What is Continuous Provision?

The clue is in the name, continuous. It’s what you provide that is accessible continuously for the children to use to deepen their knowledge and skills. It's the resources, the shelves, the trays etc - the things that stay there all the time. Not swapped out at a different part of the year. Permanent!

It is, however, becoming more common for the term to be misapplied to all provision (including the enhancements). Where this happens it’s possible that practitioners will miss out on the most important part of continuous provision, depth!

Continuous provision isn’t new. Frobel had his gifts; Pratt had her unit blocks and ‘do with’ toys. It has long been a staple in early Childhood settings that children will have a range of toys and resources to play with that they can go back to day after day.

Critics of this approach would tell you that children can often get ‘bored’ of these resources and it’s essential to replenish or refresh with new and exciting resources. I’m an advocate of enhancements, but not at the expense of resources already in place that still have capacity for learning.

Much of this comes down to the resources and the possibilities they possess for learning. If you think on historical continuous provision (whether from when you first started practicing or from when you were in nursery yourself) you’d expect to see blocks, playdough, books, pencils, water and sand (amongst others). These resources would be supplemented by other resources to create ‘areas.’ Playdough is an incredible resource that children should never tire of using. That’s because it’s open-ended enough to be used in a variety of ways. It can be a pizza on a Monday, fried chicken on a Tuesday, a Caterpillar on a Wednesday and who knows about Thursday!  As a sector we have moved away from some of the open-ended resources we historically provided towards more closed. These closed resources were there for a purpose – to control. Here’s a set of compare bears and a pattern card. It’s really rather closed ended (once you master this pattern, what next?). We put this out because our curriculum or data tells us we need to teach pattern and we need to ensure it happens! Could patterns not have been taught using the playdough I wonder?

The key learning around continuous provision is depth. Depth in understanding of how and why to use a resource as a tool to make sense of the world around them. Imagine you’re in the kitchen making spaghetti bolognaise. You reach for a spoon to stir the spaghetti. Chances are you’ll reach for a spaghetti spoon, but wait, it’s in the dishwasher! So, you reach for something else that you know will do the job almost as well. It’s a slotted spoon. How do you know this slotted spoon would work? Why not the rolling pin? Why not the garlic press? Over time you’ve developed an understanding of the capacity of the slotted spoon through trial and error and know that it’s capacity to stir and drain water away quickly is what you’re looking for right now.

Where practitioners swap out resources quickly, they deprive children the opportunities to learn the depth and complexity of them. They struggle to form deep connections. Maybe they’ll end up stirring their spaghetti with a rolling pin!

Children do NOT get bored of high-quality continuous provision, but it does need to be enhanced over time. Those enhancements, which we’ll talk about in a later post, should be linked back to the learning journey the children are on. Which, incidentally, can be a mix of child- and adult-led.

In my next post I’m going to talk about some of the complexities of thought around selecting continuous provision resources and why an overly mandated approach to provision never pays off they way it is intended.