In Scotland, there is momentum behind moving towards an educational system that prioritises wellbeing – on paper at least.

Our national curriculum, the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), flagship government policies such as the incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into Scottish law and a burgeoning movement advocating play-based learning have shifted our teaching practises towards a holistic whole-child approach, typified by the Getting it right for every child policy.

The policy context

The implementation of the CfE in 2010 was intended to provide a coherent curriculum from 3 to 18 years old. It promised trust and freedom for practitioners, and breadth and flexibility for learners. But detractors defined it as vague and criticised the lack of time and consultation allowed for its implementation.

Scotland’s commitment to being the first UK nation to incorporate the UNCRC into domestic Scots’ Law means children and young people in Scotland will have legal entitlements across themes including inclusion and consultation, family, health, education and welfare. Critically, any organisation found not to be meeting these rights will then potentially be breaking the law.

The broad, whole-child approach advocated by both the CfE and UNCRC is reflected in the trend in Scottish educational settings to embrace play as a learning and developmental practice. The UNCRC enshrines the right to play for every child and the CfE supports play as the primary pedagogical approach within the early years phase.

A significant body of research now points to play being fundamental for a child’s successful development, supporting health and wellbeing, enhancing learning and aiding social and emotional development. Evidence asserts a more explicit link between play and attainment, suggesting play can effectively enhance literacy and numeracy in young children too.

In Scotland, the question is not whether to embrace play in education, it’s in what format is play most effective in preparing children for formal learning and how can it best be deployed in communities and classrooms across the country?

As a former secondary school teacher, I believe in the ethos of CfE, particularly the holistic approach and shared responsibility for literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing. And my experience as an educator more broadly has strengthened my conviction that connection with nature, outdoor learning and play are crucial to our children's wellbeing and development.

However, as the parent of a child in nursery school, I already have concerns about the dominant focus on attainment over wellbeing, and about narrow, curriculum-based assessment superseding my child’s enjoyment and development.

This hints at a disconnect that exists in Scotland between the prevailing narrative of holistic, wellbeing-focused development and how we measure progress at the start of formal education.

Measuring progress in a whole-child approach

In Scotland, we tend to avoid sharing and comparing individualised data, instead using data from the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation to create area-based comparisons of attainment and development.

Our policy narrative points to meeting the child as they are now over a prescribed future developmental state. The CfE is designed to span from early years through secondary school, and (in theory) is flexible enough to allow children to progress through levels at their own pace.

In England, the concept of 'school readiness’ is used as an indicator of how prepared a child is to succeed in school. Most often, a child is classed as ‘school ready’ if they have achieved a ‘good level of development’ by age 5.

For Nesta colleagues working on fairer start projects in England, eliminating the school readiness gap that exists between rich and poor is a clear objective that can be tied to existing data. However, this presents a unique challenge for designing and delivering our related work in Scotland.

Like England, we assess all children at age 5, but without linking results to whether a child is prepared for school learning. Currently we use Scottish National Standardised tests in literacy and numeracy for 5 year olds, against the recent advice of the OECD.

Many claim this approach results in a “teach to the test” impact, a narrowing of the curriculum and a negative impact on young children’s confidence. Further to this is the suggestion that early exposure to formal learning could be damaging to young children’s longer term development and attainment.

An assessment-heavy culture has done little to address the attainment gap to date, and may actually be contributing to developmental inequality. This is where the disconnect between prioritising wellbeing and how we measure progress exists.

In Scotland, the challenge is not whether to embrace a wellbeing-focused, rights-protected and play-led model in early years education; it’s how we assess the impact of this approach on children.

This raises several questions for those of us working towards closing the attainment gap in Scotland – whether innovators, policymakers, practitioners or otherwise.

1. How do we measure children’s progress using a wellbeing model that is neither too narrow nor too vague and that we can confidently say will help to close the attainment gap?
2. Could we evaluate the impact of our system, sensitively capturing individual developmental progress, and equipping practitioners with knowledge of what each child needs and how to access it?
3. With our supportive policy context recognising the importance of wellbeing, children’s rights and play, could we define a level of development to which all our children are legally entitled?
4. Can we access the necessary data to assess which interventions work and why so we can replicate and scale them in communities and classrooms across the country?

These are questions we are grappling with at Nesta as we explore ways to support parents and carers to improve the home learning environment and work to ensure fair and equal access to high quality early learning and childcare. By investigating what is already working in Scotland and why, we can better understand why some children achieve more than their circumstances dictate.

We’ll supplement this by trialling new interventions – from changing the ways in which practitioners and institutions communicate with parents, to scrutinising the resources and infrastructure we expose our children to in pursuit of learning and development.

Inequality is systemic, and it is a heavy burden for education and childcare to compensate for the cumulative trauma of poverty. But there is huge will within the sector in Scotland to redress the balance through improving wellbeing.

Ultimately, if we are to make a genuine difference for children living in disadvantage, we need to have better ways to assess what works and what does not.