Nicola Hacking: Purposeful Learning Environment

Creating a Purposeful Early Learning Environment

Creating interesting and purposeful early learning environments is something we all strive to do, but whose purpose are we talking about here? I imagine we’d all immediately jump in and claim it’s for the child, but in reality, there are often a number of other people that we end up considering.

Are they for us as practitioners? Whilst we’d all love to imagine that our environments are directed towards child lead learning, many of us operate within systems that mean we find ourselves often steering children round to a next step or learning goal that we need to prove they’ve met. Sometimes I’ve even desperately re-set children up so as to take a good evidence photo to go along with the observation I’m about to report in great detail. Who is that for? Did it help the child? Or did I interrupt their purposeful activity and are they about to ask that question… “can I go and play now?” Other considerations we have to make are our available time for set up or clean up at the end of the day, and who this responsibility falls down to. Nobody loves that practitioner that sets up something crazy and messy at the start of the day and then trots off on ppa or finishes on an early shift, leaving it to someone else to deconstruct. What is feasible?

Let’s not forget the expectations we also have from our children’s Parents and Carers. ‘Craptivities’ and keepsakes are often expected at holiday times especially, and it can be a difficult conversation when one child has a perfect snowman Christmas card to take home and another child has spent their day climbing trees and avoiding the card making table at all costs.

We also need to consider our Senior Leadership Team or Management and their requirements and view-points on our set up. We all have experience or have heard stories of working for leadership teams who originated in key stage 2 and think children should sit in tidy rows, learning in silence. These people don’t have the same vision for the Early Years as we do, and that can make it difficult to follow the path you believe to be right for your children. And don’t forget, all we do in the early years is play…

And is this ultimately, all then directed towards pleasing Ofsted? Do we feel like we have to construct our environment around a series of tick boxes that we know they’ll be looking for?

With so many exhausting pressures to make our environments all about other people, how can we bring it back and focus our environments back on what the children really need?  

Thankfully, the current trend in Early Years practice is to move towards a much gentler, more natural environment with the learning environment often referred to as the third teacher. This is the perfect time to really focus on how you can make your space really work for you and your children, without spending your whole weekend constructing elaborate plans and touring a range of shops buying stuff for your classroom!

I always find you have to start by being very flexible. Just as the children are growing in the physical sense, their needs and the way in which they construct their own learning is a fluid and rapidly changeable process. They also have incredibly diverse needs and your environment has to fit a wide range of learning styles and schemas. How can you make the space really adaptable on a regular basis? Do you need to break it up into smaller areas so children can access different spaces in different ways? How can you make it easy for children to self-select resources? Do you need to link areas together so children can select items to take to the potion station or malleable area?

I feel like we’ve already moved away from having the seven specific areas set out with the printed signs above them, but then how do you organise the resources? Instead try setting out different provocations based on the children’s interests and trying to add an element of small world, construction, literacy or numeracy to each one. This could be as simple as providing a basket of really unusual and beautiful shells into your water area for example. Has someone been on holiday recently? What did they see? Was it hot or cold? What colour are these shells? Are they big or small? How else could we categorise them? What is a shell for? Where does it come from? Maybe we could add a book about shells, or sea animals, or a holiday brochure. You can see the breadth of the conversation this could create.

Resources and budgets are often a major consideration when having a revamp of your space. Consider visiting recycling centres, charity shops or asking parents or the community to help. You never know what fabulous, inspiring curious you might end up with!

You have to bear in mind as well that whilst I personally adore the current trend towards calm, neutral, gentle spaces full of natural materials, some of that does come down to personal preference. A teacher like Shonette Bason Wood would tell you that she loves a classroom full of colour and noise, and well, she’s very good at what she does. You have to go with what works for you and your children and this is totally individual to yourselves. Can you use your setting to really champion what makes your community special and celebrate the diversity within it?

My big passion is to above all make sure you find a way to incorporate outdoor space. Even if this is a sad bit of concrete, it’s still OUTSIDE and can still be really useful. I visited an amazing setting called Your Nursery Ltd in Manchester once, and their outside space is certainly not exactly natural, but is still one of the most incredible I’ve ever seen. You can see how the children are able to free flow access it as a series of rooms, with physical play mingling with gardening areas, artistic possibilities, cosy nooks and small tinker spaces. How lovely to spend a busy day sat in the sunshine happily taking apart an old computer with real tools! You can certainly see how this would be a most absorbing place to play, and work in.

A purposeful learning environment is only purposeful, if it suits the purpose and needs of the children in it. At the end of the day, surely our priority is to make it work for them?