Children's Progress in Community Nurseries

Abstract

Staff in both community nurseries and nursery schools are concerned to promote the social, cognitive, linguistic and physical development of children. In the community nurseries there was a particular concern for children with social and emotional behaviour problems. In evaluating the nurseries children's progress in all these areas of development was assessed. The focus of this paper is on comparing the progress made by children in the community nurseries with that of children in nursery schools. Specifically questions were asked about the level of social and emotional behavioural problems across the nurseries, about comparability of development on entering and leaving the nurseries and whether children across all the nurseries make the same kind of developmental progress.

Three assessment tools were used, the Preschool Behaviour Checklist, the Keele Assessment Guide and the Renfrew Revised Child Development Chart. Assessments were carried out at all nurseries four times over a two year period. While caution must be exercised in generalising from limited time‐span data, the results obtained suggest that in general, children made considerable developmental progress over a two year period with children leaving community nurseries for primary school with levels of development equal to, or better than, those leaving the comparative nursery schools. The exception to this steady progress is amongst children under 3‐years old where progress is not as consistent as might be expected. While one community nursery admitted a particularly high proportion of children with social and emotional problems, these problems were significantly reduced over time.