I’m hoping this link takes readers to the early, early years photos I took this evening of my first grandchild. She’s not called Nick.

Enough words, if so.

I’ve often said this to trainees when they find the pace and content of the PGCE tricky in some way, and seeing my sister going the GTP makes me wonder whether the present alternatives are actually any healthier. Study where a fast pace is set by external forces generates stress, just as any working to deadlines does. What then are the possible alternatives?

The most radical would be to say that graduates should be able to teach without further qualificatory training; that they are intelligent enough to read and to pick up what they need form in-service training. The old charge at the Oxford degree ceremony Do vobis potestatem legendi “I confer on you the power to lecture” holds true, if this is the case. Instinctively I want to say it can’t mean “teach” in the sense we use it today. The transferable skills of “graduateness” may well equip people to tackle the demands of a new profession or to evaluate their professional practice differently, but do not, of themselves, constitute a sufficient understanding of child development, pedagogy, &c &c.

At the other extreme, I think, is the idea that only a rigorously regulated, top-down training prepares the untested for the requirements of being a government agent in education. Danger of death by a thousand folders and government initiatives follows, or at least might follow,with the trainee being seen as a recipient or information, being prepared to become a deliverer of policy.

And this is where the “If I were you” really starts to bite. A recent(ish) speech (cited in this article on outdoors education) suggsts that we need a pedagogy that is “interactive, dynamic, ethical, educational, and caring:” a tall order!

Key to the process has got be an understanding of notion of curriculum, including how we view that nebulous concept “the needs of the child,” and a definition of the role of the teacher, although the findings from recent research in New Jersey suggest that significant differences in content in training exist in US (as, perhaps, here in UK), and that issues of equity need to be addressed.

This song by MC Lars. Nothing to do with EY but it cheers me up. And any rapper who can mention Robert Venturi in a song like Spacegame gets my vote, too.

The bald answer has to be yes, of course. Not everything in a good quality Early Years centre is going to be sustained shared thinking; even the logistics of space and ratio would tend to prevent it.

Similarly – and crucially, in the context of this argument – Siraj-Blatchford et al make a telling point about staff expertise in this paragraph:

While ‘sustained shared thinking’ may be considered a necessary pre-requisite for excellent pedagogy in the early years; our analysis also shows that on its own it may be insufficient. We found examples of practitioners whose knowledge and understanding of the particular curriculum area being addressed was inadequate and this led to missed opportunities or uncertain outcomes, and this was particularly the case for the direct teaching of phonics. (p66).

Where does this insufficiency stem from? Perhaps – I almost hesitate to say – from the reverential approach to childhood that is more protective than challenging. There is a real need for practitioners and people who train them to sort out a coherent model, an ethic, perhaps, of Early Childhood Education, coupled with a need, as the report states, “to identify the pedagogic models being applied by the most effective settings and to find out how these are realised in practice.” (p40) The REPEY project report is quite clear, for example, that, while formal programmes of instruction can be “counterproductive” (p30), “participation in excellent, cognitively oriented pre-school programmes was associated with later school competence”, (p30) . If programmes are not the way – and perhaps my disquiet is around whether sustained shared thinking might not become a programme – then how do we distinguish quality practice from poor?

Time to revisit Barbara Jordan’s chapter on co-construction in Anning et al (2004) Early Childhood Education: Society and Culture and ask What are the implications (of time and space) for this approach, not so that children are followed round by quizzical “metacognitive practitioners” (a bizarre notion of the teacher/EY practitioner) but so that a balance of time and effort is given to effective instructive activity in which the child is listened to, as well as time set aside for activities in which the adult, as a competent partner, shares their enthusiasm and experetise…