Ready school 34

‘Making schools ready for children’ embodies another approach to building a relationship between early childhood and primary education. It arises from a critical questioning of the traditional school – which typically remains anachronistic in its responses to challenges of globalisation – and ‘whether it needs to change its ways, both to better meet the needs of children and in response to a changing world’ (Moss, 2008: 221). A ‘ready school’ perspective also questions the one-sidedness of the school readiness conception of educational success, which places the cause of school difficulty and failure on children as well as their families’ inability to efficiently help them meet the expectations of school.

The ready school model of relationship therefore stresses the need for recognising and appreciating the learning children bring with them into primary school (Alexander, 2010). It emphasises the school’s adaptation to the child’s developmental needs, focuses on the school’s accessibility as well as characteristics of the school environment that can encourage or hinder learning. It recognises that schools carry a major responsibility for every child’s success and gives attention to aspects such as school leadership and environment, curricula,

teacher training and support, and parental and community involvement. It also advocates that the first years of primary school adopt pedagogical methods and materials used in ECE in order to facilitate transition and make primary schools more welcoming and familiar for children (Kaga, 2008).

Drawing from the definition put forward by the National Education Goals Panel (Shore, 1998), Ackerman and Barnett (2005) highlight three main features of a ‘ready school’:

1. Provide necessary support to children: A ‘ready school’ is attentive to the cultural, linguistic or contextual constraints that can make children’s adjustment to school difficult, and is attentive to individual children’s needs. It strives to make a link to children’s previous ECE experiences and to adjust the teaching and learning environment accordingly. It has positive expectations about children’s abilities to learn and succeed in school regardless of their socio-economic or linguistic backgrounds.

2. Fine-tune programmes: A ‘ready school’ avoids one-size-fits-all approaches to learning and teaching. It takes professional development of all staff who interact with children and families seriously, encourages them to adapt programmes to children’s needs, and facilitates parental involvement in supporting their learning. It also takes responsibility for each child’s success and determines the most appropriate ways to assess individual children’s progress.

3. Mobilise necessary resources: A ‘ready school’ has strong and articulate leadership with the ability to determine which resources the school needs. It sees that children can benefit from support outside the school, including health care, nutrition and social services, library and museums, and seeks collaborations with providers of such services.

Vandenbroeck et al (2013) propose, based on their research involving parents of ethnic minority children in ECE in Belgium, a school readiness premised on welcoming ‘a unique child’, who is not ‘an average child’ but who will have similarities and differences compared with the ‘average’ children primary schools have had so far; a child with a family that will resemble and also differ from the families they know. A child, therefore, is ‘fundamentally unpredictable’. For schools to be ready for that child ‘means being ready for unpredictability and uncertainty and, consequently, being ready to search and to research what ECE may mean for this child and for his family’ (2013: 273). The importance of working with parents as an essential feature of a ‘ready school’ is also shown in a study by Liz Brooker (2002) of 16 4- year-old children from low-income households in the UK. She concluded that the school ethos and the pedagogical discourse of the classroom positioned these children as unable, and that

the rich social and cultural capital that children had available to them from home and family on school entry was useful knowledge only when the inclusion of that capital was negotiated into the classroom. Often, this negotiation had to be facilitated by the children’s families (cited in Carr, 2013: 150).

In contrast to the ‘schoolifying’ tendency in the school readiness model of relationship, the ready school model is inclined to favour primary schools adopting some of the pedagogical strengths of ECE, such as attention to well-being, emphasis on the natural learning strategies of the child (e.g. play, active and experiential learning and personal investigation), and avoidance of child measurement and ranking (Bennett, 2006) at least in the first years of primary schooling. An upward influence from early childhood to primary education is advocated, In Sweden, when preschool was moved into the education sector in 1996, the then prime minister Göran Persson spoke of ECE as the first stage towards translating the vision of lifelong learning into reality and that ‘preschool should influence at least the early years of compulsory schooling’ (Martin Korpi, 2005). Similarly, in Norway, school reforms that reduced the age of starting compulsory school from 7 to 6 years involved a discussion of the need for kindergarten pedagogy to have greater influence on the school: the new first grade for 6-year-olds previously in kindergarten was intended to be significantly distinct from the ‘traditional’ school pedagogy by being based on kindergarten pedagogy, while the subsequent four grades were to integrate the traditions of both the kindergarten and school, accompanied by an emphasis on exploration and learning through play, and introducing only gradually subject-oriented teaching (Moser, 2007).

Other examples of the ready school model of relationship include close collaboration between the ‘feeder’ nurseries and primary schools to establish curricular and social continuity in order to respond to individual children’s needs in Denmark (Broström, 2002, cited in Fabien and Dunlop, 2006: 12). In this effort, school teachers learned about the interest of individual children through meetings with nursery staff and sharing photographs, drawings, favourite stories of children; and facilitated opportunities to make the transition with friends, which worked positively on their emotional well-being and confidence to approach new challenges in new environments. In North Carolina, in the USA, the State Board of Education, together with various stakeholders, defined 14 items (e.g. physical environment of the classroom, the curriculum, the services offered, collaboration with parents) that can help assess the readiness of schools as part of a broad readiness framework (Ackerman and Barnett, 2005). In the ready school model of relationship, the image of ECE is not as a subordinate, but as an active collaborator, an advisor and partner for primary education. While this model appears more positive for children and their families, it is acknowledged that ECE’s purpose of readying children does not have to be dismissed. Regarding the function of readying children by ECE, Vandenbroeck et al (2013) state that ‘[f]or some families, this is precisely what they

expect. Some immigrant families, for instance, do not choose child care as a ‘home away from home’, but precisely because it differs from the home: it is a place for learning the dominant language and for socializing their children, holding out the prospect of integration and social capital… whether ECE has this function or not, and especially how this function is shaped in practice, is the result of on-going negotiations between local communities, practitioners, management and policymakers – and parents’ (2013: 273). Moss (2013) points out:

Educators who contest the dominant discourse, such as those in Reggio Emilia, do not dismiss literacy or other icons of school readiness. Rather, they place them into a wider context of multiple languages, which together contribute to rich learning by a rich child; and argue that literacy and numeracy call for ‘theoretical perspectives and didactical tools that align themselves and are closer to children’s own strategies for engaging’ with these particular languages (Olsson, forthcoming). Similarly, we need not dismiss all predetermined outcomes; rather, it is important to keep open a space where movement and experimentation, lines of flight and unexpected directions can thrive, a space for outcomes that are not predetermined, that are unexpected, that provoke surprise and wonder’ (2013: 64-5).

Today’s conceptions of ready children and ready schools increasingly recognise that readiness of children and that of school systems are two sides of the same coin (Woodhead, 2007). The National Education Goals Panel of the USA explicitly states that reinforcing achievement necessitates both getting children ready for school and getting schools ready for the children they serve (Shore, 1998). Brown (2010: 137) states that the ‘interactionist approach’ to defining readiness – which understands readiness as a ‘bidirectional concept’ constructed from the child’s contribution to schooling and the school’s contribution to the child – is the frame used in the current research in ECE in the US as well as across the globe.