Education: Early Years

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 8th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on securing this debate and introducing it so well. Common sense tells us that early years lay the foundations of our intellectual and moral life. If you go beyond common sense and look at research, it confirms what common sense tells us. Obviously, there are some important disagreements among researchers about which early years are more important. A Freudian will say that the important period is between one and two, while Adler and Jung will say that it is between three and four. But that need not concern us. They are all agreed that early years, whichever they happen to be, are important in shaping the adult’s life afterwards.

There is also some disagreement about whether remedial action afterwards can wipe out the damage done in the early years and how effectively it can do that. However, there is agreement among researchers that a good early start is the best policy and that any form of remedial action must be extensive and is inevitably extremely costly. It therefore makes a lot of sense to concentrate on early years rather than to hope that the damage will be wiped out by what we might do to children at a later stage. Early years shape an individual’s life at various levels. They cultivate cognitive skills, train the mind, develop social skills, especially conflict management, between two and three year-olds, which can stand them in good stead when they grow up, and introduce a measure of self-discipline and good habits as to how to organise work, study and life.

The home environment is exceedingly important and plays a crucial role, but it is not enough, because home has a certain intimacy and does not have the kind of impersonality that the school has. Furthermore, a home environment of the right kind is not always available to socially disadvantaged groups. For all these reasons, high-quality pre-school provisions are extremely important, but they are effective and can deliver on their promise only if they satisfy four criteria. First, they must involve parents actively or, if they do not involve them, at least keep them informed about what is going on. Then there is no radical break between the home and the school and between the parental culture and that of the school. All research has shown that parents generally find their association with pre-school provision extremely helpful. It is known that parents who are associated with pre-school provisions generally use less harsh discipline, provide a cognitively more stimulating environment and engage in greater dialogue with their children.

The second condition that pre-school education must meet has to do with something very important, which the term “pre-school” itself tends to obscure. It seems to suggest that what goes on between two and four or two and five is simply a way to keep children preoccupied or is a stepping stone to what goes on in school. To talk about pre-school is to imply that these years have no value in themselves; that they are not autonomous but simply a stepping stone to what happens in primary school, which would therefore decide what goes on in pre-school. Pre-school provisions have their own value and require their own pedagogy, and it is quite important that they should be recognised as having their own social status and command their own respect.

The third condition that pre-school education has to meet has to do with qualified teachers. It is not an area that can be handled by anybody and everybody, and teachers must be qualified up to level 3. They should also be sympathetic to children and they must find ways in which to combine formal teaching with informal teaching. Education at the pre-school level must be child-centred, but that should not mean reducing oneself to the level of a child, as if adults should abdicate their responsibility for educating the child. It should also be easier for teachers engaged in pre-school to acquire qualified teacher status, looking on it as one avenue through which one can acquire that status.

The final condition that pre-school education has to meet is of the following nature. It should aim at curricular content and information but also at certain basic skills and attitudes. Equally important, in a culturally diverse society such as ours, is to get children to feel at ease with the diversity that prevails in society at large. Very often, racist attitudes spring up at that level, when they are reinforced at home. Children notice differences of gender, race and religion. The important question is how they construct, conceptualise and respond to those differences. That is where pre-school education has a very important role to play in countering prejudices that might develop in future. If pre-school education is to play that role, we should also concentrate on the adequate representation of gender and race in the staff in those schools—and by staff I mean not only the teaching staff but the managerial staff.

These basic facts have been grasped by Scandinavian countries, particularly Finland, whose educational system obviously is the envy of the world. If they are properly organised, pre-school educational provisions can also help us overcome class divisions, create a broad sense of social mixing and equality as well as enhance educational performance, and ensure that we produce socially well adjusted men and women.