The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) (DfE, 2017) and its Development Matters guidance (Early Education, 2012) is deeply rooted within Developmental Psychology, Psycho-Social Development and the work of Piaget (1951; 1952), Bronfenbrenner (1994), Vygotsky (see Giardiello, 2014; Smidt, 2011) etc. Indeed, such developmentalism has long dominated Early Childhood Education (ECE) (Wood and Hedges, 2016; Ang, 2014; Lewis, 2018), generalising the typical “scientific child” (Moss, 2019, p. 52) as “becoming” adult “being” (Lee, 2001, p. xiv; Prout and James, 1997; Qvortrup, 1994; Uprichard, 2008) on a “ladder-like progression to maturity” (Moss, 2019, p. 49; Whitebread, 2012; Meggit, 2012; Crowley, 2017).

Maintaining society’s long-standing subscription to “the capitalist treadmill” (Huckle, 2010, p. 136), education has long taken a functionalist stance (Askew and Carnell, 1998; Barton and Walker, 2007; Parsons, 2012; Durkheim, 1956), acculturating “the child as future citizen” (Lewis, 2018, p. 4) with “cultural capital” (Ofsted, 2019, p. 9; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990, p. 11; Bartlett and Burton, 2012; Ward and Eden, 2009; Ballentine and Spade, 2012), with ECE “readying children for school and, eventually employment” (DfE, 2013, p. 6). Producing “human capital” (Becker, 1993, p. 1) for “the global labour market” (DfE, 2014, para. 8; Tomlinson, 2005; Ball, 2012; Moss, 2014; 2019; Dahlberg et al, 2007), UK government aspires to raise the “best educated young people of any nation” (DfE, 2014, para. 5) amidst international league tables (PISA (OECD, 2018a) and IELS (OECD, 2018b), to “compete and win in the global race” (DfE, 2014, para. 5; Ofsted, 2017; DfE, 2013).

Together, the EYFS and Development Matters (non-statutory but widely accepted as part of the early years ‘curriculum’) infer a comprehensive ‘curriculum’ of age and stage expectations for typical development, correlating almost perfectly with those considered ‘best practice’ in both the Child Development field (Meggit, 2012; DfE, 2017; Cottle and Alexander, 2012; Crowley, 2017) and in Neuroscience (Rushton, 2011).

However, through Neoliberalism and its notion that “unregulated markets will, of their own accord, fund unimprovable results for all participants” (Smith and Doyle, 2013, online), marketisation, businessification and commodification has forced ECE into ‘economy drive’ (Dahlberg et al, 2007; Moss, 2019; 2014), policing it with “terrors of performativity” (Ball, 2003: 215; 2012) and infecting dominant discourse with a totalising, reductionist, ruthlessly positivistic governmentality (Foucault, 1982; MacNaughton, 2005; Cohen, 2008), in which “anything which cannot be measured cannot matter” (Moss, 2014, p. 1).

Abandoning modernity’s hallowing of such objective, nomothetic, deterministic and generalisable truth, acknowledging the “socially constituted, historically embedded and valuationally based” nature of knowledge (Lather, 1991, p. 52;), Social-Constructionism and its advocates (Burr, 2003; Crotty, 1998; Berger and Luckman, 1966) have spelled the downfall of positivist developmentalism and its nomothetic trajectories of ‘typical development’ (Dahlberg et al, 2007; Moss, 2014; 2019).

Policy making becomes a political and value laden process (Ang, 2014; Wood and Hedges, 2016; Wood, 2013; Moss, 2019; Basford, 2019; Newell 2014; Edwards 2003), with those who accrue power for supposedly “thinking right” (Olsson, 2013, p. 231, emphasis added) upholding only their own “regimes of truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 133; MacNaughton, 2005), accrediting only their own versions of “cultural capital” (Ofsted, 2019; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990, p. 11), and pursuing their own personalised “conceptions of ideal humanity” (Newell, 2014, p. 2; Lewis, 2018; Dahlberg et al, 2007; Moss, 2014; Ang, 2014). Unfortunately for practitioners, parents and children, as Foucault (1979, p.27) describes, “power produces knowledge”, “it produces reality” (1979, p. 194).

In practice, despite the Development Matters framework (Early Education, 2012, p. 6) claiming that “Children develop at their own rates, and in their own ways”, that “the development statements and their order… should not be used as checklists”, practitioners traversing the unforgiving mire of developmentalist totalism and neoliberal performativity find themselves “caught between a rock and a hard place” (Bashford, 2019; p. 779-780). Wrestled into compliance as “policy puppets” (Bashford, 2019; 779-780), as “technician[s]” in the classroom “processing plant” (Moss, 2019, p. 53), practitioners trade in progressive pedagogy for a technicism of mechanised instruction and reductionist box-ticking, “follow[ing] prescribed steps to achieve prescribed outcomes” (Moss, 2019, p. 53; Canning, 2011; Mohammed, 2014; Silberfeld and Horsely, 2014; Roberts- Holmes, 2013; Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury, 2016; Rogers, 2011; Dahlberg et al, 2007).

Whilst the EYFS (DfE, 2017, p. 9) seems, at first glance, to valorise play as “essential for children’s development”, the prevailing “discourse of instrumentalism” (Rogers, 2011, p. 7) has seen what Rogers (2011, p. 5; 2010) describes as the “pedagogisation” of play. “[A]ppropriated by the structures of schooling” (Rogers, 2011: 5) into something “planned” and “purposeful” (DfE, 2017, p. 9), inherently adult free, agentic, iterative and erratic (Smidt, 2011; Giardiello, 2014, Rogers, 2011; Wood, 2014; Sellers, 2013; Gol-Guven, 2017; Mohammed, 2014; Kuschner, 2012), play has been hijacked by developmentalist, functionalist, adult-centric ideals (Canning, 2011; Sellers, 2013), commodified “as an educational tool” (Rogers, 2011a, p. 14) and universalised as “a vehicle for teaching” (Dockett, 2011: 32; Brock, 2014; Gol-Guven, 2017).

Indeed, behind the EYFS’ façade of progressivism and play based pedagogy, there persists an audacious, bigoted adultism; “adults know what is best” (Silberfeld and Horsley, 2014, p. 16) and can plan play to coerce children into evidencing the Development Matters standards (Wood, 2013; Early Education, 2012), occasioning what Dadds (2014, p. 173) describes as the ““hurry-along” curriculum”. Here, children are lured in, take the bait and tick the box before being ushered off to the next ‘invitation to (dis)play’ (Woods, 2013; 2014; Silberfeld and Horsley, 2014; Rogers, 2011). Pedagogy is reduced to the technical prosaic of ‘quality control’, upholding the schedule for product completion, as homogenised ‘human capital’ passes along the production line conveyor (Wood and Hedges, 2016; Dahlberg et al, 2007; Moss, 2019). There is little time for quality play experiences, agency or interaction (Mohammend, 2014; Canning, 2011; Roberts-Holmes, 2013; Cottle and Alexander, 2012; Wood and Hedges, 2016), and, ironically, no time for the “unique child” (DfE, 2017, p. 6; Early Education, 2012, p. 4).

Thus it becomes clear: whilst the EYFS itself appeases practitioners and parents with warm words of flexibility and practitioner agency, as yet another pawn for politicians’ ceaseless “strategic manoeuvring” (Lewis, 2018, p. 3; Ang, 2014), beneath this cheap veneer and waiting in the wings lays a tightly bound, slyly designed web of interrelated ‘policy levers’ (school readiness (Ofsted, 2017; Neaum, 2016; Moss, 2013), setting competition, OFSTED inspection frameworks (Ofsted, 2019), guidance documents (Ofsted, 2015; DfE, 2013; STA, 2019) etc.) which, the government knows, when compounded by the ruthless inhumanity of neoliberalism (Cottle and Alexander, 2012; Dahlberg et al, 2007; Moss, 2019), will bind-the-hands of practitioners, making their dictatorial agenda of human capital production, developmentalism and economism entirely inescapable (Lewis, 2018).

Ultimately however, with Social Constructionism undermining the EYFS’ developmentalist justification for the curriculum’s ‘worthwhile knowledge’, and with critical scrutiny exposing government’s valuational discourse and political “manoeuvring”, a post-humanist lens calls the very concept of curriculum into question.

Setting aside dominant “regimes of truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 133) as merely one specific territorialisation within a post-structural, rhizomatic reality (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) in which all components of reality proliferate in a state of ongoing organic “intra-action” (Barad, 2003, p. 815), in which “things ‘are’ because they are in relation to and influencing each other” (Murris, 2016, p. 12), knowledge is evolved rather than elucidated, created rather than curated, with each minuscule moment/happening mattering in/to its own inexorably contextual, rhizo-situated and wildly unpredictable body of truths (Barad, 2003; Moss, 2019; Sellers, 2013; Murris, 2016; Deleuze and Guattari, 2004).

In this, we reinterpret the early years classroom as “a mutual contagion… forming momentary, unstable learning assemblages” (Pederson, 2015, para. 2; Murris, 2016; Sellers, 2013), as a site of generativity and potentiality (Bracher, 2006; Sellers, 2013).  Shifting away from “the one who knows” asserting dominance over “the one who does not” (Taguchi, 2010, p. 17), together, we are forever (re/e)mergeing from/in/to the curriculum (Sellers, 2013). Every child, every actor in the web, bears an onto-epistemological right to self-author-ise its own truths, forever “be(com)ing” in a state of autopoiesis (Sellers, 2013, p. 15; Murris, 2016; Pederson, 2015; Barad, 2003).

For Sellers (2013, p. 1) then, the traditional notion of curriculum, a body of knowledge to be relayed chunk by chunk (Tanner and Tanner, 1980), can no longer be valid. Rather, we must come to view “curriculum as processual, as a lived experience” as “less of a thing and more about happening” (Sellers, 2013, p. 1). We may no longer set out pre-determined goals, ages or stages (Sellers, 2013); there is “no end other than the processual condition. Process is both means and end” (Sellers, 2013, p. 113). “[A]s the child becomes curriculum, curriculum becomes the child” (Sellers, 2013: 33); as Dewey (1902, p. 9) suggests, “the child is the starting-point, the centre, and the end. His [sic] development, his growth, is the ideal. It alone furnishes the standard”.

 

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