Early Years and Primary Education

Improving physical development through movement and physical activity

• Carol Archer
• Iram Siraj

Physical development is a key component of the curriculum but so far there has been no valid means of assessing the pedagogical or environmental quality of the child’s physical experience. The Movement Environment Rating Scale (MOVERS) does so, using the methodology established by the popular ECERS-E and SSTEW rating scales.

Possibility Thinking in the Early Years

• Linda McConnon

This book shows how using Possibility Thinking (PT) is at the heart of young children’s creativity. It traces the verbal and non-verbal communication, collaboration and identity development of a girl and two boys as they use PT in their art and crafts practice during their first three years in school.

Sustained Shared Thinking and Emotional Well-being (SSTEW) Scale for 2–5-year-olds provision

• Iram Siraj
• Denise Kingston
• Edward Melhuish

Based on high-quality pedagogy and developed for the use of teaching staff and managers, the Sustained Shared Thinking and Emotional Well-being (SSTEW) Scale can be used alongside other environment scales (including ECERS-E, ECERS-R or ITERS-R) to give a more complete picture of what high-quality early childhood education and care can look like.

An international perspective

• David Brody

Few men work in day-care settings or nursery schools, yet they are acclaimed as gifted educators and excellent caregivers. These personal narratives of six unusually talented men from various countries who have worked with young children for years illustrate what attracts men to work with young children and how to retain them in early years’ work.

A professional learning resource

• Elaine Hallet

This book and DVD will support practitioners in reflecting upon leadership of learning in early years and practice, review their own leadership style and consider areas for development. The DVD provides examples of current professional leadership practice in a variety of early years settings.

Vision, community and curriculum for primary education in the twenty-first century

• Jane Reed
• Kathy Maskell
• David Allinson
• Rosemary Bailey
• Fernanda Bates
• Sian Davies
• Catherine Gallimore

This is a topical study of innovative and original practice in three primary schools. It aims to illustrate how they have made their schools successful. After an introduction and a background chapter colleagues describe the vision for their school, how it has come about and how they are putting it into practice in adventurous and exciting ways. Secondly, they describe their local context, who they serve and how they have revisited their purpose as a result of getting to understand more about their local area and setting. Thirdly, they give a picture of how they conceptualise, plan and implement their curriculum and design adventurous learning. Their primary focus is to create real learning for life – life as it is now and also life in the future and a broader view of the learning experiences and skills children need to be citizens in the world as it will be in their adult lifetime. It looks at the ways in which the three schools have taken the power to make decisions about their school improvement priorities in ways that give their pupils a central and active rather than tokenistic role. It is about learning and leadership for everyone including the pupils. ‘The Adventurous School’ is characterised in the book as one that is creative and ingenious, develops a confident spirit and a hardy disposition, has a map and planned routes but is not rigid about the journey, is evolutionary, travels with others, takes risks, is questing, questioning and enquiring and is there for something more than itself.

Equality and Autonomy in Voluntary Organisation

• Ann Henderson

The playgroup movement reached 50 in 2011, yet the Pre-school Playgroups Association which founded it failed after 30 years. The reasons for its failure, explored here, are crucial because PPA embodied many qualities that government and policy makers to achieve right now, tapping reserves of learning potential in children and whole communities.

• Margaret M. Clark
• Stanley Tucker

How is the nature of childhood changing? What challenges do children face as they grow up? This book examines: the impact of new technologies, policy, and early education; poverty, changing family circumstances and living in care; and case studies of childhood in certain African countries, the UK, US, Australia, and, Western and Eastern Europe.

• Kathy Sylva
• Iram Siraj-Blatchford
• Brenda Taggart

The ECERS-E is an instrument for measuring quality in literacy, numeracy, science and diversity as observable in pre-school in relation to child cognitive and social/behavioural developmental outcomes for children age 3-5. This book offers guidance on providing a quality environment in which young children and their learning can flourish.

Listening to Learners of Mathematics at Secondary School and Above

• John Mason
• Jenny Houssart
• Alan Graham

Reports on what is gained by listening to school students, undergraduates and adult learners. Suitable for secondary teachers, classroom assistants, adult numeracy tutors and lecturers, and for people preparing for these roles, this book considers the place of learners’ voices in their own future teaching.