The "UN Convention on the Rights of the Child" is one of the most widely-ratified human rights treaties, yet the visibility of children in the early years, in the mandatory government reports to the "UN Committee on the Rights of the Child" and in the Committee's concluding observations to States Parties, is relatively low…

This article highlights the findings of an empirical research project, using an ethnographic approach, taking place over one academic year. It investigates the different forms of engagement that children may present, when acting in free play situations in a nursery in NW England, without direct adult intervention. This range of engagement includes…

Nursery experience is now common for young children and their families. Questions of quality have focussed mainly on safety and early learning. The roles of subtle emotional processes in daily pedagogic interactions have received surprisingly little attention. This paper discusses the Tavistock Observation Method (TOM), a naturalistic method of…

Historically underpinning principles of the English curriculum framework for children from birth to five years explicitly acknowledged a spiritual dimension to children's uniqueness and well-being. Yet spirituality receives scant reference in the discourse of creative learning and teaching. This paper considers the relationship of spirituality to…

This article troubles the established discourse of free choice and free play in early childhood education, and develops post-structural approaches to theorising children's agency in the context of institutional and relational power structures. It is widely accepted that planning a curriculum based on children's needs, interests and patterns of…

"Exploration" is recognised as research behaviour; anecdotally, as an early years' teacher, I witnessed many young children exploring. However, young children's self-initiated explorations are rarely regarded as research by adult researchers and policy-makers. The exclusion of young children's autonomous explorations from recognition as…

This paper explores the contribution of James Bryce as an Assistant Commissioner to the Taunton Commission from 1865 to 1868. It highlights his criticisms of the English middle class and of middle-class education represented in the endowed grammar schools of Lancashire, England. These criticisms were based partly on finely detailed observation of…

In recent years there has been an unprecedented increase in support staff in schools in England and Wales. There were widespread expectations that this will be of benefit to teachers and pupils but there has been little systematic research to address the impact of support staff. This study used a naturalistic longitudinal design to investigate the…

This paper outlines the role that Forest School can play in children's development. With over 100 Forest Schools in England, 20 in Scotland and 20 in Wales, this concept is growing across Britain. Forest School involves children having regular contact with woodland over an extended period of time; it allows them to become familiar, and have…

The quality of care offered in four different types of non-parental child care to 307 infants at 10 months old and 331 infants at 18 months old was compared and factors associated with higher quality were identified. Observed quality was lowest in nurseries at each age point, except that at 18 months they offered more learning activities. There…

From its inception, the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC) project included an explicit intention to identify some principles for the enhancement of learning cultures in order to improve student and teacher learning, and a wish to see how effective different strategies could be in this endeavour. The project showed that both…

In this paper we develop our theory of "Bi-numeracy" and show the importance of children's own invented symbolism. Most studies to date have concentrated on the analysis of children's number representations in clinically set-up tasks (Hughes, 1986; Sinclair, 1988; Munn, 1994). These studies have added to our knowledge of and…

Interdisciplinary collaboration with other professionals was the theme of a preservice training activity in England in which 18 students enrolled in a teacher training program for learning difficulties were paired with students of speech and language pathology to observe, discuss, and assess a severely disabled child in the school setting. (JW)

A one-year project was conducted by the Training, Enterprise, and Education Directorate to evaluate the effectiveness of a learning program at a northwest England Skillcenter for developing nonmanual skills in unemployed adults. Interviews with 30 trainees and training workplace observations identify strengths and weaknesses of this continually…

Observing young children learning is an indispensable part of teaching in the early years and this is clearly acknowledged in the "Curriculum guidance for the foundation stage." It is through observing and assessing learning that one can find out what children know and what skills and concepts they appear to have acquired. In this…