Improving the quality of early education matters: it’s positive for every child, and especially important for socio-economically disadvantaged children. Research evidence tells us that high-quality interactions are the beating heart of effective early education.
So how do we go about putting that evidence into action, when there are so many challenges facing practitioners in the early years?
What do we mean by high-quality interactions?
There are two well-evidenced strategies which we can use moment-by-moment to improve children’s enjoyment and achievement in their early years:
- Back-and-forth conversation with children to promote their communication and extend their thinking and learning
- Using scaffolding so that children can succeed in a task which is currently too difficult for them to do on their own
Experienced practitioners can make high-quality interactions look natural and effortless. But they are not easy to do well.
So, how can we help all staff, including our newest and least experienced team members, to improve the quality of their interactions with children?
We’re delighted to introduce our new guide, Improving early education through high-quality interactions. In it, we explain that increasing the number of conversational turns children experience is important but not sufficient to ensure that all children become confident and capable talkers and learners. Research evidence suggests that it is the quality of conversation which matters most, not just the quantity. ‘Scaffolding’ is one of the most important techniques we can use to improve the quality of interactions, to help children develop their thinking and learning.
With our new ‘STAIRS approach’, we are providing educators with a simple and memorable set of strategies to embed research evidence about scaffolding into everyday practice.
How can we act on the evidence?
Every child should have the opportunity to thrive and succeed in the early years and beyond, regardless of their background. But having ambitious aims and knowing about good practice doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement. We need to change what we do every hour, every day, for every child.
When we consider that children eligible for free school meals are already an average of 4.6 months behind other children by the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage, that’s a big challenge for all of us in the early years. We need to keep on the journey of improvement. High-quality interactions are a guiding principle for all our work in the early years.
Acting on the evidence means we:
- Model effective practice, like the ShREC and STAIRS approaches, to show colleagues exactly what high-quality interactions can look like
- Check in on colleagues, highlighting when they’re interacting positively to help children learn, and sensitively offering feedback on how to improve
- Keep it up, so that ShREC and STAIRS are embedded in everyday practice
Sustaining our efforts to put evidence into action every day isn’t fast and it isn’t simple, but it is crucially important.