Sir, - The issue of E&L dedicated to Lifelong Learning contained much helpful information. However, the report on evaluation of the Early Start programme indicates that some comparisons are not being included. Children who have moved on from Early Start to Junior Infants have "settled in more quickly". Well, it is staffed in part by primary school teachers. They are good at "doing little things, little things that are important to teachers with up to 35 children in their class".
But just how useful to a young child are 34 others in the class? Granted that the Early Start children benefit from books and stories if they come from homes without such pleasures, might not the long term aim be to get books and stories and learning of various kinds into all homes? When the evaluators visit the parents, are they able to establish that these do not tell stories to their children?
So much research, for example by The Harvard PreSchool Project, 1972, Margaret Donaldson, 1978, Dr Barbara Tizard in the early Eighties, and Professor Pnina Klein in Israel, has demonstrated the advantages parents have over strangers in relating to children's minds, that the evaluation ought, surely, compare also children who are receiving appropriate encouragement at home? They may lack experience in putting away lunch boxes, but they may not be lacking in the "main strands" of the Early Start programme, "cognitive development, language and personality". Dr. Tizard, in Young Children Learning at Home and at School made just such comparisons.
My suggestion is that support for parents, from which both they and their children (as well as neighbouring children) benefit, is more consistent with Lifelong Learning than is a plan that brings more tidy children into large classes.
I would not he so foolish as to suggest that evaluation might include Montessori children; if I am not mistaken, the Department still holds that this system is appropriate only to children with some sort of handicap. Yours, etc.,
Whitechurch Road,
Dublin 14.