Cleverlands Page 3

  However, international evidence suggests that starting formal schooling when the children are a little older makes no lasting difference to children’s later reading ability. Two cross-country reviews have been done in this area that make the most of the fact that different countries start formal schooling at different ages, ranging from age five (24 countries, including 15 small island nations18), through age six (143 countries) to age seven (38 countries). Back in 1992, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) commissioned research to examine the differences in reading ability between children in countries who’d started school at five and those who’d started school at seven. They found that by age nine, those who’d been in school for four years (having started at five) did only marginally better in reading tasks than those who’d only started learning to read just two years earlier.

  Intrigued by whether these differences completely evened themselves out as the children grew older, Sebastian Suggate, a New Zealander now based in Germany, ran an analysis using the PISA data of 54 countries (including those where children start at six). He found that by the age of 15, there were no differences in reading achievement attributable to school starting age; the two-year head start made no difference by the end of compulsory schooling.19 Now, by itself this does not imply that starting earlier is of no benefit. It might be that those countries with a later school start are actually engaging children in school-type programmes in pre-school anyway – those with highly-structured lessons, requiring children to sit still and engage with material in a particular way and to be assessed on set outcomes. I have not looked at the pre-school practices of all 54 countries, but I have looked at research comparing these types of pre-school programmes (or an early school starting age) with less formal, more play-based early-years programmes like those practiced by the Finns, and the results are pretty consistent. While academic programmes at an early age often have positive effects on academic outcomes for the first few grades, these effects tend to wash out by the time children reach the end of primary school, with the later-starters catching up, and in a few cases, even over-taking their earlier starting peers. This effect has been found within countries (Ireland, Germany, America20), between countries (Slovenia, Switzerland and England21), and in maths as well as reading.22

  At this point in my research I became a little less sceptical about the Finns’ later school start. If it made no long-term positive difference to academic outcomes, then what was the harm in play-based learning for a little longer? My scepticism left me almost23 completely when I went on to look at studies investigating the wider effects of starting formal schooling a little later, and found evidence suggesting that it could have some positive effects. For example, researchers in Denmark found that a one-year delay in the start of school (at six-and-a-half compared to five-and-a-half) dramatically reduced inattention and hyperactivity at age seven, and that this difference persisted at age 11.24 An analysis of Norwegian data found that boys who started school at an older age were less likely to have poor mental health at age 18, and that girls who started school older were less likely to become pregnant in their teenage years.25 If delaying formal schooling by one year has no long-term academic effect, but a suggestion of positive social effects, then why rush in?

  Yet to leave it there would be misleading. To leave it there might give the impression that it doesn’t really matter what children are doing before they start school, as long as they’re not starting school too early. And this is most definitely not the case. An in-depth study of 3,000 children in early years settings in England found that preschool attendance has positive outcomes on overall development (as long as it is high quality – see Box 2), that an early start (between two and three) was linked with better intellectual and social development; and that preschool is particularly beneficial for disadvantaged children.26 More specifically, attendance at preschool matters for later reading skills too; the OECD finds that ‘The difference between students who attended pre-primary… and those who have not attended pre-primary averaged 54 points in the PISA reading assessment – or more than one year of formal schooling’27 – which might be explained by the effect of high-quality preschool on early language skills.28

  Box 2: Not All Preschools are Equal

  Finnish preschools and kindergartens meet many of the criteria that have consistently been found to correlate with, or cause, high quality outcomes.

  High staff:child ratio29

  Ratios and group sizes that allow staff to interact appropriately with children are a feature of high-quality preschools. Finland’s maximum recommended ratio, at 1:7 for over threes (1:4 below that), is one of the best in the OECD.

  High staff qualifications and understanding of the curriculum30

  Settings that have staff with higher qualifications have higher quality scores and their children make more progress. In Finland, early years teaching staff need at least a diploma equivalent to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) Level 5 (undergraduate degree level), and are required to take part in subsidised professional development.

  A developmentally appropriate curriculum with educational

  content31

  Being ‘developmentally appropriate’ does not mean all activities need be child-initiated – the EPPE study found that in ‘excellent’ settings, the balance of who initiated the activities, staff or child, was equal. Finland’s early-years curriculum is based around learning goals including academic content and social skills, but these are developed through playful activities.

  What is going on here? Why doesn’t giving children an academic head start at school have a long-lasting effect on their reading and maths skills, and how can a preschool that doesn’t teach them these more advanced skills make any difference to their later development? As Finnish children don’t start formal school until seven, but attend high-quality play-based preschool before then, what we’re really asking is, ‘How can Finland’s early-years approach be working?’

  To answer this question, let us turn to the Bible (bear with me):

  A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on rock, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown. (Luke 8: 5–8)

  Suggate uses this parable of the farmer to explain the differences in effects when children are taught to read at different times.32Like scattering seeds on a path, trying to teach children to read aged one or two will be unproductive, as they don’t have the skills, the language abilities or the cognitive capacity to be able to do it yet. Like scattering seeds on a rock, teaching children to read when they’re three or four might be seemingly productive, but will take greater effort and input than waiting until they have fully developed the skills required for reading, and helping them to do so. Meanwhile, spending this time trying to teach them detracts from the time they could be using to develop the knowledge and skills that are needed (such as their awareness of letter-sound correspondences, and their vocabulary).

  The equivalent to scattering seeds onto good soil is to focus on developing children’s pre-reading skills and pre-maths skills until the soil is good (I’m stretching this analogy now, I’ll stop), and only teach and assess them on more advanced content when they’re ready for it and when they’ll pick it up more quickly. Suggate calls this the ‘Luke effect’ and this is exactly what teachers in Finland use. They encourage and allow all children to develop the necessary skills before expecting them to read. Not all children start at seven – they are assessed during kindergarten for school readiness, and if they aren’t yet ready they stay in kindergarten for another year. At the other end of the spectrum, those that are ready sooner are encouraged to read widely and given support to do so by teachers in kindergar
ten; crucially though, this is seen as an opportunity for those who are ready, rather than a requirement made of all children.

  Motivation and Variance

  Once they do start learning to read, children in Finland pick it up very quickly. I had a long chat with a young primary school teacher called Marjo-Rita after class one day, and she told me that they expect all children to be reading by Christmas of Grade 1 (after just four months of teaching). While this might be possible in Finland, they do have a distinct advantage – the Finnish language has great orthographic transparency. This means that in Finnish, sounds and the letters that represent them tend to correspond on a 1:1 basis, which can be picked up by children fairly easily with enough exposure. In English, on the other hand, the letters ‘gh’ sound different in the words ‘trough’ and ‘though’. Consequently, it will take English-speaking children longer to learn to read,33 which some have argued means it is necessary to start teaching them at a younger age. However, this doesn’t mean that children can successfully learn without the necessary foundation – the Luke effect still applies.

  Even though English-speaking children have more to learn, they still won’t be able to read and distinguish between ‘trough’ and ‘though’ unless they have first fully understood that sounds correspond to groups of letters, and it won’t do them much good anyway if they don’t know what a trough is. Teachers understand this, but if a system requires (rather than offers) too much of children too soon, they are forced to rush through the foundational stages of early learning. If you don’t see the point in waiting until the majority of the children are ready before having higher requirements for the whole year group, consider the alternative of attempting to teach all children to read graphemes such as ‘igh’ at five. Some advanced children will be ready at this stage and will pick up the idea that letters have different sounds depending on what they’re combined with. Their comprehension will still be limited by their vocabulary, and it won’t put them at any longer-term advantage, but they’ll be able to decipher what a word sounds like even if they don’t know what it means. Others who have only recently understood that letters correspond to sounds will really struggle.

  This is consistent with research suggesting that children who start learning to read earlier have less positive attitudes towards learning than their peers who started later,34 and as Cambridge professor David Whitebread points out35 – children get good at what they practise. If they enjoy reading and are motivated to read outside of school, they are more likely to become expert readers than those who were put off books by being forced to learn to read before they were ready. When I was in a Finnish primary school, I peeked my head into one classroom to see Grade 1 children silently reading to themselves. Some were reading sizable tomes, which shocked me until I went in and saw that they were reading Donald Duck comics (a big deal in Finland), bound to look like adult books.

  Kaisa Kiiveri and Kaarina Määttä at the University of Lapland asked Finnish children themselves how they felt about learning to read, right at the beginning of their first year at school, before they’d started formally learning.36 Most of the children considered themselves illiterate at this age, but said they could read ‘a little bit’. In general, children had trust in their own abilities to learn, and ‘learning was considered to be joyful’. A few correctly assessed that they could already read; that they’d taught themselves at home or with friends, and this was an enjoyable and surprising experience for them. ‘When you read for the first time, it is like… like you would go for the first time to a roller coaster; I got so madly excited then too!’

  We know that children starting school in Finland at age seven-ish have varying reading abilities. But some research also suggests that during the kindergarten years, the differences between different children’s reading abilities widen – those who started with better pre-reading skills advance more quickly during this time than the ones who start behind. Hardly a high-equity system then, you might think, but there is a bit more to it than this. Suggate’s big international review of school starting ages found that there was a tendency for there to be a greater variability amongst children’s scores in systems where they started school earlier – the opposite of what we’d expect if the widening gap between scores at preschool had a longer-term impact. The clue to this puzzle might lie in what happens once Finnish seven-year-olds do start school. Have a look at this graph (Figure 1).

  Group 1: 71 children who showed high reading levels early in kindergarten (T1).

  Group 2: 113 children who had low levels during kindergarten (T1-T2), then improved rapidly during Grade 1 (T3-T4)

  Group 3: 11 children who had low levels during kindergarten (T1-T2), and whose skills developed relatively slowly in Grade 1 (T3-T4).

  Figure 1: From Leppanen et al. (2004)37

  This is taken from a paper by Ulla Leppanen and colleagues, who measured children’s reading skills at various key points in their early education: two months into kindergarten (aged six-ish), nine months into kindergarten (six­–seven), two months into Grade 1 (seven-ish) and nine months into Grade 1 (seven–eight).38 In their analysis of the results, they clustered the children into three groups – those who had relatively high skills at the beginning of kindergarten (Group 1), those who had low levels of skill during kindergarten but improved rapidly during Grade 1 (Group 2) and those who had low levels of skill during kindergarten and improved more slowly during Grade 1 (Group 3). Although the differences between initially high performers and low performers widen during preschool, they diminish rapidly during Grade 1 due to the rapid improvement of Group 2, and more modest improvement of Group 3. Leppanen and colleagues explain this by suggesting that learning to read is a similar process for the majority of children, in which there is a rapid qualitative change from being a non-reader to a reader, followed by a slower rate of improvement during which vocabulary and comprehension expand. The difference in the timing of this rapid reading development depends on your initial skills – you need your pre-reading skills to be up to it before the rapid development happens.

  But what would happen to those in Group 2 and 3 if someone tried to get them to read before they were ready? The thick black line representing Group 2’s progress might be a bit steeper earlier on, but if they found it difficult and unpleasant, I suggest it is unlikely that their skills would accelerate in the way they do in the graph above. Group 3 would likely fare even worse. Suggate hypothesises that the greater variability in scores found in systems that start formal instruction early might well be due to the frustration or low academic self-concept of less able children, brought about when the tasks they are expected to do are overly difficult for the stage that they’re at.39 This same frustration wouldn’t affect those children who were developmentally ahead of their peers (often due to them having earlier birthdays), thus exaggerating the gap in ability.

  Finland avoids this; by 15 years of age children have one of the smallest variances in scores of all countries, due to the relatively high performance of their ‘lower’ attainers. But their late start is only part of the story.

  Special Needs Support

  Some children pick reading up quickly, but some find it hard, even at age seven, due to special needs of various kinds. When this happens, Finnish teachers get straight to it. Before they even start school, children are screened for learning difficulties to allow for early intervention. Marjo-Rita told me, ‘Students who are struggling in reading or writing have extra lessons with the class teacher. We give these once a week, before or after school, and we can also ask the special teacher to help support them if they need it.’ This is pretty special. These special teachers are trained intervention experts – they are qualified teachers who have completed further training in the kinds of difficulties students face and how to help children to overcome them, and as they don’t teach their own classes they are available to offer support where needed. ‘All the schools have these resource teachers these days; we are very lucky in that way.’
>
  However, this is not just a case of throwing money (in the form of professionals’ salaries) at the problem. Class teachers don’t just call on the special teachers to take children out whenever they have an issue – they give them as much support as they personally can first (and must record the support that they give before they can request extra help – a source of some grumbling). There are three different levels of support available to children who are struggling: general, extra and extra extra (not the official terms). General support is provided by the teacher, making use of all the strategies available to her: giving extra lessons after school, sitting the struggling child next to a more able one who can help them, offering extra support to complete tasks during the lesson and more sophisticated strategies that they learn during their teacher training. Another teacher told me, ‘Many times I think it’s about the methods, you know, you have to know the methods, you have to learn the methods. Of course you can think of ideas yourself, but it’s always easier if you’ve seen examples.’

  If after all this the child is still struggling, they get ‘frequent’ support, which includes having extra support from the special teacher once a week, and a special plan written for the student by the class teacher which they discuss with the parents. Only if all of this has not had its desired impact (of supporting the child to keep up with the rest of the class) is a different curriculum offered for one or more subjects – the assumption is that they will do everything they can to support children to access the usual, national curriculum expectations, before acknowledging that the child’s difficulties make this impossible. If the parents agree, and it is passed by the student care team, the child may then be taught in a separate, smaller class, where they can be given more attention.