Philosophies of early years education

Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852)

Friedrich Froebel was one of the most well-known exponents of the early 19th century push for social change through education. Froebel invented the word ‘kindergarten’ and is often referred to as the father of preschool education. He had intended to study architecture, but changed his mind and became a teacher in 1805 at the then famous Frankfurt School, under Pestalozzi.

Fundamental to his pedagogy (this is teacher-speak for ‘teachings’) is the premise that play is a necessary development phase in the education of the child. This was a radical idea in a time when play was seen as idleness and children were viewed as miniature adults to be moulded as rapidly as possible into economically productive members of society. Froebel was one of the first to advocate a childcentred education.

Froebel was born in the forest area of Thuringia, Germany and he believed in the importance of providing children with a beautiful natural environment. He promoted the principle that there is a fundamental (Christian) unity that exists between all created things and their creator, and between beauty and goodness.

Froebel emphasised the importance of learning through meaningful activities, and discovering and learning through play (such as cooking, gardening, looking after animals, recycling and creative expression). ‘Children learn by doing’ was one of his famous axioms. It is still possible to buy ‘The Gifts’, a series of geometrical block toys which he designed in the 1840s as a stimulating alternative to the decorative show toys of the day.

Another of Froebel’s famous phrases is ‘Children should be encouraged to think for themselves’. He viewed the child as an autonomous individual, able to take risks and shoulder responsibilities, and not just a passive receiver of information. In Froebel’s schools, children are free to move to where they need to go, and they are encouraged to be as self-sufficient as possible, hanging up their own coats, etc. They use real tools for gardening and cooking and help with the work of each centre such as looking after the pets and helping organise the recycling.

Froebel’s pedagogy travelled fast across Europe and America, spread by teachers who came to train at his schools and then set up new schools, many of which became the first training colleges for preschool teachers in each country. Much of his teaching is now an accepted and integral part of our general education, regardless of any school’s philosophical allegiances.

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925)

Rudolf Steiner is another forefather in the early learning movement and the creator of one of the more resilient philosophies to emerge out of the melting pot of manifestoes and new ideas that evolved in the early 1900s.

Rooted in Christianity, the main thrust of Steiner’s theory is that people are threefold manifestations, having intellect, soul and body. He strongly believed that any educational system would fail unless it addressed all three aspects and he held the failure of his contemporary education system in addressing these spiritual and physical aspects in equal measure to the intellectual as the root cause of WWI.

Steiner developed a complex series of ‘languages’ and programs to aid teachers in teaching spiritual and physical expression. These focused on art, music and movement, and aimed to realise: the important task of awakening people to their true worth as spiritual beings, setting forth ideas that would prevent societies from disintegrating and giving foundations for a new social fabric for the changed conditions of the time. Rudolf Steiner was convinced that much social unrest … amongst the working classes was not due, as popularly supposed, to frustration in political and economic matters, but to cultural deprivation. (Childs 2003, p. 62)

Steiner programs and products

Eurhythmy is a stylised series of moves that resonate with our breathing patterns when we speak or sing, thus achieving ‘soul gymnastics’.

Anthroposophy is Steiner’s theory of a threefold universe.

Anthropometrical relates to the proportional measurements of the human form, and applying or uncovering these qualities in the man-made environment.

Colour theory Goethe’s experiential colour theory inspired Steiner to explore the spiritual nature of colour.

Geometry is viewed as an expression of the intangible and abstract or spiritual. Steiner’s educational theory was holistic rather than reductionist, and based on ethical individualism and participation in a free spiritual life.

The Goetheanum is the famous architectural realisation of Steiner’s theories. First built in Dornach, Switzerland in 1913, it was an organic synthesis of his principles of symbolism and the physical manifestation of the spirit through colour, geometry and anthropometry. It was as important a pioneer of modern design as the concurrent avant-garde movement, Expressionism, which resulted in many structures similar to Steiner’s work, such as the Einstein Tower designed by Erich Mendelsohn and built in 1920.

Unfortunately this first Goetheanum was burnt down by an arsonist in 1922. It was an older and more cynical Steiner who built the second Goetheanum, wrought from the ‘unwilling insurers’ in the ‘dead material’ of concrete between 1924 and 1928. Now classified as a Swiss National Monument, it embodies Steiner’s principle of metamorphosis, whereby physical form is representative of the spiritual and living processes of nature.

Apart from the worldwide Rudolf Steiner organisations that now exist, and the more than 1000 schools that are run strictly in keeping with his principles, Steiner’s influence is also felt throughout general education circles. He was a prolific writer, with more than 24 books to his name (according to the online Rudolf Steiner Archive, www.rsarchive.org) and 6000 lectures and articles. Plus there are literally thousands more texts about him and his work.

Maria Montessori (1870–1952)

Dr Maria Montessori, the first woman to graduate as a doctor in Italy, focused on how children learn. An anthropologist and physician, she observed that children have different developmental stages that can be defined by age. She was not alone with this theory—Steiner had a similar series of developmental stages and so did the biologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980).

The Montessori approach posits that there are four developmental stages:

• Ages 0–6—the absorbent mind; absorbing from the environment, culture and language.

• Ages 6–12—the reasoning mind; abstract thought and imagination.

• Ages 12–18—the humanist mind; enquiring about society and the whole.

• Ages 18–24—the specialist mind; concerned with their role within the whole.

Continuing with the theory of child-centred education initiated by Froebel, Maria Montessori believed that if education followed the natural development of a child, then society would gradually move to a higher level of cooperation, peace and harmony. Montessori education is designed to help children with the task of ‘inner construction’, and is based on the belief that the child is self-directing, and knows their own needs best.

In 1896, Montessori was appointed director of the Scuola Ortofrenica, an institution devoted to the care and education of the mentally disabled. Here she developed her theories and practice with great success, teaching children who had been deemed unteachable. In 1907, she opened the ‘Casa dei Bambini’ (Children’s House). This was a children’s centre in a new housing project in a poor neighbourhood of Rome. She focused on teaching the students ways to develop their skills at a pace they set themselves:

Scientific observation … has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. (Stephenson 1998, p. 11)

In a Montessori school, rooms are pre-prepared by teachers, permanently set up with predefined and specified activities in separate areas, and the children can move between them at will. The role of the teacher is that of observer and facilitator. If the children don’t know what to do the teacher can make suggestions. Observation of the child in the prepared environment is the basis for ongoing curriculum development. The setup and program follows precise guidelines and utilises Montessori equipment and furniture (bought online from Association Montessori Internationale).

In each Montessori preschool, areas are set up for children to discover maths; language (including music); the senses (primarily touch); practical life (such as tying shoelaces, kitchen skills); culture (including geography and biology); and art.

In keeping with the developmental stages, the environment is carefully controlled. Some of the principles that are adhered to are:

• working at the child’s level. As this is generally on the floor, there are often few chairs and the ground plane becomes quite important.

• breaking down the school’s scale to provide small, child-sized environments (microcosms) in which each child feels fully competent.

• valuing art more for its process than for the product. Art can be taken home or stored away but for the most part it is not displayed, as this distracts and inhibits further development.

• allowing visible and physical access to the natural environment.

• designing built environments with simplicity in mind. A natural order is desired, and the aim is a space that is uncluttered and peaceful. Generally the storage is extraordinarily organised and out of sight and everything is highly ordered.

Maria Montessori was an influential theorist; she published several books and travelled the world as a speaker, visiting the United States, London, Helsinki and India. With the establishment of the American Montessori Society in 1914 and the Association Montessori Internationale in 1929, the Montessori approach became a founding movement in preschool education across the world.

Loris Malaguzzi (1920–1994) and the Reggio Emilia approach (post-WWII)

The Reggio Emilia schools have their early roots in the 1940s ‘People’s Nursery Schools’ set up by women’s organisations that developed in a period of local history dominated by the Italian left-wing National Liberation Committee. However, the principles and practice of the movement really began in earnest in 1963, when the local council in the town of Reggio Emilia took over the running of the nurseries and they became a public service. The council employed a young pedagogist, Loris Malaguzzi, as their advisor from 1963 until his death in 1994. It was his innovative ideas that brought Reggio Emilia Schools to international attention. In 1994 Reggio Children, an organisation that promotes this educational experience, was born.

Reggio Children are now the biggest provider of childcare in Italy, with 21 preschools and 13 toddler centres. They also run a publishing company and a clean recycled materials distribution centre, and hold regular exhibitions and international study groups.

Every year they have 16–20 study groups with anything between 80 and 400 delegates, from all over the world. There are Reggio Children branch organisations in about 20 countries, which help to spread the pedagogy. In Sweden, the national early childhood curriculum has been based on Reggio principles for the last 30 years. In Australia, it has been popular since at least 1995. The Reggio Emilia pedagogy is amongst the most influential of early childhood philosophies in the world today. Under the guidance of Malaguzzi, the Reggio Emilia approach continued the thread of a child-centred education and, in particular, held the belief that children have a voice to be heard. Children are seen as active participants in their own education and it is the teacher’s role to facilitate and promote the child’s voice with particular emphasis on children’s active, constructive and creative learning processes (Reggio Children 1998).

While on my fellowship tour, I attended a week-long Reggio course in Italy. It was very intensive and as one of only two architects at that course (surrounded by the totally different discipline of teaching) I found it very enlightening. The following seminal points are what I gleaned from two talks, the first given by Paola Cagliari:

• Education is a right: to recognise someone’s rights is to recognise their potential.

• Everyone has the right to be a protagonist in their own experiences.

• Education is a social activity.

• School is a place where everyone is sharing, discovering, inventing and participating; it is an exchange of ideas.

• Children are the builders of a culture, expressing important values.

• It is important that children are able to explore their own ideas and their own images.

• Reggio aims to give visibility to children and their expression.

• A child has 100 languages.

• Who is teaching who? and the other by Carla Rinaldi:

• Reggio is values-based education. To listen gives meaning to the other person and children are particularly sensitive to this: ‘I cannot exist without your listening’.

• The aim is to make listening visible through the projects with a cyclical process of observation, documentation and interpretation.

In a Reggio preschool, the notion of harnessing a child’s many different means of expression has evolved into a program of projects. Initiated by the children’s interests, generally as a group, an idea is explored and expanded upon through many phases and much collaboration. A vast amount of work is produced, and because it is an expansion of one ‘spark’ and developed by a team, the level of detail is impressive. The final work becomes an exhibition, thus affirming the children’s visibility.

It is worth mentioning here that these Reggio principles operate against the backdrop of Italian culture and education, which is a lot more formal than that of countries like Australia, thus freedom is a relative concept. The children are free to move within the structures set up around them. Each centre has a morning assembly, specified drop-off and pick-up time periods and a loosely timetabled day. If a preschool child chooses an activity to go on with in the morning, they are generally expected to continue with that theme for the rest of the day. And being outside is usually timetabled and involves the group rather than children being free to roam in and out at will.

Architecturally, the environment is an important part of the whole Reggio pedagogy. While acknowledging the influence of Froebel and Steiner (a child’s environment should be beautiful and the child should be autonomous and open to lots of enriching experiences), Reggio Children have developed the theme.

The resultant architecture is clearly defined by three concepts:

• A child should be free to think for themselves (and move freely around).

• The centre should operate as a cohesive community with open dialogue.

• The interpretation of play as a form of work—a science that needs a laboratory, an art that needs a workroom—the playroom should fulfil these criteria.

1 Piazza del Duomo, town of Reggio Emilia, Italy

2 Play and furnishings exhibition in the research space at the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre, Reggio Emilia, Italy, photograph courtesy of Reggio Children

3 Computer artist’s impressions of future renovations to the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre, on billboards surrounding the site

4 Water project, Villetta Centre, Reggio Emilia, Italy

There is an attempt to provide a range of experiences within the centre. Within one playroom is found: a single- and double-storey space with loft; a designated art area; a music area; a science area; eating and sleeping areas; a winter garden or bay window; stairs and perhaps a ramp with play area underneath; a series of amphitheatre steps; and recently, technology has been incorporated with a projection screen and computer area.

Reggio Emilia teachers I spoke to gave the following insights into their work:

‘Children’s personalities develop as they interact with the environment.’

‘Give the child space to give energy to their own ideas.’

‘We do not see objects as objects but as subjects, they interact.’

‘These places are not fixed. They undergo change and evolution.’

Influences from the North

For the last forty years, Scandinavia has led the world in providing government-funded comprehensive early childhood education and childcare. In Sweden at the beginning of the 1970s, an official state commission called ‘Barnstugeutredningen’ (The Child Care Survey) published its work, which proposed an education based on communication and dialogue.

In 1988, Sweden developed its first national guidelines for preschools, called Educational Program for Preschools. In 1998, this was updated to become The Preschool Curriculum and the authority for preschools was shifted from the Department of Social Welfare to the Department of Education. The new curriculum adopted much of the Reggio Emilia pedagogy, and the shift in authority ensured that preschools in Sweden are part of the education system, and are viewed as the foundation for all education. They are as intrinsic to a child’s upbringing as primary school is in countries like Australia. As such, the facilities and programs are equal to primary and high school facilities in their scope and sophistication.

From the 1960s through to the 1980s, children’s preschool facilities in Sweden were built as little house-like compartments. The standard arrangement was four identical units, each unit consisting of two rooms and a shared kitchen. But now a more multivalent approach has been adopted, with space for art, craft, science experiments and computers. The teacher’s role has changed as well: they have to do much more research to help the children with their projects, and there is generally more paperwork associated with documentation of the projects and of the children. Because of this, in newer centres there is often a rear zone of staff service rooms with offices, staffroom and photocopying and printing areas. There is also a focus on providing additional communal areas, for teachers to discuss their work, for children to interact and for parents to become involved. Preschool is, ideally, a place of encounter.

A typical Swedish preschool is arranged in a similar fashion to a primary, or even a high school. It is generally arranged in three-year blocks. Each block has a ‘homestead’ with the possibility of eating in and there are three playrooms for each age group that open onto these homesteads. A main kitchen, an assembly area and a dining room are shared. Playground and specialty rooms such as for craft, music or science are also shared. In the newer centres there are no corridors, but each room opens onto the next and onto a central courtyard, so there is an interconnectivity, fluidity and sense of openness.

Instead of outside consultants or ateliers, the Swedish preschool system makes the teachers into specialists, letting each teacher define and expand their particular strength. Each preschool may have an art teacher, a language teacher and an outdoor teacher.

Provision of a free lunch to all the students was introduced in the poor 1940s. It will probably remain a feature of Swedish education, as all the schools have the necessary facilities, but providing the kitchen and dining areas is a big part of a school’s budget. Many schools also have community services attached, such as an area for nurses and consulting outreach and health services.

Apart from taking early learning seriously and providing for it, the other big influence from the Scandinavians is their focus on the importance of the natural outdoor world and incorporating it into everyone’s everyday life, including preschoolers.

The great outdoors and neuroscience

It is very much a part of Swedish and Norwegian culture that to be outside in a natural state, in a natural environment is an ideal. In Sweden, the ‘Friluftsfrämjandet’ (Outdoor Life Organisation) was set up in the 1950s to promote and encourage outdoor activities—particularly with the young—through weekend ‘forest schools’. The schools were inspired by the Mulle stories of Gusta Frohm, a leader in the Friluftsfrämjandet organisation. These are popular stories about likeable half-child, half-animal elf creatures, the main one named Mulle, who befriend the animals and look after the environment. It is estimated that one in four adult Swedes participated in a ‘Skogsmulleskola’ (Mulle Forest School) as children.

It wasn’t until 1985 that Siw Linde and Susanne Drougge, working with the Friluftsfrämjandet, applied the Skogsmulleskola concept to daycare and preschool, creating the first Mulle ‘I Ur Och Skur’ (rain or shine) preschool. There are now more than 180 such preschools and 18 primary schools across Sweden, and a high school is currently being planned.

The approach and aims of the ‘I Ur Och Skur’ schools are twofold:

1. We were designed to be outside, not in a classroom and children much prefer to be outside than in. The main aim is to make learning fun and stimulating and get children out into the best environment for them, not to destroy their patterns or interrupt their natural learning cycles with unnecessar y classroom rituals (like dressing and undressing in warm clothes).

2. The schools seek to teach environmentalism: cycles of life, recycling, making things from scratch, enjoying nature, observing nature and being a caretaker.

Thus the schools function almost entirely outside all day, every day. Architecturally, they have provided only minimal installations within the natural setting. But the natural setting is still very much designed and manipulated to provide a variety of options to keep everyone busy. It includes child-scaled alcoves and secret cubbies, as well as more challenging physical courses and structures encouraging practical skills. The teachers, parents and children have built all the structures in working bees. This was an important part of the process, involving them all first-hand in the principles of the school. Although as the teacher I interviewed stated, it takes a long time to set up a playground this way. Many of the structures are quite simple: rope mazes, log horses, tree stump rings, etc. The attached buildings are still required to provide storage and some respite. If the weather is awful (at –10 degrees Celsius everyone is required to come inside!) the children can play indoors and they have a comfortable indoor setup to allow this, but the indoors is seen as the supplementary play area rather than the other way around. The focus has shifted to providing the complexity in the outdoor environment rather than inside. Children’s artwork depiction of ‘Mulle’, I Ur Och Skur Preschool, Lidingö, Sweden

The children have small group outdoor assemblies each morning to establish the main activity of the day, and then they are free to go and do what they want. The teachers may have set up activities but the children are also free to get equipment out themselves and do their own thing. The teacher’s job is to inspire. Sometimes they eat inside but often they eat outside. Sleeping cubbies or tents are set up outside too, and the children use sleeping bags if it is cold. Three out of five days they will make an expedition to the woods. It does not, the teacher explained, have to be far. A little woods is enough! Clothing is very important, as without the correct clothing, the children will just be uncomfortable and unhappy. Drama and music—art that does not require a permanent physical product—is often used to fulfill the Swedish curriculum requirements for arts development.

The advantages of the forest schools are numerous:

1. Nature provides a constantly changing and detailed environment full of enrichment to stimulate children’s minds. There is a wealth of spontaneous possibilities to explore, e.g. a frog seen by chance needs an immediate response, so the teachers and the students explore the topics together, finding the questions and the answers together, not just being led by the teacher.

2. The outdoors provides a healthy environment where children can run, climb and be physical to their hearts’ content. Records indicate that the occurrence of accidents is much less at an outdoor forest school than at a typical indoor centre. Studies in Sweden have concluded that sun protection is better at outdoor schools because they have set themselves up to address this issue. Grahn (1996) concluded that children at outdoor centres were healthier than the norm: they ate better, slept better, and had better motor coordination, more muscles and better physical competency than children attending more traditional schools.

3. Because they are not limited to a setup in a room prescribed by adults, children are not limited to stereotyped roles. So boys set up bead shops with stones for money and girls climb trees. They develop along the lines of their own interests, becoming individuals.

The influence of the forest schools has extended to Finland, Russia, Latvia, Japan, Scotland and even urban London. Many schools are adapting their weekly program to become outdoors-focused for two or three days a week. Some are taking a more daily approach, with two to three hours a day focused on the outdoors. Further developments in Scandinavia are the networks of ‘mobile pedagogik’ (mobile bus centres) that focus their days’ activities in the National Parks that surround Scandinavian cities. In Denmark there are currently about 60 bus schools, while in Sweden and Norway there are about 14. Some fixed-site schools have bought themselves buses to extend their service and enable an outdoors focused program.

It is of particular interest that current neuroscientific thinking supports the forest school philosophy. The Canadian neuroscientist Carl Bereiter quotes:

The key to understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American—they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. (Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby 1992, p. 56) View of lake below ‘I Ur Och Skur’ Preschool, Lidingö, Sweden

Bereiter (1992) goes on to discuss what the educational implications of ‘rediscovering’ human nature will be, such as educational curricula building on the innate knowledge of a Stone Age brain, while recognising (and thus overcoming) its inherent obstacles to new ways of thinking. He also posits that our natural behaviour patterns may well be ill-adapted to the quite recently created environment of the classroom.

If we acknowledge the prehistoric environment as our natural environment, then we accept that we were designed to operate outside and on the move, and that our brains work better when we are outside in nature, surrounded by wind and plant movement, temperature differentials, complex shadows and variable light qualities, with a variety of sensory experiences such as scents, tactile qualities and sounds and an ever present sense of not just our immediate surroundings but also the larger context around us.

But in the contemporary urban context in which most of us live it can be difficult to access natural outdoor environments, so there is a need for indoor environments to more directly emulate outdoor qualities if they are to be effective learning areas. Our educational interiors must provide a variable ambient environment, sensory enrichment, a contrast of scales, a lack of enclosure and allow for movement. Or in the words of the designer Ezio Manzini:

Designers have to be aware of ecological problems of a general kind … to propose possible and attractive ecological settings … to propose new valuable criteria primarily constituted by ‘environmental quality’, to present new settings suggesting the possible existence of a world in which a new ecology of the artificial environment may be accomplished: a world in which the discovery of limits no longer appears as a reduction of possibilities, but as the source for new ones.

(Manzini 1992, p. 4)

But if it were possible to access the natural environment, wouldn’t it be simpler to follow the Scandinavian lead and just stay outside?

The competent child

The current focus on humanistic educational philosophy with the child at the centre—initially posited by Froebel and re-asserted by each consequent philosophy so far—reaches its natural conclusion with the child as a democratic equal; where the child is an expert on what a child needs, so should be given a political voice and be heard.

In the last 20 years there has been a surge of interest in researching how children perceive and respond to their world:

This new sociological—or rather interdisciplinary childhood research—is characterized by a move away from seeing children as passive recipients of adult socialization. On the contrary, children are recognized as social actors in their own lives as well as in other people’s lives, and in the societies in which they live. (Warming 2003, p. 815)

The Mosaic approach, which has been developed by two early childhood academics, Alison Clark and Professor Peter Moss, is an example of this type of research. Influenced by educational thinkers who promote the idea of a ‘competent child’ and in particular ideas about the gathering of documentation discussed in the preschools of Reggio Emilia in Italy, it is not so much a pedagogical program as a way of measuring and exploring children’s participation in their environment. This research framework for listening and reflection has been developed and adapted through three research studies carried out in the UK (Clarke 2010; Clarke & Moss 2001, 2005). While it is not an educational philosophy in the same way as Froebel’s is, it is a research approach which articulates particular values about young children and adults.

In 2007, Alison Clark undertook a study assisting the architects designing new additions at Ashmole Preschool and Primary School, London (Clarke 2007), to incorporate preschool and primary-aged children as active clients helping to define the brief. This has led to the customisation of a fairly typical inner-London school building to provide specific microcosms within the whole that have radically altered the way the school is used and perceived. It has become user-friendly with more interfaces between the usually segregated communities within the school and with more attention to the links between inside and outside. The work done on the school was not statement architecture; it was about creating relevant child-friendly spaces and creating relationships between those spaces and the rest of the building.

The specific requests of the children (described in detail in Clark 2007) were outlined in an interview with Alison Clark and Jennifer Singer (project architect) as being all about the importance to the children of personalised spaces and the way the children drew attention to any personal markers about themselves in the space. Particular emphasis was placed on:

• transparency; being able to see parents come and go, see what the other children are doing, kno w where they are within the school

• more outdoor space; more to explore

• space that is easily customised or adapted for play

• being able to connect with the outside from the inside

• relevant detailing where it is appreciated (such as interesting ceiling designs as children are often looking up; more types of lights as children are intrigued by sparkly lights, etc.)

• a stage; just a small one in the classroom (it is used a lot and is constantly being customised)

• a shared space to mix with the other children (preschool to reception) and with the parents.

These were all implemented at Ashmole and the result is a happy, cohesive and successful school in a deprived part of London where such things are not necessarily expected.

External play area additions, Ashmole Preschool & Primary School, London, UK

Post-modernist contextualism and where we are today

Current emergent thinking, while not moving away from the child-centred approach of all the philosophies presented so far, is now embracing a bigger picture. Early learning approaches are looking not just at the child, but at the child’s context of family and community and the role of children’s facilities in contributing to this interface. Part of this thinking is the current emphasis on integrating children’s facilities with family services and outreach facilities. Feeny (2006) explains that:

Evidence from around the world suggests that strengthening the family as an essential unit of society and promoting the regeneration of communities are the most effective ways to ensure children develop into healthy and responsible adults. (p. 2)

There is widespread consensus with regard to child and family wellbeing (see ARACY 2009), that prevention is much more effective than cure or, more precisely, prevention is more effective than interventions made later on when the problems and issues are more entrenched and complex. So providing support within the normalised setting of the school and community centre—as a universal service rather than a targeted service—is desirable, creating a more natural and less stigmatising way for families to receive assistance.

This focus on the community has architectural implications. For instance, in Stockholm, Klisterburken Nursery School aims to provide not just a centre for children on a domestic scale, as in the past, but to provide a school with a more public face; a place of connections, or as the head teacher described it, a house of possibilities. The preschool and long daycare centre are built around a central communal space that can be utilised by all and provides transparency between the various components. This model is also used in Finland, where several schools are combined on one campus but with a central and transparent communal space that is often a dining area and gallery or library combined. These buildings are designed to have an impact on the neighbourhood and to be seen as a feature and focus, a beacon within the community.

The importance of both a child’s connection to their context and how a children’s centre fits within its context are current preoccupations. The next chapter explores contextual design in further detail—a common aim of each centre is the desire for a clear identity as an integral part of its community’s culture.

With this emphasis on community and context, as well as the importance of education in the early years, and with child-centred education being similar in practical application to the self-guided research of the adult world, is the future of children’s centre design becoming closer to that of community learning centres? Are children, teenagers and adults all equally the client/student?

There is a shared need for central communal areas with libraries, cafés, displays and interactive scenarios, plus a need for smaller, more private alcoves for individual activities and break away groups. With interactive play now viewed not as a way of passing the time, but as a valid part of all education, there is a need for fluid movement and transparency between the various components, putting resources on display for the learner to access at will. There is a need for the centre to act as a focal point within the community and also as a reflection of its culture, with an equal emphasis on the design of the outside as on the inside of the building.