The Importance of Children’s Friendships in Early Childhood Education (1 of 2)
[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter. A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19. In this first of two episodes Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor Chris Pascal OBE, and Professor Tony Bertram, Directors of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood, or ‘CREC’. based at the St Thomas Children’s Centre in Birmingham.
In this episode Caron talks to Tony and Chris about the importance of children’s friendships in early childhood education, and links to children’s wellbeing. This episode covers a range of topics including flourishment and joy, encouraging children to connect respectfully with others, COVID 19 and friendships, recovery, and re-entry into settings and schools post-COVID 19.
The second episode will look at the role of adults in children’s friendships, time and friendship, and hope and optimism.
[00:01:19] So welcome, Tony and Chris, so this podcast. It’s really great to be able to talk to you this morning. I wondered if I could ask you to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your background. If we could start with you first Chris?
Chris Pascal: [00:01:34] Hello everyone, and to you Caron. Really happy to be part of this wonderful conversation this morning. My name is Chris Pascal and I’m Director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood in Birmingham, which I co-direct with Tony Betram. I began my professional career as a social care worker with younger children in inner-city Birmingham, looking after children under the age of 5 who had been taken in to care but were in a children’s home. I don’t think that we do this anymore. It was a kind of assessment centre for children.
[00:02:08] Then I went on and got inspired by the value of education as a means for social mobility and life transformation. So, I did a teacher training and then became an early years teacher in inner-city Birmingham and I worked doing that for fifteen years; doing my master’s and doctorate at the same time as teaching fulltime, and then went in to HE to train teachers and started at that time to research my own practice in the classroom – and that’s where my research career started. Inspired also by my doctorate.
[00:02:44] And then I met Tony, who was also at Worcester, and we established the Centre for Research in Early Childhood, which we relocated into a children’s centre in inner-city Birmingham in the year 2000, as we turned a new century. And here we are, doing research practice, consultancy, and training – living our daily lives in a children’s centre in inner-city Birmingham with children and families. So, we walk in the front door with the children every day and it keeps us very grounded, I like to believe.
[00:03:17] That is so interesting, thank you. I think that it’s really great for listeners to just- They are also interested in people’s backgrounds and how they’ve come to where they’re at. So, could I ask you the same Tony?
Tony Bertram: [00:03:30] Yeah, well I was born in Bolton, in Lancashire. I grew up in Blackpool, in a little fishing town on the coast there. We were market traders. I’m not talking stocks and shares; I’m talking about making women’s hats. And I spent the first infant years in a drawer at the market stall, a hat drawer. That was my beginnings.
[00:03:54] I emigrated to Canda when I was maybe in my early twenties, got married out there. Then decided I should do something serious, and I came back and trained as a teacher. I worked in infant schools. I have always worked with children under-five, for about thirteen years. I became a head, and then moved into higher education.
[00:04:20] As Chris said, we started the Centre for Research in Early Childhood when we were at Worcester and since then we’ve become independent. Our focus of much of our research is on the implications of research for practice and policy. In other words, we don’t just want to do research for research’s sake, but we want to have an impact.
Chris Pascal: [00:04:44] It is a very ethical and values driven organisation with a serious mission around social justice and equalities, and particularly for those less-advantaged children and families which Tony and I both come from, is to give them the opportunities that we feel we’ve had and just support children and their families holistically. So our work is very much infused with a social mission and a political mission to make a difference to the kind of country that we live in, to make it more inclusive and allow every child to thrive and achieve their potential and I say that at the beginning of this podcast, because we’re talking about something that is really important in securing children’s life chances and their sense that they’ve lived life well, and lived a fulfilled life and our friendships and relationships are at the centre stage of all of that, as our own lives have illustrated to us.
[00:05:42] I think that it’s really, really important, as you say, that the research that we do has that impact. I was just thinking I probably wouldn’t be doing this right now if it wasn’t for, you know, I’m from a similar working-class background and widening participation at the time when I was kind of going to university and so on allowed me to do what I’m doing. So, I think that’s really heartening to hear that that is still on the agenda and people are still advocating for that, because it’s so important.
Tony Bertram: [00:06:14] I would never have gone to university unless I had received a grant. I can say that straightforwardly.
Chris Pascal: [00:06:26] But I think our work in early childhood education is not just education, it’s what I call civic work. It’s about citizenship, voice and democracy and listening to children and their families, whoever they are, and responding to that. And that’s the kind of society that I want to live in, where it’s inclusive and people have the chance to live their life in a, we’re going to use the term ‘In a fulfilled way’. Not just driving academic lives.
[00:06:59] For me education, when I trained back in the 70s, was much more holistic. It was about giving children the capacity to live a culturally and socially and professionally rich life. To be able to develop relationships, and coming back to the theme of this podcast, are really meaningful and help them live well. We are social beings, and we all depend on having people around us who we care for and who care for us, which is what friendships are about, isn’t it.
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[00:07:31] One of the reasons I was so interested in talking to you is knowing that you do quite a lot of work around children’s wellbeing and obviously that’s so linked in with children’s friendships. So, I just wondered if you could tell us about your research and links to young children’s friendships and perhaps wellbeing? So, could we start with you Tony?
Tony Bertram: [00:07:55] Yes, I mean we are interested in researching friendships and wellbeing. Friendships are very important to wellbeing. Not just for children but for adults as well. Communities within school settings and early childhood settings. I think that there’s a danger at the moment that we’ve developed, and I think that it’s particularly impactful in early childhood settings, we’ve developed what I would call a performative culture. So, all of a sudden we’ve started to measure children and have metrics on everything and we’re forcing both the practitioners and the children to be subject to that and I’m not sure that we’ve got the balance right.
[00:08:43] I do think that we want all children to be fulfilled and to be the best that they can be, and to develop skills and so on, I’m not saying that. I’m saying I think that we’ve got in balance the relationship between fulfilment if you like, the development of all the skills and things that children need, and flourishment. And I think that flourishment is quite a nice idea because it suggests that children have to develop within the community and with themselves and be socially interactive and so on.
[00:09:10] So that focus on, I think at a political level, that we’ve got that out of balance at the moment. That is one of the things that we’re very interested in exploring.
[00:09:22] That’s great, thank you. And did you want to add anything to that Chris?
Chris Pascal: [00:09:27] I want our children to progress academically and to achieve that because that’s what’s helped me in my life, and I had a good education in Birmingham that gave me the knowledge and the skills and capacity to do that. I think particularly in early years, although I think that it’s true throughout, is how do you live well while you’re doing that. And I really worry at the moment about mental health issues amongst our children and young people, because they’ve lived through COVID and been very isolated – cut apart from their normal networks and friendships and a lot of our work really looked at that, and I think that has led us to a preoccupation, not just with the knowledge and skills that children need to progress educationally, but the process by which they experience that. I think that for children, flourishing is about having a life in which things like joy, love, trust and relationships are part of that, part of where children are developing the skills to be able to do that.
[00:10:27] And actually to perform well in any area of your life you need to be able to connect with other people. I also want to make the point at the beginning here that friendships are part of that. That relationships are bigger than that. We have to relate to people who are not our friends. We have to relate to people that we sometimes find it difficult to be friendly with. We live increasingly in a polarised society of us and them, and othering others, and not connecting in a respectful way with each other, but in our world, we’ve got to learn to live with difference. And I mean that at a global level. There is war going on in Europe now, and how we live with difference and diversity, and people who are different to us and how we relate to that in a respectful way with that without losing your own integrity and your own sense of groundedness and who you are. And you’ve got your place in that world, and you’ve got your close network of – I will call that ‘friends’, but you operate in a connected way with other people in that world.
[00:11:37] We can’t live like hermits or in gated communities or in camps away from other people. So that is when I talk about our civic work and relationships are at the heart of that. A bit of the foundation stage curriculum which puts personal, social and emotional at the heart of it probably more than – and I’m a great fan of getting children mathematically and linguistically competent, but the ability to be socially, emotionally literature as well is probably more important in terms of determining that child’s life and their fulfilment in their lives.
[00:12:18] My daily work is full of relating to other people and if I hadn’t got the skills to do that I would be in big trouble. I don’t think that you can live well in an isolated way, and so I work on relationships and within those relationships we all need somebody around us or a few people around us who would go to unreasonable lengths for us, which is what your friends and hopefully your family do. But we all need people in our lives to do that, and that means that close relational friendship and developing that capacity to link up with somebody like that, to have a bond, and it starts really early on – that basic skill of connectivity and attachment, we might call it. Attachment of another to us, because we learn it through that, but also our attachment to others around them and how we negotiate that through our lives.
[00:13:12] Because our relationships, our close attachments change as we grow too, don’t they. I was struck by a young child I was with the other day who had got in to trouble at school because she had said that somebody wasn’t her friend and then I thought that’s a fairly okay thing to say because I have to work with people who are not my friends. I thought she had been quite sophisticated saying ‘No, she’s okay, but she’s not my friend’, and she was making that distinction. So I think that friendships and relationships and our networking with people is how- And that is created by the processes by which we live and work together and as Tony said, we don’t spend enough time, or there’s a danger that we’re spending not enough time on that, and some of that is part of why I think some children are struggling in today’s world, because they haven’t had enough experience of it or that there is too much of a function to drive them on and drive them through and catch up, which is very individuated, rather than a collective endeavour.
[00:14:18] I have recently done a podcast with a teacher in a school and they were saying very, very similar things to you. Again, the fact that we want children to reach their potential and to do well in maths, English and that kind of thing, but also the really important things are those relationships and making connections.
[00:14:36] I know you mentioned there about COVID-19, and I know you’ve written a social mobility impact research brief, and I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit about that?
Chris Pascal: [00:14:48] We were commissioned by the social mobility unit actually to look at what was happening over the period of the pandemic and also the Froebel Trust that we’ve been working with because Froebelian practice has a great emphasis on some of the things that we’ve talked about; fulfilment, friendships, and networking, and the important of being together with each other during this time.
[00:15:12] And our work tends to be in practice and with practice. All of our research is done in the company of others. We don’t come in as researchers and do research. We kind of work alongside children and particularly we try to listen well to children and encourage them to kind of share their knowledge and expertise, which is what we were doing on this project. What were their experiences like of living with COVID? There is age hierarchies that go on here and the group of people that haven’t been listened to by policy and practitioners are children and young people. There is a lot of evidence now. But the younger children particularly – because there is this perception that they’re not able to articulate and actually we find children profoundly able to articulate and communicate.
[00:16:03] Even without words. Their body, if you tune in to what they’re telling you, they’re communicating with you. They are incredible communicators of their mental state, their wellbeing, and what matters to them.
[00:16:16] So through the children’s play, when they were going through COVID, and sometimes there was lockdown and they were not allowed in and some kids were in and some were not in, but we really were trying to listen well to what children’s experiences were and we did some work in primary schools as well, at the Teach First project to see what their experience had been during lockdown, and the fundamental thing that bonded them all was that during lockdown, the biggest thing that they missed as their friendships in the nursery or in school.
[00:16:51] When they were going backwards and forward; lockdown and not lockdown, or in bubbles and not in groups, the children found that profoundly difficult. That they couldn’t relate to their home friendships because their home friendship and settings, how they lived with that. Some children we found very, very resilient in that. In fact, the children were teaching us as adults how to manage that, and they found ways to express it through their play and through their actions, to make different kinds of connections with people.
[00:17:28] I remember one little girl, she knew she couldn’t hug her friends so she kind of developed this self-hug and then she did a kiss by opening and shutting the palm of her hands to express her feelings so they were telling us you can find ways to connect, even if you can’t physically but they were absolutely, when they were back in the nursery and the school, sometimes the coming back was difficult to navigate because it was a long period of time and they’re growing fast and things are changing and their friends had had experiences that they hadn’t.
[00:18:01] The thing that they most missed and most needed as a kind of therapy was to reconnect with their friends and being back into the routine of their nursery community. But what we were doing in our research was documenting and curating their play sequences to see what was happening in their play and how they were making their inner-life, and this is very Froebelian, their inner-life outer, through the expression of that in their play sequences.
[00:18:36] There was lots and lots of COVID play. There was a game called the death game, where they acted out somebody dying, but they didn’t want to do that with an adult, they did that away. That was quite interesting. But mask games, touching games, and not washing/hand cleaning games. All kinds of play that went on over a period. Whereas others didn’t want to do that at all, they wanted to play away from that. So super-hero play. And the other thing that we found is that they were drawn to the outdoors. Again, children teach you. In the nursery they had the choice of indoors and outdoors, maybe because they hadn’t been able to when they were at home. They wanted to be outdoors because a) I think they kind of knew. It was almost in that romantic way; the outdoors is healthier for you. The engagement with the outdoors was much more profound as an individual but also as a group they wanted to be outdoors as well. So, we learnt a lot through observing, listening, and documenting their play and then talking with the children and then telling their stories. Often using their words or through multimedia expressions of what they did.
[00:19:49] And then really dialoguing with them and the practitioners about what they were telling us and then we adjusted practice because of that. So that’s the impact and so the children’s voices really shifted. So, the practice in the pre-schools changed, nurseries changes, so they changed to be more outdoors focused. They changed to give children more time to play and less time doing kind of what might be prescribed as catch-up activities around literacy and numeracy. They felt that the children needed more time to be with each other and play in a free way and play out these narratives and express these narratives that were really important to them.
[00:20:34] And they also wanted knowledge, by the way. They wanted to know about the virus and what it looked like. And the drawings of this virus, which is a crown, isn’t it, so they wanted that intellectual academic knowledge about- They didn’t want to be protected from that. They really wanted to know the science I would say, and they understood what would happen if the virus got on their hands and got transmitted to them.
[00:21:04] And then they were telling their parents about wearing their masks and sanitation. So, we sometimes, no, we quite often underestimate what children are interested in and capable of but what they most needed, and need now, as we are moving ahead, is time to play. Time to express their daily realities and live out and express their emotional state in relation to that. Or not. Sometimes they want to move on from that and do something different and that should be fine as well.
Tony Bertram: [00:21:35] Two quick anecdotes from me, is that when we were doing this thing on COVID we were interviewing children, and adults, to see what had been the impact but also what had been the process of recovery and re-entry in to schools, and I remember interviewing this 12 year old girl and asking her what was the most difficult thing about having to come back to school and how she could pick up where she had left off, and so on. We had a strategy of an intervention process from an additional teacher who had been engaging with this group and I was thinking about the curriculum and when I said to her what is the most difficult thing, she said ‘I was frightened that when I came back my friends wouldn’t be friends with me’, and I thought wow, that’s it. You know, if you’re talking about developing children you’ve got to be aware that all this happens in the social context. So that would be one anecdote.
[00:22:32] The other one was we’ve done another piece of research with The Scouting Association, and historically when I was that age you had Scots and Cubs or Guides and Brownies, but now we’ve got underneath the cub level we’ve got Beavers, and we’ve got the new group which is called Squirrels. So, this is 4- and 5-year-olds, so again we’re doing an evaluation, national evaluation – it’s an incredible programme I think. It is scouting, but it’s about growing kids independently, it’s not gender specific, it’s boys and girls. So, I am asking this group of children at the end, I said what was the most dangerous thing that you’ve done in Scouting and one of them said ‘Oh yeah, we had to light a fire! We were allowed to light a fire!’ and the other one said ‘Yeah, we were chopping up wood!’ and I said, ‘Have you got any fingers left?’ and then this one kid said, ‘The hardest thing for me is actually coming in and seeing if my friends are still here and if they still like me’. And I thought, you know, it’s as deep as that. I don’t think that PSE sums it up. Sticking PSE on the end, it’s an actual integration, an integrated part of children’s life and in fact all human life.
[00:23:49] Do I belong here? Is there somebody looking at me as an individual? The teachers that I remember from my school, still, are the ones that saw me as an individual and I think that there is a problem with us just looking at children as what’s the average and why aren’t they up to the average? Because actually none of us are average. We’re all individual and independent and I think that kind of flaw, not the ‘law’ or averages, but the ‘flaw’ of averages is something that we ought to take on board and see children more as individual. And listen to this social and emotional process that has to be right, and you have to be close to it and understand it. And that is how we wrap all friendships. And, as I say, I think that applies not just to the children but to the adults as well.
[00:24:37] Can I just pick up on a few points that you’ve said there. Those kinds of stories, those things that you’ve just told us Tony about what friendship means to children, I think that’s why I’ve been researching this for the last decade, because I know how much it means to children. I know that it’s really important to them. It’s really great that you could share those examples. Just picking up on a couple of things that you said, Chris – those positives almost, if we can say. I know that we don’t like to look at it in that way, but actually in terms of adversity like COVID, you were saying that some of the children showed resilience through their play. And again, play being so integral to friendship. And you mentioned Froebel and I’ve done a podcast with them and interestingly they mentioned your work.
[00:25:28] I think when I did some research with children during COVID there were some children that talked about actually this did give me the opportunity to make new friends, or to talk to people that I don’t usually talk to. Particularly when there were groups of children where there were keyworker children and vulnerable children that were in school, so it might be that your friends weren’t there but actually for some children that was an opportunity to have conversations with other children or be in groups with other children that they wouldn’t ordinarily be with and for some that was positive.
Tony Bertram: [00:26:00] We did a piece of work in a seaside town where we were looking at Early Years settings and seeing what had been the impact on those Early Years settings in terms of COVID and so on, but this one particular setting, it was close to a hospital – and it was an area of great social deprivation. You know, some of our seaside towns now are where what used to be called ‘troubled families’ were placed. And the children in this setting were those who had been children of key workers during COVID. And, as I say, they were next to a hospital but they weren’t the children of the nurses and doctors, they were essentially the children of the porters, the ordinary people who were grafting around things.
[00:26:51] And for them of course, because they were seen as children of keyworkers the ratios had suddenly changed within the setting. Their care and education was being paid for, and what the practitioners reported to us was that what they had predicted in terms of these children’s achievements was far exceeded during the COVID years. They were the ones who were the complete outliers who went against it and they had really benefitted from lower ratios, more time, they hadn’t stuck to the rigidity of the practice and as Chris said, they had enjoyed a lot of time outside, outdoors, exploring things because actually the staff wanted to be outside more than they did inside.
[00:27:38] So I just thought that was an interesting outlier, and maybe saying something about what’s needed in terms of having the space and the forum to develop children in the way that we’re suggesting. And yeah, maybe in a Froebelian way.
[00:27:51] To have that time and space to actually focus on those interactions and those relationships, yeah.
Chris Pascal: [00:27:57] I think it’s important to say that COVID impacted on all of us differentially. Some of us, and some children had – if we can say this, a good COVID and others a really bad one, and all those now are back together, and so the challenges that those of us who work in those provision is to support all of those children and the danger is that we focus on the catch up thing, which is to intensify and narrow down on a few certain things when maybe what we should be doing is opening up and relaxing and we are very inspired recently by Alison Clark’s work on slow pedagogy and giving time- Because staff are also struggling with their own mental wellbeing and recovery too, but not thinking that we’ve got to catch up in 12 months what was a three year process, and for some children the majority so far of their young lives. We’ve got to give them the luxury and freedom of time to navigate through that.
[00:29:07] Now that takes skill and it isn’t just about saying that we just need to let them go, free for all, and all of that. Skilful practitioners who know how to scaffold and structure individually for those differences that are there, but to pay attention to the wellbeing and to give children time and staff time to have relaxed time together, slow time together, to process things and find their feet.
[00:29:39] And the skill of interacting with a wider group of children, you know, these children coming in from home and family and that has been very restrictive. If you think of how many different relationships these very young children are having to make and respond to when they’ve been in a very contained environment, you know, you add another two children in and exponentially the number of interactions and the number of relationships between all those children – and you add another ten children and its massive what we’re expecting of these children in order to function.
[00:30:14] It isn’t just about sitting them down on the mat and showing them flashcards or getting vocabulary into them, it’s how they interact and relate to each other and we’ve got to pay attention to this I think looking ahead. If we don’t then there is this whole generation. And all of us, we are all still in recovery from it. I certainly still am, because my working life was transformed, and children’s lives were shaped differently, this cohort coming through, their lives were shaped differently.
[00:30:50] We’ve got to kind of pay attention to that and infecting their day – I talked earlier about the conditions for flourishing and fulfilment is joy. They’ve got to experience joy in their daily life. Being able to be joyful and to feel the joy and to develop and feel warmth and affection from people who aren’t their family. To know when and how to trust other people. There is a lot of caution, because there had to be, so having to engage in a trusting way and develop trusting relationships is a big work for us to do in our sector. So, joy, love, trust and giving them time to process those experiences through play or through arts. And there is another thing that’s linked: the imagination and creativity.
[00:31:46] One of the things that other pieces of work were very involved with is the place of creativity, the arts, and the cultural life that goes on in the setting that many of these children have missed out on, giving nurseries and schools not just permission but the support to kind of enrich their lives. That aspect of their life has been impoverished as well and will have consequences for how they grow up with a love of the arts, the ability to enjoy music or make music, the ability to create wart of be in art or perform art. All of these things enrich life and make us more rounded people, and we generally do these things in the company of others, don’t we.
[00:32:36] You know, you just think that we couldn’t sing together and how joyful singing is at every age. We are having to re-learn all those things or learn for the first time those things again, and all of that needs space and time to have its place, and there is a big, huge work for us to do, but underneath that children are incredibly resilient and have found ways through it but not all children did. So we have got to be aware of the differential of experience. Some children flew and thrived and had brilliant times and had wonderful home experience as well as carried on at the nursery and that was kind of better for some children who were there, but other children did not and they had a very difficult time.
[00:33:30] But we always say the best therapy for any child is another child. A Greek friend of ours once said that to me and I always remember it. The best therapy for any child or any human is another human that they can get close to. That’s what friendship is about and it’s fundamental to our work and our life more broadly I think, and we are really campaigning in all of our political work and in our practitioner and practice work, is to encourage and support attention to be paid, equal attention, and a rebalancing, I think. Tony talked about our attention to these underpinning life skills, which is what they are. Which is how we live well in the 21st century and how we deal with virtual friends or the virtual world. There is an AI kind of issue.
[00:34:27] When we think of the sustainability goals, the human, social, and environmental – that technology is also changing the nature of friendships and relationships and helping children and ourselves navigate the way through that. it’s a massive challenge that brings huge opportunities for connectivity, but it brings huge challenges about what’s real and authentic and that will help you live a fulfilled and well life when all those options are around.
[00:35:00] I think that we should in this podcast touch the AI and the virtual world, or the metaverse and do you like me, am I your friend, what image am I presenting on that, on my Facebook? Very, very young children have phones and live in this virtual world. It’s astonishing to me, and how we give them alternatives to that, or ground them in a real world. Something that I care quite passionately about, that I want the meta world, or whatever that is, to be a benefit to our humanity and not to kind of distance ourselves from each other or allow ourselves to live in even more of a bubble, because I think that one of the things that’s happening is that we’re all living in little self-contained bubbles and social media and the internet are part of that, aren’t they, and that polarises or puts us in to that camp or that camp.
[00:35:59] And I’ve come back to that learning to live and relate to people who are different to us in many ways. I don’t just mean in terms of their abilities, and I mean in terms of their sexuality. All the diversities. Populations are on the move and our countries are becoming much more diverse places, so we are not living in a tightknit homogenous community and shouldn’t be. And how we encourage that openness to difference and that welcome to difference and an ability to connect across those differences in an inclusive way is going to be vitally important for our survival as a species, I think.
[00:36:40] When you were talking, lots of things were coming into my mind but I was thinking still about that sort of tolerance, our understanding, that compassion and that time and space, and I was just thinking about a scenario that somebody was telling me about just after we had the second lockdown. I think one of my friends said that they saw a lady with a pushchair with a toddler in the pushchair and she just went up to just talk to them in the street and said hello and said hello to the child in to the pushchair, and the child kind of turned away and she just said ‘Look, I’m really sorry, but he’s a COVID baby and he’s really finding it hard now with those interactions’. And when you said about trusting people, it made me think about that whole, you know, we’ve got to allow that time and space and understanding and compassion about how children have kind of learnt during those lockdowns to be cautious and to be careful and now it’s going to take a while for that. So that reminded me of that.
[music playing] Thank you for listening to this podcast. The second episode of this podcast with Tony and Chris can be accessed by visiting https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends. Here you will also find more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts. This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University. [music playing]
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