Curriculum in the Early Years

Curriculum in the Early Years Ofsted’s consultation about its new education inspection framework (2019), with its focus on the curriculum, is leading Early Years practitioners to wonder what a curriculum for the youngest children might look like. It is, perhaps, useful to begin the discussion by outlining some of the things that we do not yet know – despite ongoing research into early learning. For example, we do not know much about how young children learn tricky concepts of time, such as how long ago things occurred, or even that things happened in the past and not the present. The child who is obsessed with dinosaurs is just as likely to think that they exist somewhere else today as to understand that they existed an unimaginably long time ago. Practitioners sometimes comment that this is a consequence of the nature of child development: young children are simply not ‘ready’ to understand such notions until they reach a higher stage of development. Yet this ‘stage the