1. Context

1.1 Introduction

The Early Years Enriched Curriculum Project was conceived as the result of a number of different strands of activity undertaken by a variety of groups of people. The groups in question were:

• A group of school principals and early-years teachers in a socially disadvantaged area of Belfast, Northern Ireland, whose schools had participated in the Greater Shankill Early Years Project (Sheehy, Trew, Rafferty, McShane, Quiery & Curran 2000; Quiery, McElhinney, Rafferty, Sheehy and Trew 2003 ).
• Early-years experts in the Northern Ireland Council for Curriculum Assessment and Examinations, who are responsible for setting the early-years curriculum in Northern Ireland in consultation with other professionals.
• Early-years experts in Belfast Education and Library Board, who are responsible for the implementation of the curriculum through the provision of training, guidance and support for teachers.

These groups, each from their own perspective, had become aware of the difficulties experienced by many children in Northern Ireland in coping with a traditional Key Stage 1 curriculum in primary school, especially in the first year. This traditional curriculum is similar to that defined by the English National Curriculum. An additional source of pressure is that children in Northern Ireland start school two months younger than their English peers on average and in recent years, have been expected to start formal work within the first term. One focus for concern of the the authorities is the long low-achieving tail, similar to that found in other areas of the United Kingdom. Low achievement combined with membership of a low-achieving group, especially in boys, is believed to translate into later social disadvantage and a low level of skills and does not give the individual a secure stake in society.

Research undertaken in the School of Psychology had also indicated that young children with May and June birthdays fared badly under the traditional system (Menet, Eakin, Stuart and Rafferty 2000). This finding was considered to consititute further evidence that a lack of maturity on starting school was one of the factors which prevented children from fulfilling their potential within a traditional curriculum. Extrapolating from these data, it was suspected that the impact of socioeconomic disadvantage in some areas was being heightened through the traditional curriculum, mediated by some combination of poor skills in oral language and social abilities and by poor proficiency in motor skills as children start school.

For some time prior to the beginning of the project, members of Belfast Education and Library Board curriculum planning teams had been taking note of changing attitudes to early-years curricula in the wider world which had been revealed to them through their own research. The BBC Dispatches programme ‘The Early Years’ and a report by Mills and Mills (1997), which explored the continental model of early-years mathematics education, was influential in confirming their belief in the better performance of children in the mid-teens in parts of Europe and South-east Asia. This programme was given further weight by a House of Commons Select Committee on Education report which detailed some failings of early-years education in the United Kingdom and proposed moving closer to the continental model (Early Years Report, 2000). Locally in Northern Ireland, the Belfast Education and Library Board began, in collaboration with the Northern Ireland Council for the Curriculum Examinations and Assessment (CCEA), to formalise a proposal for joint funding for a pilot project to redesign and test a new first year curriculum (Children go straight into Year 1 in Northern Ireland in September of the school year in which their fifth birthday falls. This group is not called the reception class, as in England). This ‘Enriched Curriculum’ would draw on elements of the continental and South-east Asian models and on tried and tested elements from other sources.

Meanwhile, the evaluation of the Greater Shankill Early Years Project (Sheehy et al. 2000) had drawn attention to the difficulties faced by the Year 1 children within this area of social deprivation in progressing through the established first-year curriculum. In all schools taking part in the project, there was a convergence between the teachers’ views and the results of psychometric testing which indicated that the existing Year 1 curriculum was not well matched to the needs of the children. The pattern of results from the psychometric testing in the Greater Shankill study (ibid.) was broadly in line with results from a study in disadvantaged areas of Aberdeen (Cowie and Croxford 1999).

A meeting of principals and project workers in the Greater Shankill area was held in December 1999 and it was agreed that principals would go back and examine the problem with all the Key Stage 1 members of staff who could contribute. As a result of these discussions, a consensus emerged that the very formal and traditional Year 1 curriculum which was in place was not meeting the needs of the children in the area. The consensus declared that children were coming to school with poor vocabulary and articulation, poor social skills, low self-esteem and in many cases, additional difficulties. These disadvantages were believed by staff to render them incapable of benefiting fully from the type of education which was then on offer. In some schools in the Greater Shankill area of Belfast, some teachers had begun to explore a different approach which they felt was more appropriate for the children. One of these teachers was approached to take a leading role in the proposed project which was beginning to be conceived by Belfast Education and Library Board and CCEA. She was seconded to the project from the beginning of March 2000 and undertook continued research into the literature and the planning of training for teachers in collaboration with staff from Belfast Education and Library Board and CCEA.

The input from these various groups of educationalists was combined to inititiate and design a curriculum with an innovative approach which culminated in the inauguration of the pilot project in six schools in September 2000. The schools were all situated in the Greater Shankill area and nine classes undertook what came to be known as the Enriched Curriculum. Three classes from other schools in a similarly disadvantaged area of Belfast were designated to act as a control group (The evaluation later moved to using the cohorts one and two years ahead of the intervention group as controls. This is fully explained later.).

The team from the School of Psychology in Queen’s University Belfast was well placed to tender for the evaluation for the project, given their previous engagement with the Greater Shankill Early Years Project and their wide range of expertise in education projects. The team was further strengthened by the addition of Dr Walsh from Stranmillis University College, the designer of Walsh’s Quality of Learning Intrument (Walsh 2000; Walsh and Gardner 2004). This instrument is a structured classroom observation measure of the quality of the children’s learning experience and is fully described below. Initially, the contract was awarded for one year, later extended to four years. This major longitudinal project has not only allowed us to evaluate the new curriculum from a variety of complementary perspectives but has enabled the team to build up a network of co-operative relationships within schools and other educational bodies in Northern Ireland. This network has gained us the assurance of the co-operation of a number of teachers in the videotape project already and we anticipate no difficulty in finding the requisite numbers.

1.2 The nature of The Enriched Curriculum

In our report at the end of the first year (Sproule et al. 2001), we concluded that the Enriched Curriculum was best characterised as an evolving curriculum. This was seen as a source of strength within the project at that time, in that it allowed teachers to exercise their professional expertise within the framework of the project and engendered a sense of ownership in the project staff. Fosterage of this level of staff commitment is recognised as one of the characteristics of successful interventions (See Adey & Shayer, Ch. 9, especially page 157). At the time of writing, the curriculum is somewhat less fluid than during the first year of the project, but still subject to quite widely differing interpretations. Further, it is not yet defined by any central written framework across the whole of Northern Ireland: The different Education and Library Boards each have their own version to some extent. Nonetheless, there are some core principals on which the curriculum is founded.

The principal aspirations and qualities of the Enriched Curriculum may be summarised as follows:

• Removal of the early experience of persistent failure for the child. This is seen as a primary goal and the basis for the child’s development of appropriate coping skills when confronted with later difficulties in learning.
• The belief that the young child learns best through play, story-related activities and play-like teacher-directed activities.
• Postponement of the use of formal reading schemes until the teacher assesses the child to be ready, whilst at the same time concentrating on oral language and emergent literacy activities. This is accomplished by a wide and eclectic range of activities.
• Postponement of formal recorded arithmetic whilst laying the foundations for a strong sense of number through practical work in sorting, matching, counting, and seriation together with frequent opportunities to absorb early mathematical concepts and language in a cross-curricular mode.
• Promotion of good motor development at gross and fine levels through appropriate indoor and outdoor activities, including very active physical play.
• Encouragement of creativity through activities such as art, music and role play.
• Development of pro-social behaviour through promotion of self-regulation and modelling by the teacher.
• An emphasis on encouraging the children be independent and to take responsibility for their own learning.

The new curriculum was first piloted in six schools within the Greater Shankill area of Belfast beginning in September 2000 and was rolled out to the other Education and Library Boards in the following year. Currently, 84 schools are taking part. The goals of the evaluation were to examine the children’s classroom experience and their academic progress and to gather information on the views of the teachers and parents involved in the project.

2. The Early Years Enriched Curriculum Evaluation Project

2.1 The evaluation objectives

In the first phase of the project, the evaluation was commissioned for one year only. As a result of the evaluation of the first phase, it was realised that the new curriculum was going to have far reaching consequences which had not been fully anticipated. Accordingly, it was funded by CCEA for a further three years and extended to include a second pilot cohort. This second cohort was drawn from areas outside Belfast where the curriculum was implemented by the other four Education and Library Boards in Northern Ireland. This second pilot cohort consisted of eight classes in six schools which represented a much wider spectrum with respect to their social context, school culture and intake attainment characteristics. Unfortunately, the choice of schools for this second group was dictated principally by the willingness of the school to take part and its dissimilarity compared to the original pilot group, drawn from what was a relatively small number of self-selecting schools then undertaking the Enriched Curriculum project in any case. Clearly, this is not a representative sample of schools in the province. However, it did include schools from:

• Outlying suburbs and small country towns
• Schools with much more variety in their socioeconomic catchment areas than the original Shankill group
• Schools integrated across the religious/cultural divide in Northern Ireland.

This selection did allow us to trace the progress of a reasonably sized group of children in the highest ability part of the spectrum. Forty-three children had baseline scores more than one standard deviation above the mean.

Essentially therefore, we have two studies in the evaluation. The first study comprises the evaluation in the original group of Shankill schools. The second study comprises the evaluation in the disparate group of schools outside the control of Belfast Education and Library Board. This second group may be seen as a series of case studies. However, it is sometimes instructive to consider them as a group in order to look for indications of research questions which might be considered by a further study in the future.

2.2 Evaluation design

In all schools in the project, the evaluation had five main strands.

1. Documentation of the history, nature and form of the Enriched Curriculum from data obtained in teacher interviews, through training documents supplied to teachers and through formal and informal discussions with other education personnel connected with the project.
2. Attainment testing on children in the intervention (Enriched Curriculum) and control groups. The main measure was Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (PIPS), a psychometrically robust instrument run from the Curriculum Evaluation and Management Centre in the University of Durham.
3. Comparison of the child’s learning experience in the intervention and control groups through structured classroom observation using Walsh’s Quality of Learning Instrument (Walsh 199?, Walsh and Gardiner 2004) (This instrument was developed by a member of the evaluation team ( Glenda Walsh) as her PhD project).
4. Exploration of the views of teachers about the Enriched Curriculum via teacher interviews and focus groups.
5. Accessing the views of parents about the Enriched Curriculum via questionnaires, interviews and focus groups.

Controls

In the first year, matched schools were used, but the team was unhappy about the degree of matching because of the high levels of social unrest in intervention schools that year and because of suspected creeping implementation of the new curriculum. We moved to using children who were one and two years ahead of Enriched Curriculum children but in the same school as Enriched Curriculum children as control groups. This was possible because of data available from the earlier Greater Shankill project.

3. Findings from the Early Years Enriched Curriculum Evaluation Project

The funding body, CCEA, felt it was inappropriate to publish the detailed findings until the full conclusions from the longitudinal study became available. At the end of their third year, children in the first cohort in Shankill schools equalled the performance of control groups until (Sproule, Trew, Rafferty, Walsh, O’Neill, M cGuinness, Sheehy 2003). Results for children in the second group of schools appear to be following the pattern of those in the Shankill schools. There are no measured gains as yet, except in oral language skills in the first two years, as measured by the Bus Story Test. CCEA are now happy for publication to go ahead and two papers are in preparation, one on the research design and one on the results on attainment. One conference presentation has taken place in the European Education Research Association conference in Hamburg in 2003.

Tentative conclusions:

• Classroom practice has dramatically changed in Years 1 and 2.
• There was no significant difference between intervention and control children at the end of the third year in Shankill schools on measures of reading or mathematics. In the same way, children in the second group of schools are expected to ‘catch up’ at the end of their third year.
• Although finding the curriculum extremely daunting in the beginning, first year teachers were universally highly enthusiastic about the project by the mid-point in the school year. In some schools, teachers have become somewhat less enthusiastic as the children move up the school. This appears to be related to the level of in-school support and the degree of training provided by the different Education and Library Boards.
• The great majority of parents who have responded have been very positive about the project. A very tiny minority have been hostile, with a larger group having concerns about literacy. Usually, this concern has been ameliorated over time but sometimes not. Except in regard to reading, where parents have a poor model of the process of learning, parents are highly insightful about their child’s education and place a high value on their child’s happiness at school.
• Walsh's Quality of Learning Instrument has proved to be a useful tool for examining the quality of the child’s learning experience in the classroom. It clearly distinguished between intervention and traditional classrooms. There are also indications in the data available to date that scores on this measure will be a significant predictor of later performance, after controlling for PIPS baseline scores and teacher rating of attention in a multilevel hierarchical model.
• There is some lack of cohesion in the project, due to the decision of Education and Library Boards outside Belfast to initiate pilot projects of their own without waiting for the findings of the evaluation of Shankill schools. This has led to a lack of programme fidelity: Despite a high level of agreement on a draft framework document, there are within and between board differences in conception and training, which have in turn caused confusion and disaffection amongst some teachers.
• Even where lack of programme fidelity has not been a problem, teacher training has sometimes been reported to be inadequate.

References

Adey, P. & Shayer, M. (1994). Really Raising Standards: Cognitive Intervention and Academic Achievement. London: Routledge.

Cowie, M. & Croxford, L. (1999). Using Baseline Assessment for Early Intervention. Centre for Educational Sociology, University of Edinburgh.

Menet, F., Eakin, J., Stuart, M. & Rafferty, H. (2000). Month of birth and effect on literacy, behaviour and referral to psychological service. Educational Psychology in Practice, 16, 2, 225 – 234.

Mills, C. & Mills, D. (1997). Britain ’s Early Years Disaster. Private Research paper. London: Mills Productions Ltd.

Quiery, N., McElhinney, S., Rafferty, H., Sheehy, N . & Trew, K. (2003) Empowering Parents A Two Generation Intervention in a Community Context in Northern Ireland. In I. Katz & J. Pinkerton (Eds. ) Evaluating Family Support: Thinking Internationally, Thinking Critically. (Pp 207-226) London: Wiley.

Sheehy, N., Trew, K., Rafferty, H., McShane, E., Quiery, N., & Curran, S. (2000). The Greater Shankill Early Years Project: Evaluation Report. Report produced for the Greater Shankill Early Years Project and CCEA.

Sproule, L., Trew, K., Rafferty, H., Walsh, G., McGuinness, C., Sheehy, N. & O’Neill, B. (2003) The Early Years Enriched Curriculum Evaluation Project: Rationale for the Research Design. Report produced privately for Northern Ireland Council for Curriculum Examinations and Assessment (CCEA).

Sproule, L., Trew, K., Rafferty, H., Walsh, G., McGuinness, C., Sheehy, N. & O’Neill, B. (2002). The Early Years Enriched Curriculum Evaluation Project: Second Year Report. Report produced privately for Northern Ireland Council for Curriculum Examinations and Assessment (CCEA).

Sproule, L., Trew, K., Rafferty, H., Walsh, G., McGuinness, C. & Sheehy, N. (2001). The Early Years Enriched Curriculum Evaluation Project: First Year Report. Report produced privately for Northern Ireland Council for Curriculum Examinations and Assessment (CCEA).

Walsh, G. (2000). Unpublished PhD Thesis. “The Play versus Formal Debate: A Study of Early Years Provision In Northern Ireland and Denmark”

Walsh, G. & Gardner, J. (2004). Submitted. Developing an instrument to assess a quality learning experience in Early Years Settings.