Context and Implications Document for: How child-centred education favours some learners more than others

Debates on how best to educate young children have been raging over the last 100 years and have fiercely divided educationalists and policy-makers. These debates are often based on matters of faith rather than evidence. To some extent this is not surprising given the difficulty of examining how any particular teaching style relates to pupil progress in a systematic and comparative way. However, the introduction of a new child-centred curriculum in Wales provides the opportunity to undertake just such an examination. The Foundation Phase curriculum—introduced in 2008—is designed to provide all 3- to 7-year-olds with a developmental, experiential, play-based approach to learning. A 3-year project designed to evaluate the impact of the Foundation Phase finds that, overall, pupil progress and well-being is fostered in those settings where the principles of the Foundation Phase have been most closely followed. However, the evidence also suggests that even within these contexts, progress is uneven and that some kinds of children seem to gain more from this approach than others. The ‘losers’ appear to be boys and those living in poverty. The research points to a number of factors that might explain these outcomes—including levels of resourcing, breadth of curriculum coverage and the nature and quality of teacher–child interactions. The research is therefore of significance for both policy-makers and practitioners in considering how the benefits of child-centred approaches can benefit all learners.