Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Sors, Senior Lecturer, York St John University

The UK government’s strategy for early years education in England aims to get children in reception “school-ready”. But what school readiness means is debatable.

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has pointed out that half of reception-aged children “can’t sit still”. And recent writing guidance outlines handwriting and spelling lessons for reception-aged children.

As experts in primary education, we take the view that children aged four and five should not be sitting still at tables. Expecting children to sit still and formally learn how to write at this early age conflicts with widely accepted theories around cognitive and physical development.

Research by theorists in child development emphasises the importance of active play and exploration. Children can develop their interests through free choice activities that support their language, communication and thought.

Researchers argue that young children should be encouraged to understand their world in a range of indoor and outdoor settings that can be explored through the power of play.

Not all children can or should sit still. Children need physical play to develop their strength, coordination, and motor skills before being given a pencil to write. They need role play to learn how to communicate, question, and hold conversations before following instructions.

They should be encouraged to move and explore through free play instead of sitting still. At an early age, children’s enjoyment of learning should be the priority. For every child this will be different, and practice should respond to children’s preferences and interests.

The government’s Plan for Change sets milestones for strategic national developments. In its mission to “break down barriers to opportunity”, the plan aims for 75% of children to achieve a “good level of development” (GLD) by 2028.

This means that children must meet 12 of the 17 prescribed early learning goals. These measure a level of development across areas like language, personal, social and emotional development, mathematics and literacy when children reach the end of their reception year at school, at age five.

But what does this value? Three of the early learning goals focus on literacy. Children cannot meet the “good level of development” if they have not met the early learning goal for writing.

As well as this, a child may excel in many of the learning goals, but still not meet the criteria. There are other considerations, such as a potential age difference of up to 11 months among children finishing reception.

This creates an uneven playing field, with some children needing more time to develop language and communication, physical, personal, social and emotional skills before a formal move into literacy and mathematics.

The government recommends that reception teachers should plan regular explicit handwriting and spelling lessons that directly target children who may choose not to write in their play. This directive approach might not suit every child and takes away their choice over opportunities to play.

Learning through play

In Finland, children start primary school at age seven. The Finnish educational model sees learning through play as “essential”.

New Zealand’s Te Whāriki is specifically a “play-based” curriculum. It understands that each child learns at their own pace. It explains the power of storytelling and play to build foundations in reading, writing, and maths.

Within the UK, Wales and Scotland focus on play as essential to improving outcomes. Play pedagogy in the Scottish curriculum emphasises responding to the unique needs of each child. Wales views “playwork” as vital for children’s health, wellbeing and overall development.

England’s Early Years Foundation Stage Framework sets the standards that school and childcare providers in England must meet for the learning, development and care of children from birth to five.

In this document the importance of play and following children’s interests is also highlighted. But this is overshadowed by government messaging and guidance on the importance of formalised academic skills such as phonics and writing.

Our research highlights the importance of connections between child development, culture, and responding to children and their environments.

Playful creativity, problem-solving, and experimentation help build strong foundations for learning. Valuing children’s experiences instead of focusing on prescribed milestones helps them learn to connect with the world around them as well as develop academically.

The English Early Years curriculum needs to return to basics. This keeps foundational learning through play at its heart, including all children and responding to their stage of development.

When we play, listen, read and talk with children, we give them a great start in life. This begins with looking at them as individuals. Learning in the early years should foster a love of learning, promote positive relationships and help children to understand the world.

Nurture, care, play and exploration should be prioritised to develop confident, resilient, and adaptable learners who can navigate a fast-changing world.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Four-year-olds don’t need to sit still to be ‘school ready’ – https://theconversation.com/four-year-olds-dont-need-to-sit-still-to-be-school-ready-261812

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Francesco Grillo, Academic Fellow, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University

Nearly three decades after the first UN climate conference, emissions are still rising. The global system for tackling climate change is broken – it’s slow, cumbersome and undemocratic.

Even Donald Trump may not be totally wrong when he blames the UN for producing “empty words and then never [following] those words up”. If we assess the progress since the first UN Cop climate summit in 1995, the numbers on emissions confirm that not very much did, indeed, follow years of words.

We urgently need not just to redesign climate policies but also a new method for drafting those polices. Climate change could even be the right issue in which to experiment with an approach that might inspire a wider reform of multinational institutions.

A conference I have helped organise beginning October 16 in Venice on the global governance of climate change will discuss three ideas.

First, we need to gradually redesign the decision-making process to solve a deficit of both efficiency and democracy. Decisions today are slow and weak because they de facto seek unanimity.

The Paris agreement, for instance, only required 55 countries producing at least 55% of global emissions to enter into force. And yet diplomats worked so that it could be agreed by all 195 UN member states – including those that later dropped out – by adopting words that tend to be “empty” to avoid displeasing anybody.

At the same time, the process does not even include all the parties that really matter: technically, the microstate of San Marino is one of the signatories of the agreements; the megacity of Los Angeles is not. Current mechanisms also miss the opportunity to experiment with direct representation of groups for whom climate change matters more, such as young people, indigenous people or farmers.

One idea would be to leverage the relative concentration of the world economy. China, the US and India represent almost half of the world population (and much of the population living below the global poverty line), more than half of the GDP and emissions; and most of the private investment in artificial intelligence that may enable some of the most interesting solutions.

Reforms that go beyond current blanket consensus are necessary. For instance, some experts have proposed a qualified majority voting system, in which changes might require a supermajority of countries or perhaps a majority of both developed and developing countries.

But we must be even more ambitious than this: voting rights should instead reflect size.

This would create incentives for states to move towards pooling their votes into regional representations. Trade-based regional agreements, like South American Mercosur, the African Continental Free Trade area or the Association of South East Asian Nations could evolve into climate-related alliances.

This would be a gigantic opportunity for leadership by the EU, which has accumulated more hard-earned experience than any other multilateral organisation in how to pool national wills. It could set an example by merging its 27 seats into one, showing how its carbon border adjustments and other collective instruments can translate ambition into action.

Drastically reducing the number of parties could allow for the introduction of a high qualified majority (75% of the parties) to avoid a situation like the UN’s security council where vetoes of just five parties is enough for paralysis.

This would also open space for a more direct representation of vital interests. The existing alliance of climate-vulnerable small island states could get a vote that outweighs their modest populations and GDPs. The C40 group of major cities could get an institutionalised role.

Young citizens assemblies have long been experimented with and it is time to give them a formal vote. This would also force, in turn, their internal decision-making processes to be more transparent. Such a reform would be limited to the UN climate change conferences and if successful be scaled up to other UN decision-making process.

Simplify climate finance

Second, it is necessary to streamline the chaotic array of climate-related financial instruments. Colleagues and I recently counted about 30 facilities bridging developing and developed countries and meant to finance climate projects, with much overlap and confusion.

One possibility would be to merge many small funds into three to five bigger instruments. Only Germany and UK, for instance, fund ten of such facilities (and four of them are a joint effort). Each of the instruments resulting from the consolidation would be dedicated to a big-picture goal that every citizen, investor and asset manager can immediately understand.

There could be one fund for adaptation (including the problematic “loss and damage”); one for mitigation (and energy transition); one for financing research and development, and technology sharing; and one for encouraging, assessing and scaling up experiments.

Reinvent the Cop format

Third, we absolutely need to change the format of Cop itself. The cost of flying and accommodating 100,000 delegates at Cop28 in Dubai was probably higher than the total amount promised at that same Cop to compensate poorer countries for climate-related losses. This results-to-cost ratio is one reason why the climate agenda has lost some popular support.

One possibility is to transform Cop from a gigantic exhibition that changes location every year, into five permanent forums (one for each main continent) focused on generating and managing knowledge on five problems that we need to solve.

They are: climate adaptation; climate mitigation; governance of places that are beyond national boundaries (oceans, Arctic, Antarctic); AI and climate; geoengineering (a last resort technology in need of strong global control).

Distributing Cops around the world would focus the debate, make participation easier, cut costs and emissions, and could sustain a year-round dialogue rather than a single big moment.

Governance of the climate is not working. Yet the climate may be the best problem against which to apply a radically new method of global governance. It may become a blueprint for the much wider question of how we reinvent institutions that were conceived for a different, much more stable era.

And if we can fix how the world decides on climate, we might learn to fix how it decides on everything else, too.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

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Francesco Grillo is affiliated with Vision, the think tank.

– ref. Why climate summits fail – and three ways to save them – https://theconversation.com/why-climate-summits-fail-and-three-ways-to-save-them-267470

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dan Gordon, Professor of Exercise Physiology, Anglia Ruskin University

Instead of wasting hours squatting weights in the gym or pounding miles of pavement in your running shoes, you could instead get all the benefits of a workout just by moving a little bit more like other animals.

“Quadrobics” is the internet’s latest fitness trend. This unconventional training method involves using all four of your limbs during a workout. Proponents claim it’s a highly beneficial form of exercise because of the large number of muscle groups that it uses. By running on all fours, muscles in the shoulders, upper and lower arms, as well as the legs, back and core are used.

Sounds good in theory but is it any more effective than your normal workout?

Although there’s limited research on quadrobics, research does show that the greater the amount of muscle used in a workout, the more benefits your cardiovascular fitness and health will see.

For instance, research which has compared cycling and running has shown that running leads to greater cardiorespiratory fitness gains than cycling does. This is probably due to the different amounts of muscles each activity uses.

Cycling focuses mainly on the legs and lower body, while running is more of a whole-body exercise. Since running places demand on a greater number of muscles, this may explain why it leads to greater fitness gains.

Quadrobics, which apparently uses almost all of the major muscle groups, should therefore lead to greater gains than either running or cycling.

However, when one study compared quadrobics to a standard walking programme, quadrobics oddly did not seem to use more energy – despite spiking heart rate to a greater degree. This finding probably comes down to the fact that both activities use the same muscle groups, but just to varying degrees.

But while quadrobics does not necessarily appear to be better than walking, it may have other fitness benefits.

During a quadrobics workout, you might end up using different muscles than you would during a more conventional type of workout. For instance, compared to running, quadrobics would place a greater emphasis on the shoulder muscles, but would require less work from the calves.

This suggests that quadrobics may have potential benefits for flexibility and balance. One study looked at the effect of an eight-week quadrobics training plan in young people.

It found that compared to the control group (who did two 60-minute sessions of typical physical activity), the quadrobics group saw greater improvements in shoulder flexibility and balance.

Meanwhile, although quadrobics does work many of the body’s muscles, there is currently no evidence to suggest it’s more beneficial than weight training in improving strength.

But something that cannot be discounted is the novelty of this exercise. One of the appeals of quadrobics is the playfulness of the exercise. This could have positive effects on mood and help relieve stress.

A number of groups describe quadrobics as “animal flow training” as it encourages us to adopt animal poses and attitudes. Since many find going to the gym can become uninspiring and boring over time, quadrobics could offer a solution to this.

If you’re looking to give quadrobics a try, two popular exercises are trotting and cantering.

In a trot lift your right hand and left leg at the same time, then your left hand and right leg. You will create a diagonal type of movement. While in a canter drive from the legs together and then land on your hands. This exercise can be done continuously or as repeated bouts of high intensity efforts, interspersed with periods of recovery.

For those new to the practice, it’s best to start slow when walking on all fours before advancing to these exercises. This is because there may be a risk of injury with these types of movement as they place much of the impact force on the elbows and wrists.

The potential risk of fracture or sprain is even higher in older adults, who experience more fragile bones and joint immobility, and those taking certain prescription drugs – such as corticosteroids.

The fitness benefits of walking like an animal might not be any greater than those seen with more conventional exercises, but the novelty of quadrobics may provide an entrance point to health and fitness – especially for those who may find conventional workouts boring.

Dan Gordon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Quadrobics: is the trend for walking on all fours like an animal good for your fitness? – https://theconversation.com/quadrobics-is-the-trend-for-walking-on-all-fours-like-an-animal-good-for-your-fitness-266524

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Frances Fowle, Personal Chair of Nineteenth-Century Art, History of Art, University of Edinburgh

The Van Gogh Museum’s new exhibition, Van Gogh and the Roulins – Together Again at Last, celebrates an important family reunion. It brings together 14 portraits of the wife and three children of the postman Joseph Roulin – Vincent van Gogh’s closest friend and supporter while he was based in the southern French town of Arles.

The exhibition is a work of art in itself: tightly focused, beautifully designed and accompanied by an excellent catalogue. Additional works and props (such as Roulin’s chair) contextualise the show, but it is the portraits of the Roulins – Joseph, Augustine, 17-year-old Armand, 11-year-old Camille and baby Marcelle – that take centre stage.

Hung in three rooms on contrasting deep blue and orange walls they demonstrate the new direction that Van Gogh’s work was taking during a crucial period of his artistic development.

As a group they represent, on one level, the artist’s personal longing for the stability of a wife and family and, on another, his radical rethinking of portraiture as a genre. They were painted at a time when, in correspondence with his two friends, Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, he was struggling with the idea of art as “abstraction”. That is, as a fusion of the real and the imaginary.

Van Gogh wanted to paint ordinary people as he “felt” them and to raise them to the level of the universal. He was interested in creating symbolic “types”, of portraiture such as “the poet” or “the soldier”, and also sought to evoke the character and soul of the sitter.

As the exhibition cleverly demonstrates – through the careful placement of comparative works and “glimpses” via various sight-lines – he was inspired by artists such as Rembrandt, Frans Hals and even Honoré Daumier, all of whom devoted themselves to what Van Gogh termed “the painting of humanity”.

In July and August 1888 Van Gogh painted two expressive and colourful portraits of the bearded Roulin, whom he viewed as the modern equivalent of Frans Hals’s painting, The Merry Drinker (1628-1630). The first portrait shows this jolly barfly in his smart blue cap and uniform leaning awkwardly on a table in the Café de la Gare.

It recalls the artist’s description of the postman in a letter to Bernard as “something of an alcoholic, and with a high colour as a result”. He was also a “raging republican” and the two spent long hours conversing about politics.

In October Van Gogh moved to the “little yellow house” in Arles, where he rented two rooms and a studio for only 21 francs 50 centimes a month. A reconstruction of the house is installed on the first floor of the exhibition, which is devoted entirely to wider interpretation and family activities.

It was close to the station, where Roulin often worked, and also had a pleasant aspect, opposite the leafy Place Lamartine. Gauguin soon joined him there and for the next two months they enjoyed a fruitful relationship.

In November 1888, Van Gogh decided to paint all five members of the Roulin family, including baby Marcelle in her mother’s arms. Gauguin, too, produced his own somewhat austere portrait of Augustine, and it is interesting to compare his more abstracted approach with Van Gogh’s more personal interpretation.

Rather than pay the family to sit for him on numerous occasions, Van Gogh then embarked on several “repetitions” or variations of his own paintings. The exhibition devotes a whole section to these repeated portraits of the family, inviting the visitor to compare the first version with its copy. Although dating them is a challenge, the repetitions appear more systematic, producing a calmer, more contemplative image, in emulation of Rembrandt.

Particularly curious are two portraits of Marcelle who, with her intense blue eyes and chubby features, takes on an almost grotesque appearance. She is dressed in a white christening robe, with a gold bracelet and pinkie ring, which were common christening gifts.

At the end of December 1888, Van Gogh’s mental state deteriorated dramatically, culminating in him severing most of his left ear with a razor. He was admitted to hospital in Arles, where both Joseph and Augustine paid him regular visits. As a selection of touching letters in the exhibition testify, Roulin also kept in touch with Vincent’s brother Theo.

Once back at the yellow house, Van Gogh continued to work almost obsessively on his repetitions, producing five extraordinary portraits of Madame Roulin, portraying her as the universal symbol of the comforting mother.

Dressed in green, she is seated in a red chair and set against a background of swirling daisies. She holds the rope of a baby’s cradle, evoking the idea of the comforter. Van Gogh even imagined the perfect location for the portrait as the cabin of a ship, where it would rock with the waves, reminding the sailors of their own mother.

This is a wonderful, absorbing exhibition, but with a salutary message. For, before he left Arles, Van Gogh gave the five original Roulin portraits to the postman as a token of their friendship. In 1900, in desperate need of money, Joseph sold all five, together with three other paintings, to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard for a pittance. If only he could have held on to them – today the portraits are recognised as among Van Gogh’s greatest achievements.

Van Gogh and the Roulins – Together Again at Last is at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam until January 11 2026.

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Frances Fowle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Van Gogh and the Roulins: a family reunion of the artist’s greatest portraits – https://theconversation.com/van-gogh-and-the-roulins-a-family-reunion-of-the-artists-greatest-portraits-267349