Why primary CPD needs primary expertise – avoiding “Secondary Lite”

Primary and avoiding “Secondary Lite” CPD.

I led a session last week where the schools in attendance were focusing on primary pedagogy and the need for specific approaches across the developmental bandwidth from EYFS to Y6. In primary, we have children who have only just left toddlerhood, right through to those on the cusp of adolescence. Matching effective provision and instruction to the changing and developing child is therefore nuanced, complex and requires deep understanding of age, stage and phase.

However, ever more frequently I see events and training for primary colleagues, focusing on curriculum design or teaching and learning that are led by colleagues who have never taught in primary. I am not of course talking about specialists in their field such as speech and language therapists or child psychologists who are qualified specialist professionals and who are providing insights that general teacher training and experience would not provide. I am talking about colleagues who have taught or led, but never in the primary phase. Colleagues who have never had the experience of trying to lead an art lesson with thirty year ones, or had to try and manage the teaching of Science and English and Maths and DT all in the same day in the same room with the same children, many of whom are yet to be proficient readers and writers and  who are still working out how to tie a shoe lace or do up a fiddly button.

Teaching in primary is complex. It’s complex because the children are multi novice. They are making sense of everything from how friendship works, to how to read, to how the number system operates. They are, by the very nature of not having been alive for very long, new to pretty much everything they meet. They are desperate to move, to play and find the fun in everything but they are also often simultaneously fearful, yet to coordinate their own bodies effectively, quick to cry and can tire swiftly cognitively, physically and emotionally. As the class teacher you are their everything during the day, their constant, their trusted adult and the one person they see probably more than any other during the school week. The relationship and behaviour dynamics are also therefore different, as they see you as a key constant and central adult for the bulk of their waking hours. Primary class teacher is therefore a very special role and a complete privilege. To play such a pivotal role in each child’s day is a huge responsibility but one that is both hugely rewarding and a complete and utter joy. It is, like many things in life, one of those things that is almost impossible to imagine until it has been experienced.

You are also operating in a room that has to be all things. It has to be science lab, art studio, maths classroom and DT workbench. As the class teacher you have to be able to flip this organisation in a heartbeat to teach the next session or, if you are using a continuous provision model, constantly be alert to how resources are being used in provision and what may need adding or replenishing or replacing. You are responsible for resourcing and setting up every lesson across the entire curriculum so are master of pencils, glue sticks, books, footballs, gym mats, paint palettes and saws. It is your job to organise each day so that sessions flow seamlessly and that the room itself can flip and flit between the bandwidth of the curriculum without incident, accident or lost time. You are juggling the teaching and instruction of multiple subjects, no free periods and a teaching load that is all subjects, every day, all week except on any PPA or management time. There are usually no prescribed lesson lengths, no quick changeovers and no new set of children every hour or so, and then at fairly regular intervals someone’s tooth falls out just to add to it all. It’s you and your small charges together all day every day. (And that, for me, is part of the magic.)

It is therefore worrying that some training glosses over that primary is different in every single aspect from timetabling, assessments, staffing, resourcing, pedagogy, building use, child development, lesson length, furniture arrangement, proficiencies of the children, room use and curriculum. By this, I mean training that is designed and delivered by colleagues around teaching and learning or curriculum who have never taught in primary. Colleagues who have never had to juggle multiple subjects, teach children within a specific developmental stage and who assume that all, or even most aspects of pedagogy are congruent, adaptable or suited in a one size fits all for all ages. They’re not.

Not only does not understanding the lived and experienced reality of the primary classroom potentially impact on the quality of training as an appreciation of the unique primary backdrop is absent from examples, but messaging around how we learn often fails to recognise the distinct maturational neurological and physical differences at different ages and stages. Working memory development and attentional control follow a distinct maturational timeline with critical development points that occur within the primary phase. This means that techniques employed with older students will need significant adaptation for children in KS1 and below. There are also physical developmental changes that impact on the things we expect or ask children to do. The maturation of the human hand and the associated bone development that is not complete until broadly the very end of KS1 shows that the types of tasks we ask children to engage in to build up strength, dexterity, stamina and control need to be much further ranging than simply holding a pencil or writing on a whiteboard. This impacts therefore on task design and resourcing information as well as designing in opportunities for play and movement that will develop associated gross and fine motor control.

Children are also hard wired to move and play. The design of the primary day should be rich with opportunities to move, play and engage in a broad range of tasks and activities to develop both the physical, emotional, social and the cognitive. Yes, the model of memory is critical for teachers to understand but it is not the king of the younger child’s developmental kingdom; physical, emotional and social development need to happen in tandem and without this messaging presented as an aggregate, then the importance of ensuring rounded development in young minds and bodies can be skewed. There is little point in primary education if children are well versed in information but have poor physical skills or cannot work well as both an individual and as part of a happy and harmonious group. Our youngest children are multi novice, both intellectually as well as socially and physically. Their days therefore need to be a rich and broad range of carefully designed provision and task designs that draw from the best of what we know for each facet of their development.

Providing training about teaching and learning and curriculum that fails to talk with wisdom and experience about the differences and the unique nature of the primary child is to fail primary children. Our youngest children deserve training for their adults that has a deep understanding of them as younger learners at its heart, not an approximated version delivered by someone who does not understand, love or who can’t speak with rich experience about what it is like to work with little learners.

Our primary colleagues also deserve training that is rooted in reality and lived experience, that can draw on deep wells of references, examples and agility around how to make things really work. Research can be read by anyone, associated training that focuses on teaching, learning and curriculum needs to be led by those who have lived it, not those who have simply observed it. “You don’t know what you don’t know” is a key thread here. Until you have delivered the full curriculum to a room full of five-year-olds for a significant amount of time, the pedagogy being preached is simply conjecture or second-hand observation.

This sadly is prevalent in everything from keynotes to conferences, twilights to some national programme materials. The fudged approximation and lumping in of all phases into a generic soup erodes the necessary pedagogical precision with which we should be approaching the training and development of primary colleagues. I have heard and seen multiple examples of keynotes at primary training leading on learning who have never taught a day in primary setting; keynotes at national conferences on primary curriculum led by colleagues who again have never taught a day in primary; and I have heard endless stories of how national programmes can frustrate primary colleagues with a lack of case studies or assessments that are pertinent to their phase. In a system that has so many more primary schools than secondary schools, how does this even happen? The argument of, “But colleagues can just contextualise it to their own phase” to me, begs the question, “Why not just have someone who can talk about the primary context in the first place?”

There are hundreds of hugely experienced, knowledgeable and articulate primary educators in the system who are deeply reflective, dedicated and who understand primary with precision, wisdom and clarity. These are the colleagues who need platforming and their practice sharing and supporting.  

Therefore, if you are ever invited to hold the mic for a primary audience, please ask:

• How much experience do I have teaching or leading in primary?
• What lived examples will I be able to reference?
• Is this audience my field of expertise and experience?
• Am I the best person to speak to this phase?
• What’s it really like to teach year one after wet lunchtime on a Thursday afternoon in late December?