Foundations of Character - Developing Character and Values in the Early Years | Learning for Life

Report cover - Foundations of Character

Foundations of Character takes a deep and insightful look into character and values development during the ‘early years’ phase of education.

It is commonly assumed that the influences on the early years of a child’slife are determinative for the future individual: the evidence from this report suggests that it is more complex.

Children’s exposure to and engagement in early childhood education is currently a widespread phenomenon in England, with 92% of three year olds and 98% of four year olds benefitting from some free early years education of up to 15 hours per week.

This study aimed to explore the developing dispositions, values and attitudes of a sample of young children in the familiar contexts of their homes, early education settings, and primary schools. It was hoped that this exploration would also provide insights into the values of the significant adults in these children’s lives, and these adults’ views about the development of character and values.

Background

Taking three Early Years Education settings in inner city London, and three in rural Kent, children were observed in naturalistic settings, predominately six nurseries. The children were first observed when they were between 36 and 48 months old, and then tracked over a nineteen month period between June 2008 and December 2009, A total of 86 day-long visits provided rich observation evidence for the study and this confirmed a close connection between the emergence of moral awareness and social and emotional development.

Key Findings

The children’s varied and complex interactions demonstrated that they:

were kind and considerate;
showed understanding of what it meant to be involved with others;
were capable of taking control, or even trying to dominate when co-operating;
usually displayed honesty and fairness in the way they treated others;
showed subtlety and flexibility when dealing with others, facing up to issues and finding ways round them;
frequently used humour in ways which transformed situations;
took opportunities to encourage others in a positive way.

The parents’ and professionals’ perspectives:

Parents and practitioners agreed that a good person is respectful, kind, honest and caring;
Commenting on their child’s characteristics, parents most commonly said that their children were happy, caring, curious, kind, funny, helpful, and polite;
Practitioners agreed with parents’ comments on children’s characteristics but were more likely also to say the children were responsible;
Parents were less confident about their child’s sharing behaviour, though few said they were selfish.

Research Strategy

This study adopted a multi-case approach to explore young children’s moral character formation and development, and the potentially wide-ranging influential factors. The sampling strategy was based on the premise that the study’s main sources of evidence would be young children and significant adults in their lives. The study’s design recognises the significant educational and developmental functions that families fulfil and the opportunities they could provide for explorations of character and values in different contexts.

Within the six settings, 14 focus children’s key workers and 24 of the focus children’s parents were invited to take part in the study in stage 2. The head teachers or the managers of the settings also participated in interviews, informal discussions and the practitioners’ survey (questionnaire). Other informants in school settings included 14 reception year teachers, 3 teaching assistants, and 2 head-teachers, with whom informal discussions took place.

Research methods included:

(i) Naturalistic observation -
unstructured observations of children’s everyday interactions in a real-life context, which also allowed researchers to study the situations and events that are emotionally meaningful to the children.
(ii) Discussion groups with adults -
parents/carers, ECE practitioners and teachers.
(iii) Questionnaire to parents/carers and ECE practitioners.
(iv) Interviews with parents,
ECE practitioners and teachers and reception teachers. Discussions with ECE practitioners and parents by means of video clips.
(v) Discussions with children by means of stories, video clips, and children’s own materials.
(vi) Home visits.

Observations

Each visit to a setting was designed to capture evidence associated with more than one of the focus children.
During a regular day, a minimum of thirty minutes was spent focussing the observation on each child in turn, although sometimes more than one focus child was involved in the interactions that were recorded in a single observation. The minimum 30-minute time period provided a good opportunity for the researcher to record how a child was able to initiate, invite and /or be rejected by her/his peers to play, and to record how the play or interactions continued or ceased.

Over time, as the children became more familiar with a researcher’s presence, they sometimes instigated conversations. When the children appeared comfortable and confident with the researcher, some structured questions were deliberately used to create conversations with the children, for instance, “Who are the important people in your family? And why are they important?” By means of these conversations, some additional evidence emerged about values and virtues that the children perceived to be important.

For further information on the findings of the report, please view the pdf documents below.