‘Happy children are better learners’

Do you remember anything about your own early days of school?

I remember being quite a goody two shoes and trying to do everything right. Once, when I was doing my sums, I wrote down everything in a tiny box in my book, thinking that small meant neat, but I was told off by my teacher who must have thought I was trying to be too clever by half. I was genuinely trying to get things right! 

But I think that's an important first question because when parents have children starting school, they may have memories that cloud their judgement about what it will be like for their child. I've interviewed quite a few parents about this transition, and almost all of them said how much nicer it is for children at school now. There's often a fear that history will repeat itself, and whatever a parent endured, their child will go through. Things are so much more friendly now. At least that's the hope!

What does it mean to be ready for school? Do you think about it primarily in social terms?

There is an emphasis on this in the book. There's a lot of pressure around phonics and number skills. Of course, these things matter, but from a child's point of view, what really makes the difference as to whether they succeed at school or not, is often friendships. How they make friends and keep friends. From their point of view, getting the most out of school and having a fun time is really the important point. We have found that parents and children differ in what they're tell us about school. 

Parents typically underestimate how much fun children are having in the playground, perhaps because they only get told when it all goes wrong and there was some dispute or something like that. Children don't necessarily talk about all the lovely times they've had when playing. Equally, parents tend to overestimate how happy children are doing work. Maybe the children don't really want to tell their parents that they're finding it all quite difficult or boring. 

So, from a child's point of view, I think focusing on those skills matters, but I think also there's increasing recognition that, in the 21st century, what we need for our employability chances are social and emotional skills. We have access to information through the internet all the time, so actually, what's needed to succeed in life is much more about the kinds of things that will help you in the playground. 

I was struck by the Yeats quote in your book, 'Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire'. Do you think our schools are getting closer to that ideal or further away? 

I think that schools are pretty good at building up children's enthusiasm in reception class, but when it all starts to get a little bit more serious, by, key stage one, it does seem more like 'this is what you must know'. It's sad that teachers don't necessarily have as much freedom as they might have had, once upon a time to do those kind of 'spur of the moment' trips. I remember years ago, when my children were in primary school, we interviewed the head teacher, and one of the things we asked him about was snow days at home. And we were very pleased that he thought that snow was for playing out in and not as a learning day at home. 

In terms of time, do you think the impact of covid on the school transition was kind of a blip, or are there things that are now here to stay?

I don't know how much of this is from the pandemic, but I think that now, in terms of communication, it's much more normal to have devices like Tapestry, (an early year's education platform) so parents can see little video clips of things their children have done in the day. This helps bring down some barriers and demystify a little about what their children are doing and how they're learning. 

Teachers are getting increasingly good at using these sorts of tools. In the pandemic, teachers had to make themselves much more open to communication with parents, because they needed the parents to collaborate with them and step in so there's potential for it to have had some positive effects. On the downside, I think most schools will say that children are arriving at school with lower levels of language skills and lower levels of social skills than they were pre-pandemic. And I suspect that's going take a while to right itself. 

How do UK schools compare with other school cultures? The cross-cultural aspect has become an increasingly prominent part of your research, hasn't it? 

Yes, I'm currently doing work in Hong Kong and mainland China to look at this. One of the things I've learned is that although school is very much more intense in Hong Kong than it is in the UK, children aged five in Hong Kong, are only doing 15 hours of school a week, unlike in the UK where they are doing 30 hours a week. So of course, they can sustain much more focused lessons, because they're only doing half a day. 

Children in the UK start school a year earlier than many places, and there's lots of adjustments happening at the same time. They're making the transition to school, but they're also having to learn to read. Whereas in Scandinavian countries, you may start school quite young, but you wouldn't be expected to read until you were six or seven years old. There's much more emphasis on play.  You haven't got that pinch point happening when children are also navigating the social changes and challenges of starting school.

With the UK education system, it sounds like as soon as you get into key stages there's some form of assessment or league tables which influences everything…

I think it comes back to this whole business about lighting fires. If children can have a positive couple of years at the beginning of school and we can really protect that time for building up their enthusiasm and their confidence, then when things do get more serious, the children are willing to embrace it. Whereas, if you're hitting them with targets that they must reach when they're still coping with lots of other challenges, it might be counterproductive.

I also think that there is a weird sense of a trade-off. Almost like, if you're learning then you're not playing and if you're playing, then you can't be learning. In Hong Kong, they refer to happy schools which are schools that don't give homework. The idea feels like you can have a child who's happy, or you can have a child who's learning, and you can't have both. To me, that seems like such an unproven dichotomy. It seems more sensible to assume that happy children are better learners, and not where you can only have one but not the other. 

As a parent who's now got children finishing in the school system, that would have impacted everything because we often have that feeling of, 'look, you have my child for a long time, and so we need to protect the space outside school and not necessarily have so much homework'. 

The school does have your child for a long time and in some ways, there shouldn't be this boundary between what's home and what is school. Children can be learning wherever, so the idea that school is this way, and home is completely different, doesn't seem to make a lot of sense psychologically. 

Coming back to what we were saying earlier about what parents know about how their child feels at school. Something we discovered is that parents didn't agree with their child in reception about how happy they were, but they did by year one. In year one, what the parents were saying was echoing what the child had said in reception. So, it seems like it's taking parents about a year to tune into what's really going on for their child at school. We've commissioned another book that will be coming out in December, which is a picture book, and we're hoping it will promote those sorts of conversations about what happened at lunchtime or in the playground and build up an emotional literacy for children. 

The picture book approach is interesting because I was wondering about what advice you can give to children. Given that some of them are four, when they start school, can you translate your work into advice that you could give to a child of that age?

Wow! I know what children tell other children is something like where the loo is! It seems to be really important for them. 

I think firstly, all children are going to be different from each other. For some children, what they are excited about is exactly the thing that another child hates. I'm not sure that you could give generic advice to all four-year-olds, but, in one of the chapters, which is advice for parents, but it could be for children too, is that when you're trying to join in a game or play with other children, your success rate is likely to be quite low. Children can feel quite knocked back by that and worry that maybe other children don't like them, or they start to get socially anxious. But it's good to remind them that there are so many opportunities in the day and that sooner or later, they will join in. It's good to know there's nothing necessarily excluding about your attempt not working. It's just that it can be tricky, and you must try and try and try again. The Japanese say, 'fall down seven times, get up eight'. That sense of resilience, that sense of it doesn't matter if it doesn't work once or twice, just keep going, and if you persevere, then it will pay off, might help some children not to get so discouraged. The evidence shows that you can have multiple setbacks in the day. And most children get lots of setbacks every day, but perhaps the only ones you notice are the ones that happen to you.

Your research in areas like mentalizing, theory of mind and kindness are all still underlying in the book…

What I've tried to do in the book is focus on why these things matter for children's social relationships. But those same skills can help academically as well. If you're trying to understand a story and you're trying to build up your reading skills beyond phonics, then having that sort of mentalizing awareness is really useful. We know that there's evidence for that. So again, coming back to the belief there's not a false dichotomy. The things that help you in the playground can also help you when it when it comes to doing serious learning.

In terms of every child being different, has the growth in awareness and understanding around neurodiversity and diversity of all types been a big influence on your work recently? 

The last chapter in the book is called Diversity in the classroom. Diversity comes in multiple forms. Often people only think in terms of neurodiversity, and I don't know whether this is a legitimate position or not, but I came away from my reading feeling that the term 'neurotypical' is a bit empty. Almost like, there are those of us who are neurodiverse, and then the others are neurotypical, and I don't think that binary way of seeing things is very helpful. I think of it as much more how we all have individual fingerprints. We all have individual brains. 

I think partly I was influenced by doing some reading on deafness, because people don't normally think about deafness when they think about neurodiversity. But a lot of the barriers are really very similar. So even if it's not happening in the brain, even if it's happening in the ear, whatever it is that's making you different, the social model of disability matters just as much. We all benefit in some ways, from having greater diversity in the classroom. 

And I would imagine that understanding challenges from a diversity perspective would be helpful for everybody, because it's very different from what some children will have experienced.

Something I've heard from a few teachers though, is that the thing they find really challenging isn't so much meeting the needs of neurodiverse children but making sure that the parents of other children are tolerant and understanding. Often, they will be met with something like 'that child hit my child, and I need you to punish them'. That's something schools are increasingly facing. Even if the argument happened out of school territory, it's still something that they're expected to sort out, and it would be nicer for everybody if the parents of the children, could reach out and help the other ones along. 

We're back to kindness and compassion again…

 Yes and what it means to be school-ready. Because the way you phrased it was what does a child need to be school ready? But I think as adults we need to be skilled in supporting children through this transition; whether we're parents, whether we're teachers, or whether we're people in the community. 

On that note, do you have any tips for parents approaching their child's transition to school?

I think it's great for parents to put themselves in the position of their child, so seeing things from a child's point of view, but also from the teacher's point of view. The teacher will see your child in a very different light to you, because you know your child inside out and see them when they are in a very comfortable, familiar environment. What the teacher will see is 30 children in a brand-new environment, and it's going to take them some time to get to understand every child. I think if parents can be patient, that knowledge will grow. Just like it can take a while for children to connect with each other and get into effective dialogue and play with other children, it can also take parents quite a while to build up a relationship with the teachers. Rome wasn't built in a day! 

The Psychology of Starting School: An Evidence-Based Guide for Parents (routledge.com) is out now.