Interest-led Planning

Interest-led enhancements are quickly becoming the most popular way to enhance provision within the UK. Much of this was sparked by Anna Ephgrave’s book ‘Nursery Year in Action’ (amongst others.)  Ephgrave’s work is exceptional, and I highly recommend you checkout her books.

However, with many things in the Early Years, Ephgrave’s approach has been diluted, appropriated and changed and in some cases the ‘child-led’ approach settings take doesn’t resemble her philosophy or doesn’t take children’s voice into account.

Please note: Interest-led enhancements or child-led planning doesn’t need to involve physical planning. It’s just the name.

It is also worth noting that Ephgrave didn’t start the idea of child-led approaches off. The approach is embedded in various philosophies of education around the world and has been used in the UK for many years.

What does it mean in practice

I’m not going to discuss Ephgrave’s specific approach as this is under copyright and I really do think you should buy her books. I will, however, explain in this blog the concept of following the child’s interests. In a later post I will explore how to create a hybrid approach which considers other approaches.

Here’s an example:

Little Phoebe is playing with a digger in the sand area. She is fascinated by the action of the digger moving forward and backwards leaving caterpillar track marks in the sand. Interest-led planning is noticing and responding immediately to this interest. It could be that a practitioner discusses the track marks and provides new vocabulary. It could be that they retrieve a book all about differs and show Phoebe. It could be that they source another toy truck that has caterpillar tracks on. All of these things happen ‘in the moment.’ This relies upon you knowing what resources are available to hand in the continuous provision, what is stored in your cupboard and being able to tune into the specifics of phoebes play.

Providing a new tracked toy is one small step but child-led planning doesn’t mean you stop there. If this ignites some interest you continue down this path, providing more resources to feed the interest further. Only when you reach a natural stopping point such as a break in your day, end of the session or the child loses interest do you stop. At this point make a note of what you did last in a visible place for all the team to see. This way they can pick up in the future and potentially provide new resources for the child as a provocation (more on that soon).

Is it better than topic-based approaches?

Subjective. I personally think if child-led planning is done well then you can achieve a lot more than through topics. However, it relies upon having a healthy ratio, consistent staff members who know the children well and a team with a lot of knowledge about childhood development. For this reason, many settings are struggling to introduce a child-led approach.

Furthermore, many settings who record children’s interests find themselves completely inundated with notes. Trying to keep up with all children’s interests when you have a large cohort with many interests is… challenging.

My suggestion is to always focus down on the most important, play-driving interest. Ideally this would be one that hasn’t been played out much before either.

For example:

Jack from the pre-school room loves to play with the dinosaurs. He’s been into them since he was in the baby room. His practitioners have done lots with dinosaurs and are now struggling to know where to take it next. Another practitioner notices that Jack has been putting dinosaurs into cars and pushing them down the hill. She suggests that they move away from dinosaurs and explore passenger vehicles with him instead.

In the next post we’ll explore schema-led planning and in a future post we’ll explore bringing them altogether to form a hybrid approach which will likely be more effective.