One of the real privileges of working with Kunskapsskolan family of schools is being able to meet with our international colleagues to explore the way we can learn together and from one another. A week ago before the most horrendous effects of Hurricane Sandy,   I met with the Education Directors from Sweden, USA, and for the first time India. We visited two schools – Bank Street on Upper West side of Manhattan and the  Kunskapsskolan’s sponsored charter school, Innovate Manhattan.

In particular we were working together to see how we can live the Kunskapsskolan Education (KED) values in a pre-primary and primary setting. This has particular resonance for India who open their pre primary and primary sections this April in Delhi.

The first visit to Bank Street was inevitably a challenge for someone hardened by too many years in secondary education. The school offers pre primary/kindergarten from children of 18 months upwards to top primary. It is also co located with Bank Street Teachers Training College which means that the college has a ready-made laboratory and the school has a regular supply of additional adults. We started with the four and five-year olds with me  sitting on a ridiculously small chair observing activity. The class was divided into four activity zones and students had decided where to work or obviously at this age ‘play’. I was particularly struck by a group of five children who were mark-making with a trainee teacher. Looking at the badge on his jacket it seemed he had an Ecuadorian heritage and was talking to them in Spanish and English.He was using both languages and switching between the two. The children obviously enjoyed the word play and seemed to understand completely.

In another corner children were looking at snails. One had the temerity to crawl off the dish onto the table. One little boy was very concerned about this snail, but the teacher kept asking him to decide what to do. It was an exercise, even at this level, of empowering young people to take responsibility.

And so as I sat down with my colleagues  to develop the KED pre primary and primary curriculum it had empowered me to think more imaginatively  as to what we might be able to expect of children of this age. This week followed a meeting in Richmond with an expert panel of primary heads who had already got me to think more radically about what young children could do. A panel who were advising the DFE about the new national curriculum for primary recently recommended  learning a language from year 4. Yet all the evidence I saw in New York, all the evidence from the primary heads in Richmond and from those children who live in bi lingual homes, is that learning a langauge as early as possible – initially through play – is where we need to be.

A few months ago I led a group of primary headteachers on a visit to Robinsonskola in Enkoping north of Stockholm. It is one of their famous outdoor schools where primary children spend  lots of time exploring out in the wood  using the natural environment for learning even in the coldest of winters. One of the ways they learn history is to live apart of the life of Stone  Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age Tribes. This means lighting fires, gathering wood, cooking outside over open fires, and using knives. I have also seen very young children work to identify clear goals for what they want to learn and reflect on what they could  do even better.

But both here in Sweden and  the USA, and also in India, they start the formality of school up to two years later than here in the UK. These early years are  totally play-based and learning is fun but still rigorous. How we can justify putting six-year olds through a national phonics test at 6 defeats me and is an embarrassment when explaining it to my colleagues.

As we build our international model we inevitably have to contextualize it to our system and I cannot escape the statutory demands, but we can build a model that is based on international best practice.  It also has to be built  on  what we know about how young people develop and focus on building personal as well as the core skills such as literacy. Those resilience and confidence skills built in pre-sevens must make them better lifelong learners.

Completely aside , I have been with our team auditing the work in Ipswich Academy this last week. It was great to see the progress over the last 6 months. But the great challenge here is that over two-thirds of the students arriving at 11 have reading ages more than two years below their chronological age – in other words without really having functional literacy. Teachers also have to work really hard to encourage group work and learning talk where many students even at 14 and 15 still do not have the collaborative and team skills necessary for effective group work.

Many of these young people will have been identified as being behind through the whole of their school careers. Catch up classes and well-meaning interventions, will have been pushed their way.  We have to intervene, but my recent primary experiences implores  me to focus as much on exciting learning experiences such as at Robinsonskola which develop teamwork and resilience, problem solving and creativity whilst encouraging early numeracy and literacy skills.

Whilst in New York I was reading the writings and thoughts of E.D Hirsch. His two books “Cultural Literacy” and “What Your 1st Graders Need to Know” ar receiving much prominence at the moment championed by the Secretary of State. Hirsch’s basic message is that there is important subject matter content that all students need to learn that this content should be appropriately sequenced, uniformly paced and that its achievement should be objectively measured. Sequencing has to do with the logic of the subject matter and not the “age readiness” of the child, a concept which he dismisses with considerable scorn. Thus Hirsch’s curriculum is content driven. Children need to master the simpler
elements of this content before they can move on to the more complex ones, and  all children at a certain grade should receive this material at approximately the same time without wasteful repetition from one year to the next. Children must learn fundamental content regardless of the methods used to teach it. He rejects the idea that students can learn the tools of inquiry, or how to know, without learning the content entailed in specific subjects and he defends the use of memory and repeated practice feeling that they have been neglected because of an overemphasis on progressive education.

Do you think we might have both? I think there is much to ED Hirsch’s thinking about sequencing knowledge and we should ensure young people know things. I am not just advocating a rich experiential curriculum. I know from my own grandchildren how knowing things is important and can be motivating. My five-year old grandson has been “into” space for the last year. What he can’t tell you about the solar system is nobody’s business. We have to do more than rely on what young people discover, there has to be a sub text of knowledge made relevant by rich learning experiences.

This is going to be an interesting journey. I am convinced there is no dichotomy between having a structured approach to knowledge acquisition and giving a rich range of experiences initially through play. No dichotomy between  building personal skills and being able to read write and communicate. We just need to be ambitious for our  children and involve them as partners in their learning, setting goals and reviewing progress. We need to be especially careful in those early years to keep the fun in learning and to encourage them; they are all ready at different stages and develop at varying rates in staccato fashion. For me this is an amazing journey of discovery and a great opportunity to live our KED values with a wider age range. Watch this space.