Alan Wells believes that it’s important to help children develop their language skills early in life. Here, he explains why.

A couple of years ago, I made a speech during which I reported the results of a survey of headteachers in Wales. The survey tried to find out whether the speaking and listening skills of young children starting school were better or worse than five years before. This is important because early language skills – or the lack of them – have a significant influence on how well a child will do at school.

The overwhelming majority of the headteachers thought that more children were starting school with poor speaking and listening skills than five years before. Now, of course, there’s a ‘health warning’ over surveys of this kind. In essence, they are perceptions, and perceptions are not always reality. Ask someone whether summers were hotter and winters snowier when they were growing up and most people will say “yes”. Looking back at weather records doesn’t bear this out, but facts aren’t always reflected in perceptions. An added difficulty is that perception surveys tend not to define what terms like “better”, “improved” or “worse” mean, so it’s up to the person involved in the survey to determine these definitions. So my “good” might be your “exceptional”.

My speech received a lot of coverage on television and radio, and in press articles. Most commentators agreed with the view of the headteachers in Welsh schools – some disagreed. (Just to check, I often ask a similar question on my visits to schools – I’ve been to about 3,500 schools in England and Wales in the last five to six years – and hardly anyone disagrees with the view that the c number of young children with poor language skills has increased, and is increasing.)

That said, there’s less consensus about why this is happening. The usual suspects – television, computer games and so on – are often mentioned. Just as frequently identified as a cause is the lack of family meals, fast food dinners, working parents, poor parenting, single parent families, the absence of extended families living locally, a change of culture and a host of other reasons. It’s probably the case that all of these are partly to blame and identifying a single cause that can be dealt with is a fruitless activity.

Research in the US by Hart and Risley1 points to the impact of social class on language skills. They undertook an in-depth study of young children a few years ago. The study was in-depth because it involved relatively few children over a considerable period of time. Hart and Risley divided the children into those from “professional” families, those from “working class” families and those from “welfare” families. A word of warning – these terms probably don’t translate precisely to the UK.

What Hart and Risley found was that by the age of four, on average, a child of professional parents had heard around 50 million words, a child of working class parents 30 million and the child of a welfare family just 12 million words. Just as worryingly, by the age of three, children of professional parents had heard about 700,000 encouragements and only 80,000 discouragements. On the other hand, children in welfare families had had 60,000 encouragements, but twice as many discouragements. Even more alarmingly, by the age of three, the average vocabulary level of children from professional families was higher than that of the parents in the welfare families.

The Hart and Risley research bears out the influence of social class in education and how well a child or young person does. It’s unfashionable to mention social class I know, and government tends to spend more time on ethnicity and gender than on social class, but a child’s social class is still the key determinant of how well they do at school.

In stark terms, this means that intelligence is less of a determinant than the social class a child is born into. Of course, ‘against the odds’ examples exist – including me – but the reality is that, for most children, the social class they are born into will determine how they do. Even more worryingly, class mobility – the movement by someone from one class to another, usually from the working class to the middle class – has gone down in recent decades.

What does this mean for people working with young children and what can be done to stop this seemingly inevitable decline in language skills? I’m not going to suggest large-scale measures requiring resources that aren’t available to most people working with young children. Governments of all persuasions seem to be fixated by new large-scale national strategies often conceived in haste and frequently amended thereafter. Don’t get me wrong, national strategies do have an impact, but they often have an impact on the marginally disadvantaged rather than with those in the long tail – the ‘lower class’ that remains so from generation to generation without people being able to progress (for a range of social, economic and other reasons) in the class system – of our society. Moreover, national strategies tend to focus on all manner of targets and quick-fix solutions.

My own view is that a quick fix won’t alter decades of cultural changes and there’s no single ‘magic bullet’ that will work for everyone. So, although it’s less glamorous and will get fewer headlines, my suggestions will, hopefully, be more within the reach of people working with young children.

We need to do more to encourage parents to take an active role in developing the early language skills of their young children. This may seem obvious, but lots of parents don’t have a good command of language themselves and don’t know the importance of speaking and listening to their children.  

In Wales, we have developed a Language and Play programme aimed at parents living in areas of significant disadvantage. This relatively short programme helps parents to develop their children’s language skills. All feedback about the programme has been very positive. Of course, we won’t know for many years whether Language and Play has a lasting impact and we’re establishing a longitudinal research project to study this.

 In Wales, the Basic Skills Agency is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the Welsh Assembly Government’s National Basic Skills Strategy so we have funding to help establish and run Language and Play programmes. We don’t have this luxury in England, but we have made the Language and Play materials available at a low cost to help people who want to set up programmes.

Those working with young children might also be interested in our materials for grandparents. In an increasing trend, grandparents are the main daytime carers for children, particularly as more and more parents choose to, or have to, work. Yet, often, grandparents went to school when education was very different and worry about how to help their grandchildren. (Go to www.basic-skills.co.uk for information about these materials.)

Finally, people working in early years might find our Basic Skills Quality Mark useful. Although it was developed initially for primary schools, some early years settings have applied for and been awarded the Quality Mark. These settings are mainly local authority nursery schools, but there’s also a smattering of other early years organisations, including a pre-school playgroup or two. Clearly, the Quality Mark has to be adapted for early years settings as the terms “literacy” and “numeracy” may not be relevant to people working with young children. However, we have produced advice for those working in early years about working towards the Quality Mark.

I started teaching, some time ago, in a secondary school. Most of the students I was teaching couldn’t read much and could hardly write. Some of this was understandable as they were the children of recent immigrants from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent. However, others were white, working class, young people who had failed – or been failed, more likely – by an education system that valued the articulate and seemingly clever over the less articulate and seemingly forever struggling. Later, I worked in a primary age special school, where many children were wrongly placed just because they couldn’t read and write much. I then began working with adults who had managed to get through the school system and leave without the basic skills most people take for granted. My conclusion from all of this experience? Start young with developing language and there’s a chance that you won’t have to intervene later.
 

Reference

1. Betty Hart, PhD & Todd R Risley, PhD. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Brookes Publishing, 2002.