seemingly hell bent on grading, classifying, assessing, judging and measuring children, it would perhaps seem that there is a picture of a somewhat hopeless cause. This is far from the truth – as Early Years practitioners we need to begin to make our voices heard.
‘We wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do ... we wanna have a good time and that’s what we’re going to do!’ – The Wild Angels (1966)
If freedom comes from listening to children’s voices, then we have to prepare ourselves to listen. We have to create the conditions for children to be heard. We need to fashion the space within our own adult minds