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Module QF5000 essay

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HISTORICAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES OF EARLY YEARS

By Linda Fuller

The purpose of this assignment is to critique and evaluate the chosen article in terms of strengths and weakness and to demonstrate an understanding of an international educational approach to Early Years education. In addition it will explore the similarities and differences of the international approach to the current Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) working within my setting. Furthermore it will critically reflect upon the strategies within the approaches to identify possible issues and limitations of systems.

The article I have chosen is called ‘The struggle for Early Childhood Curricula: A comparison of the English Foundation Stage …show more content…

(Soler and Miller 2010, p. 60)
Throughout my career I have worked within settings that do not comply to a national curriculum as there was none, and also within settings that did. It was in 1996 that the first UK curriculum was introduced which was called ‘Desirable Outcomes’. Within the document were learning outcomes to be achieved by all children by the age of five and being a centralised system, an inspection scheme was also introduced. In this article Soler and Miller (2010) highlight how these changes were perceived to be shaping the early childhood curriculum from the outside rather than from within the early childhood community.
On the opposite side of the continuum, the Reggio Emilia approach is a programme that is centred on the principles of respect, responsibility, and community. It is based on the interests of the children through a self-guided curriculum with no early learning goals or inspections.
The article then goes on to explain how in 1999 new curriculum guidance was introduced in the UK which was entitled ‘Early Learning Goals’. It was later developed to bring in six learning areas and stepping stones that led each child towards an early learning goal. Soler and Miller (2010) research this statement further and write, that in structuring the curriculum and its assessment in this manner, the policy makers have made assumptions about where the levels begin and end for all children. My

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