Despite 50 and more years of ‘progressive education’ in the UK, classed patterns of educational success and failure stubbornly prevail. So how, where and when does it all go wrong for the many children who continue to fail or underachieve? Drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein this paper centers processes within early years’ education, which are claimed to help launch children on careers as either educational successes or failures. Our data suggest that in the progressive play pedagogies of Early Years Education (EYE) children more or less happily play their lives away, in the process learning their position in social and ability hierarchies that help define their future careers in and outside schools. That such hierarchies prevail is neither fault of teachers nor parents. Indeed, it is what EYE settings are legitimized to do; sieve and sort, make children ‘school ready’, pliant and prepared for a lifetime of learning to succeed or fail.
History
Published in
British Journal of Sociology of Education
Volume
38
Issue
6
Pages
872-886
Citation
STIRRUP, J., EVANS, J. and DAVIES, B., 2017. Early Years Learning, play pedagogy and social class. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38 (6), pp. 872-886.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2016-04-12
Publication date
2016-06-02
Copyright date
2017
Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in British Journal of Sociology of Education on 02 Jun 2016, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1182010