Does the EYFS provide a comprehensive curriculum for children from birth to five?

If the EYFS provides a comprehensive curriculum for children from birth to five it gifts each child “the best possible start in life” (DoE, 2017, p. 5) with “support that enables them to fulfil their potential.” (DoE, 2017, p. 5). It appears to understand what each child’s potential is, comprehending the purpose of children, and details all that is required for this purpose to be realised. With this clear an intention the EYFS is an instruction manual, a predictable, linear, gradational guide to the realisation of potential in the fives and under. However, what is this potential that the EYFS is hinged upon? Is it possible for this framework to fully grasp childhood capability in totality without taking a restrictive approach? And, as a government driven initiative, is each child’s development a means to a political end, with the EYFS curriculum comprehensive only with this end in mind?

At first glance the framework appears comprehensive, reaching far into the superfluity of childhood potential. Separated into two categories it considers seven main areas of childhood learning and development: the prime areas of communication and language, physical development, and personal, social and emotional development; and the specific areas of literacy, mathematics, understanding the world, and expressive arts and design.

Each area contains specific objectives, for example those for the prime area concerning managing feelings and behaviour:

children talk about how they and others show feelings, talk about their own and others’ behaviour, and its consequences, and know that some behaviour is unacceptable. They work as part of a group or class, and understand and follow the rules. They adjust their behaviour to different situations, and take changes of routine in their stride. (DoE, 2017, p. 11).

As a framework with specific outcomes, the EYFS curriculum needs to measure children against its objectives in order to rank “progress against expected levels, and their readiness for Year 1.” (DoE, 2017, p. 14). In an editorial piece for the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, Maelis Lohmander voiced concern that within:

a neoliberal, outcomes-driven discourse there is a risk that being ‘ready for primary education’ can be associated with a curriculum which decontextualised knowledge and offers scripted instructional frameworks with narrow measurable outcomes often offered…this comes at the expense of a holistic perspective. (Hayes and Filipovic, 2017, in Lohmander, 2017, p. 808).

In determining a child’s potential in terms of school readiness, the EYFS is systematic to a neoliberal (1) approach to early years education, categorising young children in terms of their potential economic value. Peter Moss goes further when he states that frameworks like the EYFS are “…contributing to squeezing every last drop of human capital…to ensure survival in an environment of cut-throat competition.” (Moss, 2018, p. 22).

However two factors require consideration before concluding whether the EYFS curriculum is limited. Firstly, is the EYFS fit for purpose, i.e. comprehensive within its own remit to produce economically viable humans. Secondly, are there alternatives: those in comparable practise, for example by other governments, and those which Erik Wright (Wright, 2007, p. 27) considers as “envisaged real utopias”, those alternatives that hold three key elements of desirability, viability and achievability (Wright, 2007, p. 27).

To assess the scope of the EYFS curriculum within its own limitations, is to assess whether its approach is currently conducive. That its knowledge-based principles provide the under-fives with the tools required to economically succeed. To do so let’s consider a two year old toddler who started nursery in England in 2019. Say this child followed their education through to university, to eventually graduate at the age of 22 in 2039. Has the economy focused pathway, that the child first began 20 years ago within the EYFS curriculum, unlocked their ability to economically succeed?

An analysis of 46 countries and 800 professions by the McKinsey Global Institute (2017) sheds much light on this. They report by 2030, a full nine years before this child completes their education, 800 million jobs across the globe will have been replaced by robot automation, affecting 20% of jobs within the UK and requiring one-third of our workforce to retrain for other work.

The McKinsey report is backed by businessman Jack Ma who believes neoliberal, knowledge based curriculum like the EYFS are decreasing in validity:

If we do not change the way we teach 30 years later we’ll be in trouble, because the way we teach our kids is knowledge based and we cannot teach our kids to be smarter than machines we have to teach something unique so that machines can never catch up with us, so that 30 years later our kids have the chance…values, believing, independent thinking, teamwork, care for others these are the soft parts that knowledge will not teach you…making sure that humans are different from machine. (Ma, 2019).

 

His concerns are shared by educationalist Sir Ken Robinson who, speaking in The Guardian, stated our approach to education is:

stifling some of the most important capacities that young people now need to make their way in the increasingly demanding world of the 21st century – the powers of creative thinking…Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests … Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. (Robinson, 2009).

Economically, what appears increasingly desirable is a broad-brush approach, one including a child’s interests, interrelations and inquisitiveness, those holistic attributes currently lacking in the EYFS curriculum. Its knowledge-based framework devised to develop a young child’s potential for economic gain falls short of being fully comprehensive: by the time our example child is thirteen, the linear, neoliberal education stream they have followed since the age of two, is made redundant by artificial intelligence. It is fair to say the EYFS curriculum is failing the regime it was created to support.

The second consideration is the availability and viability of alternatives, options that “rather than specifying any pre-defined knowledge, skills or attitudes…empower children as active citizens, so that they can act to change their own lives.” (Siraj-Blatchford, 2008, p. 9). Within early years practice in the city of Reggio Emilia this empowerment comes from recognising each child as the “rich child born with a hundred languages: the child as a protagonist and citizen; the child of unknowable potentiality.” (Moss, 2018, p. 70). Within this approach, early years learning is a process of construction rather than transmission or reproduction, a process where adults are co-constructors who rather than request a child to complete activities to fit them within a system of understanding, focus on listening and the creation of relationships without bias of what is appropriate, accurate or aim. This remit enables wonderment, surprise and uncertainty; an open-ended divergent learning process far removed from a measurable, linear educational curriculum. In comparison to the wealth of learning this model represents the EYFS curriculum appears restricted.

Admittedly the Reggio Emilia model, a realisation of Wright’s (2007, p. 27) three key elements of desirability, viability and achievability, is worlds apart from the EYFS framework, however there are other curriculums; and some like New Zealand’s Ministry of Education’s Te Whāriki, are a waystation (Wright, 2007, p. 37), a middle ground, between two educational extremes.

Te Whāriki, New Zealand’s early years curriculum embraces many holistic attributes not seen within the EYFS. It is set out in five inclusive strands: Wellbeing, Belonging, Contribution, Communication and Exploration; very much an integrated approach different to the EYFS targeted areas. Further, New Zealand’s curriculum considers each strand as equally important and is void of the language of school readiness and developmental goals. Rather than the requirement of ‘good future progress’ (DfE, 2017, p 5) the Te Whāriki looks towards:

competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society. (MoE, 2017, p. 7).

With this the Te Whāriki of New Zealand embraces both knowledge and active citizenship within its framework, it is a pedagogy based on societal values rather than economic worth.

The existence of these alternatives to the EYFS demonstrates its incomprehensible approach to early years learning. That it is possible to highlight a practice vastly different in nature as seen in Emilio Reggio, and give a ‘middle ground’ example, crafted by the government of an economically developed nation further amplifies this perspective. However these examples just demonstrate the relative concept of a comprehensive curriculum, and there are a multitude of definitions of what this may look like. So, it is in demonstrating the failure of the EYFS through its curriculum to attain its overarching goal, i.e. realise the economic viability of children and support the regime it was created to promote, that gives justification to conclude that the EYFS is not a comprehensive curriculum for children from birth to five years.

1. Neoliberalism as defined by Oxford Reference as “A political label with multiple meanings, neoliberalism is primarily associated with the goal of reducing the role of the state” (Oxford Reference, 2019). The issues concerning neoliberal ideology are discussed here https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot .

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