Deep in the forest, where the air is clear and the snow lies thick all around, it is time for maths. Tiny children wearing a variety of brightly coloured bobble hats form a circle beneath the towering pine trees, singing and clapping their hands as they play a counting game. Then they sit down in a clearing with their teacher and begin to divide small cubes into factors of eight. It is not easy with their thick gloves on, but they persevere and have soon achieved the task. A woodpecker taps against a tree in the distance and the sun glistens on the snow as the children run around to warm up.
This is the Kanava nursery in Helsinki, Finland, where children – aged one to six – spend most of the time outside. Their mornings, and often their afternoons too, are devoted to exploring and learning in the forest. Between lessons in the snow they climb trees, hang from branches, throw sticks and walk along fallen trunks. If they are not in the woods they might be skiing, skating or hiking through the Finnish countryside. Sometimes they will go out into the wilderness for a whole day. In summer they take lunch to the forest or the beach, with a barbecue and a tepee.
Finland is not the only country taking this approach. Last week, the Duchess of Cambridge visited Copenhagen on a "fact-finding" mission for her Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood. Denmark also puts a great emphasis on pre-school education to promote mental and physical health as well as academic outcomes. Like Finland, it integrates nature into its nurseries.
The future queen whizzed down the slide at the Lego Foundation Play Lab and watched children carrying logs to the fire in a forest kindergarten. She joked that it made her "broody", but she is serious about raising the importance of the first five years of life. "The early years are not simply about how we raise our children," she says. "They are about the society we will become." Rightly, she sees early years education as the social equivalent of climate change.
In Finland, formal education does not start until the age of seven, but learning begins long before that. I have joined the nursery's pre-primary group of six-year-olds for the morning. These children already know the difference between a pine tree and a birch. They can identify the birds in the forest from their song and understand which mushrooms are poisonous and which are safe to eat. They have learnt about shapes, sizes and fractions by looking at leaves, pine cones and needles.
"We try to use whatever is in nature," says Saskia Lamilla, their teacher. "We make smoothies with the berries. Sometimes, if there is no snow, we draw with sticks on the ground. When the birds are migrating we will focus on that. I've never met a child who doesn't suit this kind of learning. It's more effortless."
Lamilla, 47, spent two decades in London studying and then working as a primary-school teacher, but two years ago he returned to Finland because he says he found the education system in England stultifying. "In my first school in Whitechapel [east London] there was a tree, but the kids were not allowed to hang on its branches," he says. "It was the one little bit of nature and they couldn't use it."
In Helsinki even the youngest infants are out in the forest in freezing conditions. Wellies and snow boots are lined up in the foyer of the nursery next to an airing cupboard full of drying hats and gloves. According to Lamilla, "The only time we don't go out is when it's really windy, because then there might be a risk of trees falling."
There is a Finnish word, sisu, which roughly translates as grit or resilience and the quality is deliberately taught from an early age. "It's a mindset," Lamilla says. "We don't torture the kids, but we do go out in every weather so they get used to it. We learn that sisu – that perseverance – outside." When a child slips in the snow and falls, the teacher waits for him to pick himself up and walk on. "That happens all the time. He'll be fine," Lamilla says.
The children are allowed to roam freely through the forest and encouraged to whittle sticks with knives. There are few health and safety rules and no forms to fill in before expeditions. "We're trusted to decide when something is safe," Lamilla says. Kids are expected to learn from their mistakes, rather than being mollycoddled. Curiosity is nurtured.
"At the moment they're really interested in space. We've been asking: what do neutrons do? How was the world created? We have scientific discussions that build up their confidence about talking in a group. They build their social skills so they are ready for school."
Focus on education rather than childcare
He says the difference with the English education system is stark. "In London I had to be thinking about the next activity the whole time. Here we let the children play independently a lot. They're learning to read, but we don't force it. We don't prescribe everything for them; we have time to talk to them and listen. Obviously when the teachers are less stressed that benefits the children too."
In Finland, all children under school age have a legal entitlement to a nursery place and kindergartens are heavily subsidised so that nobody pays more than €288 (NZ$458) a month. Low-income households pay nothing at all.
The emphasis is on education rather than childcare. Nursery teachers are required to have a degree and there is a national curriculum for the early years focused on building emotional intelligence, self-awareness and independence. Some municipalities even have state-funded "playgrounds with staff" where professionals are on hand next to the swings and slides to help parents understand how best to interact with their children. During school holidays they hand out free lunches to families.
I take a taxi to the city of Espoo, half an hour outside Helsinki, to visit the Kivimies municipal nursery. When I arrive, the five-year-olds are learning geometry although they don't know it – their teachers have created a fun game involving identifying shapes and making cubes. Down the corridor there is a bilingual room where children are taught in both Finnish and English. Some of the young pupils are playing with memory cards and others are moving words around on a giant touch screen.
The atmosphere is calm. Instead of the primary colours that exist in British nurseries, the walls are painted white and the furniture is chic Nordic blond. Here too the children spend at least two hours outside every day, including in the snow or rain. Sometimes they have music lessons in the playground. There is also an indoor climbing room lined with ropes and wooden bars and with a padded floor, so that they can safely learn to take risks.
Susan Nyangena, one of the bilingual teachers, explains that she deliberately chose to specialise in pre-school education when she was at university. "I prefer this age group," she says. "I think you have more influence and this is a very important foundation for life. They get lots of benefit from play. That is how they learn the emotional skills they will need: self-regulation and self-expression." As for reading and writing, "They don't have to, although some of them can. They will learn in the end. We try to avoid that pressure. The joy of learning is what's important."
It seems to work. Finland has one of the best education systems in the world according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Despite starting school later, its 15-year-old pupils consistently outperform their British counterparts in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) rankings.
Li Andersson, the 34-year-old minister of education and leader of the Left Alliance Party in the governing coalition, is discussing the best way to find a nursery place for her own two-year-old when I arrive to interview her. For her, the political is also personal. She describes how almost 10 years ago, responsibility for pre-school provision in Finland moved from the social care and health department to the ministry of education. "Historically it was more focused on the babysitting approach, but since it was moved here, we've seen it as the first part of the educational path."
She says any government that wants to level up the disadvantaged parts of the country, and equalise opportunity between rich and poor, must ensure that every child gets the best start in life. "We have a lot of research data – both national and international – that really stresses how important it is. If we have high-quality early childhood education and care it will have a positive impact on later learning results, especially for children who come from a socioeconomic background where their parents might not be very well-educated."
The policy is expensive – according to the OECD, Finland spent 1.1 per cent of GDP on early years in 2017, nearly double the proportion that England spent in the same year and significantly above the 0.7 per cent OECD average. But Andersson says there is cross-party agreement that it would be a false economy not to find the money. "One of the biggest challenges in Finland, as in most other countries, has to do with growing inequality between students," she says.
First 1000 days of life critical
"There's a calculation that one marginalised kid will mean €1 million in expenditure for society and of course the human cost is also huge. We need to raise the education level of the population as a whole. For us to be able to do this we need to solve the issues regarding growing inequality in terms of earning outcome, and for us to do that we need to start in the early years."
There is a reason why many of the most successful education systems in the world dedicate huge resources to what happens before children even get to school. In Estonia, which has the best education system in Europe, children get a school readiness card at the end of nursery describing their skills and development. Those who need extra support are referred to a specialist, such as a speech therapist, before they start formal education. As in Finland, nurseries are heavily subsidised and fees are capped at 20 per cent of the minimum wage. Gunda Tire, the head of international assessment in Estonia, believes her country's focus on high-quality early years education has narrowed social divides and improved pupils' wellbeing. "The education system is like a tree and with strong roots you never stop growing," she says.
In England, 40 per cent of the attainment gap that exists between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils at the age of 16 emerges before they get to school. Nearly a third of five-year-olds are not reaching a good level of development and disadvantaged children are already 4.6 months behind by the end of the reception year. There are also regional differences: in 2019, the gap was 1.5 months in East Sussex but 7.1 months in Wirral and Wigan. Once children have fallen that far behind, it is hard for them ever to catch up. Their futures are being determined before they get anywhere near a classroom.
The scientific evidence is overwhelming. What happens in the first 1000 days of life – and even in the womb – is critical to outcomes later in life. At that stage of development, the brain is changing fast and the crucial connections that form depend on the child's environment, experiences and relationships. Researchers found that babies who had suffered extreme emotional deprivation in the brutal Romanian orphanages that emerged under the dictator Ceausescu had brains that were 8.6 per cent smaller than other people's. As adults, the Romanian orphans also typically had lower IQs and higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression.
While genes play a role in determining future success, context also matters. The relationship between parent and child is pivotal, but the state can make a difference in even the most troubled families.
The groundbreaking HighScope Perry Preschool Programme, a longitudinal study in the United States, illustrates how high-quality early intervention can make a dramatic difference to outcomes. The project, which began in the Sixties, found that disadvantaged African-American children who were enrolled in the programme were more likely to graduate from high school, hold down a job and have higher earnings; they were also less likely to get involved in crime.
The results were strikingly clear: 77 per cent of those who had been in the pre-school programme graduated from high school, compared with 60 per cent of those who had not, and 36 per cent of the participants had been arrested five times by the age of 40, compared with 55 per cent of the control group. The benefits of early intervention continued through their lives and into the next generation, with 67 per cent of the participants' children completing high school without suspension, compared with 40 per cent of those in the control group. Another study in Jamaica showed that disadvantaged children who were exposed to high-quality early intervention stimulation as babies and toddlers earned up to 25 per cent more 20 years later as adults.
The Nobel prize-winning American economist James Heckman has calculated that there is a 13 per cent return on investment in the early years as a result of better educational, health and social outcomes. Conversely, the consequences of ignoring this stage of development can be dire. Research for the Duchess of Cambridge's Centre for Early Childhood, conducted with the London School of Economics (LSE), found that the social cost of failing to intervene early enough in children's lives is more than £16 billion (NZ$11.5b) a year in England because of higher rates of crime, unemployment and mental illness that could have been avoided.
Minouche Shafik, the director of the LSE and a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, says, "If you want to equalise opportunity, the lowest cost interventions are before anyone even gets to school. Part of a shift in the social contract is getting people to realise that the years zero to three are not just the responsibility of families; they are too important to society to leave it just to families. Some families manage perfectly well but a lot don't."
Last year, Angela Rayner, the Labour deputy leader, told me how, having never been shown love by her bipolar mother as a child, it was only when she went to a Sure Start nursery as a teenage single mum that she realised she needed to hug her son Ryan. "I thought being a parent was making sure your children were clean and being fed, making sure they go to bed on time, making sure that the house is tidy." One of her most emotional moments was seeing her son pick up his own daughter and cuddle her. "I got really tearful. It was so natural for him just to scoop up his daughter and say all the things like, 'I love you,' and, 'You're amazing.' And I thought, 'You've broken that link.' "
Educators moving down the age range
The smartest educators are moving down the age range in an effort to change lives. Twenty years ago, Brett Wigdortz founded Teach First, the transformatory charity that parachutes bright graduates into the most deprived schools in Britain and has worked with more than one million pupils. Now he has created a similar scheme for childminders, having concluded that the first five years of life are the most critical. Tiney offers training and support for people who want to work in pre-school education and aims to create a new generation of socially aware micro-entrepreneurs.
"With Teach First we started in secondary schools, and I remember thinking that secondary schools were much more prestigious and more important for kids. It was probably the stupidest thing I've ever thought," Wigdortz tells me. "As I got more and more into education, I quickly realised that a secondary-school teacher is important but a primary-school teacher is even more important. Five years in, we really worked hard to grow in primary. Then when we were in primary school, I started realising that there are all these children in year 1 who don't know how to play and don't know how to communicate. Even in the best schools that do a good job at getting some of the gap closed, it's going to be very difficult. It's just awful to think that a five-year-old is already so far behind."
At the moment, early years provision is focused on providing childcare for working parents but, "The science would say, actually, if you really want a well-educated populace and reduced education gaps, it should be much more a child-focused thing," he says.
Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, acknowledged in his autumn budget speech that the earliest years of a child's life are "the most important", but his flagship announcement involved funding for 75 "family hubs" when about 1000 Sure Start centres, which offered support for parents as well as pre-school provision, have closed. While nursery teachers in Finland, Denmark and Estonia are treated as highly trained educators, in the UK they are often paid less than supermarket staff. Instead of being considered the first crucial steps of education, pre-school provision is thought of as a babysitting service.
All three and four-year-olds are entitled to 15 hours of free childcare a week, paid for by the government, but places are underfunded. Nurseries have to cross-subsidise by charging more for additional hours but some do not have that option. In the year to March 2021, 442 of them shut, with the highest number of closures in the poorest areas.
The UK has the third most expensive childcare system in the world, behind only Slovakia and Switzerland. The price of a one-year-old's nursery place in England rose four times faster than wages between 2008 and 2016, and more than seven times faster in London. A third of parents say their childcare costs are higher than their rent or mortgage and the Department for Education's own data shows that more than a quarter of families find it difficult to meet their childcare costs.
'This is what you need to succeed'
The system is not working for parents but nor is it driving social mobility. There are perverse incentives in the funding model that are increasing rather than reducing inequality. Working parents with a combined household income as high as £200,000 are eligible for 30 hours of free childcare, but the unemployed can only claim the universal 15 hours, even though their children might benefit most from the extra support. Many nurseries charge extra for lunch and so poorer children have to survive on a packet of crisps while their wealthier classmates sit down to a meal.
Some schools and nurseries are trying to do things differently. At the inspirational Reach Academy in Feltham, a deprived area of west London, education begins in the womb. The school runs antenatal classes, yoga sessions and walking groups for expectant mothers. Once children are born, new parents are invited to baby massage training, parenting courses, relationship guidance and play groups, with the families most in need of support referred by health visits and midwives. "If we don't get involved right at the start then we are playing catch-up with children throughout their school careers," says Ed Vainker, the chief executive. "In our nursery we can see a huge difference between children even at two or three, based on their earliest experiences."
Reach is already seeing the benefits of the approach and the foundation is now working with another 16 schools that want to adopt a similar programme, but most of the early years work is currently funded by philanthropic donations. "Public policy is a long way behind the science," Vainker says. "We now know how important those first 1001 days are, starting at conception and the impact of toxic stress on brain development, but the funding hasn't caught up."
Back in the forest in Finland, the children ask their teacher to be the "wolf" in a game of chase. Saskia Lamilla tells me he feels as if he "escaped downwards" in age terms to teach nursery rather than primary-school pupils, but he thinks his new role is even more important. "In school the teachers won't have as much time as we do to teach them friendship skills, empathy, how to work in a group," he says. "This is what you need to succeed later in life." He runs at his charges, roaring, and they race off, their laughter echoing through the trees.
• Rachel Sylvester is chair of the Times Education Commission
Written by: Rachel Sylvester
© The Times of London