ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will discuss a series of projects in preschool units in Scotland undertaken during the early 1970s. These have received less publicity than those in England; yet they are significant, particularly because of their collaborative nature, not common at that time. A local authority in Scotland, Dunbartonshire, invited me to undertake research on their developing nursery education; this they funded jointly with the Scottish Education Department (SED). The first school opened in 1970, quickly followed by four other schools on the same open plan, and a nursery class attached to a primary school, all in areas of multiple deprivation. Each school as it was opened joined the project. Our studies developed partly from the ideas of the researchers and partly from our meetings with the head teachers, whom we encouraged to raise issues about nursery education and topics they would like us to investigate. Rather than a single large project we undertook a number of smaller studies, some of which were published as articles; all, including an associated parental participation study in another county, are reported in Studies in Preschool Education (Clark and Cheyne 1979). By working in close collaboration with the staff we were able to provide
them with insights, leading them on occasion to modify their practice. We helped them develop written records for training staff, and encouraged and supported them in their observation of individual children, helping them to appreciate the differences in children’s apparent language competence in a variety of settings, including during tests. We were not seen as a threat, as were some researchers at that time, rather as a support to practitioners, many of who were new to working in preschool education. As a consequence of the information from our observations in some instances they reconsidered the available choices of activities and the placement of adults within the nursery to ensure that all children had a range of experiences during their time there. Not only were we able to observe children at a given point in time, we were also able to observe some children over their 2 years in nursery, comparing the
choices of activities of the boys and girls, and of older and younger children. At that time parents did not tend to be present in the nursery schools; indeed the design of the new nursery schools made it very difficult for head teachers who did wish to encourage parents to be present. One head teacher, aware of the value of involving the parents, appealed for funds for an extension to provide space for parents. I obtained secondment for an educational psychologist, Bill Donachy, who
was working with very disadvantaged parents and their preschool children in a neighbouring county; this enabled him to join our team and extend his research. His pioneering work attracted a great deal of attention, and later when he moved to Northern Ireland he was able to introduce his ideas when working with parents and young children there also. His programme included lending books to the parents of preschool children, these they were encouraged to share with their young children. They were given supportive materials and also met for informal discussions with other mothers in the primary school that their children would soon attend. Initially Donachy supplied toys, but found that books stimulated better discussion. Through co-operation from health visitors he had been able to include ‘hard to reach’ parents whose children were unlikely to have attended preschool education. His extended project was a balanced experimental design, with control groups, nursery and non-nursery children with and without the programme. In order to assess any effects on the children he used a number of standardized language tests. Not only were there significant effects on the children’s development after an intervention of 4 months, but also the project raised the self-esteem of these mothers and changed the attitude of some of the teachers in the primary school to these families (Donachy 1976 and 1979). I appreciate how much nursery education has changed over the intervening
years, and the wealth of research that is now available. I have therefore selected only one of our projects to discuss here, that of interest in books and stories in children attending one of the nursery schools in which we worked. It has become increasingly common to assess young children either in
preschool settings or shortly after their entry to primary school, and for a variety of purposes. I am sure you will be able to think of many such assessments. Many of the judgements made and assumptions of reliability of the measures in the settings in which they take place are overstated, even on occasion naı¨ve. During these researches we assessed young children in many different ways, and as we did so we became aware of the many problems in making reliable assessments of young children. The second part of this chapter discusses the insights we gained during this research.
