Oral skills trump reading and writing in early life

In releasing her plans for childcare, Elizabeth Truss said: “Nursery staff have a job of educating. It is not just looking after children. These are the early years and they are crucial.” This has been headlined as a desire for nursery schools to teach children to read and write, and has been conflated with the new requirement for new nursery workers to have a grade C GCSE in English and mathematics.

But it’s worth analysing what she actually said. Of course the early years are crucial to children’s development, and childcare is not just “looking after” children. But it is not reading and writing that are important in the early years. Rather, it is the development of oral language, and social and physical skills. Between 18 and 30 months, children have a word spurt, moving from saying only around 50 words to 600 or more. While learning all these new words, young children explore syntax, grammar and sentence construction, making mistakes but learning as they go. All this is linked to a one-time spurt in brain development with many millions of new synapses being made every day. Under-stimulated children suffer a permanent deficit in brain structure and capacity.

So provided that the word “educating” is understood to mean oral, social and physical skills, then fine. But when the argument is extended to reading and writing, it goes too far. Exposure to picture books and drawing or having stories read are good, but they are part of broader child development, not literacy.

The new requirement for nursery teachers and childminders to have at least a grade C in the core subjects is interesting. These GCSEs are important, but they really do not assess the skills needed by childcare workers. We once employed a young woman, Amanda, to care for our two youngest children. She was a single mum herself and had no formal qualifications. She was brilliant with our children, talking with them, and providing a stimulating and varied environment. They still, nearly 30 years on, speak well of her.

I hope Truss is not being dogmatic about reading and writing. Children don’t need Gradgrindian nurseries – they get enough of that later on.

John Freeman CBE is a former director of children’s services and is now a freelance consultant

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