Quality Practice in Early Childhood Education and Care

Quality Practice in Early Childhood Education and Care



Comparative Study: Quality Practice in Early Childhood Education and Care

Introduction

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is a single quality framework for children under 5 years. It builds on and brings together the important elements of three previous documents - Birth to Three Matters, the Curriculum Guidance the Foundation Stage and the National Standards for Day Care. On the contrary, the Steiner-Waldorf is an old method inspired by moral and spiritual discourses. Both approaches have encourages quality practice in education.

Steiner-Waldorf Philosophy

The Waldorf Schools curriculum is inspired by spiritual and moral discourses and is experienced as a union of sensory life and inner experience: a spiritual science approach. The Waldorf curriculum was developed by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian scientist, philosopher, artist, social reformer, and educator, and was implemented at the Free Waldorf School for Boys and Girls, founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919. Emil Molt, the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, had invited Steiner to develop a school for his employees' children to educate in ways that might preclude catastrophes such as war. Thus, the impulse behind Waldorf education was and remains cultural and social renewal (Clouder, 1998, 45).

According to Steiner, instilling knowledge as abstract and separate from the whole dehumanizes society, and this knowledge, disconnected from values and feelings, is coldly destructive. Rather, a holistic and balanced development of intuitive, imaginative, and inspirational capacities fully integrating knowledge, values, and feelings would prepare children to contribute to social well-being and renewal. Steiner claimed that in educating the whole being, children would grow inwardly free, thus capable of resisting dogmatic and harmful ideologies.

This claim conflicts with a controversial aspect of Waldorf curriculum and the anthroposophical philosophy that undergirds it. Although the curriculum and philosophy were so abhorrent to the National Socialist ideology that the Nazis banned the Anthroposophical Society in 1935 and forbade Waldorf schools to take on new students, current critics of Steiner's work claim an underlying racist/cultural hierarchical doctrine. Other critics object to Waldorf schools and anthroposophy as promoting occult beliefs. Both of these criticisms have been strongly refuted by the Association of Waldorf Schools (Steiner, 2003, 67).

Early Years Foundation Stage in England

Background

In 1997, and after nearly 20 years of Conservative government, there was a change in political power. The labor government brought radical changes in the field of early year's education and care. It was high on the Labor government's agenda to minimize poverty and increase quality in early childhood education and care by modern sing the services. 'lbny Blair (1998) demonstrated the commitment of the new government to raising quality in the Early \ears by investing money in the sector, as well as in research. There was an attempt to keep governmental control over children's services and provision with the introduction of targets, measurements and inspections, with localized responsibilities of decision making, planning and delivering government targets. Finally in the Section 39 of the Childcare Act of 2006 of the British government the ...