Late May has a particular flavour in early years. Transition conversations are starting, end-of-year summaries are being drafted, and practitioners everywhere are staring at a half-written sentence that says “enjoys construction” and wondering how to make it say something true. Here’s the problem with that sentence: it describes what a child plays with, and says nothing at all about how the child learns.
That second question is the one the Characteristics of Effective Learning were built to answer, and they sit at the heart of the EYFS for good reason.
Three characteristics, in plain terms
The characteristics describe how children learn rather than what they learn. Playing and exploring is the child as investigator: having a go, getting stuck in, finding out what happens if. Active learning is the child as persister: concentrating, keeping trying when the tower falls, and glowing at an achievement because it was hard, not because an adult clapped. Creating and thinking critically is the child as thinker: having their own ideas, spotting links, working out ways round a problem.
Every child shows all three, but never in the same proportions or the same way. One child explores by hurling themselves at everything new; another watches from the edge for a week and then does the whole thing perfectly. Neither route is wrong. A child may not take the conventional path to learning, and the job of the adults around them is to recognise their style, support it and plan for it, rather than quietly wishing they learned like the child at the next table.
Observation is the engine
The characteristics only earn their keep if your team can actually see them. Watch a two-year-old at the water tray filling a jug, tipping it, filling it again, frowning, fetching a funnel. In two minutes she has played and explored, persisted through failure and had her own idea about a better method. A practitioner who can see all three of those things has an observation worth writing down. One who sees “water play, 10 minutes” does not. None of this demands longer observations, incidentally. It demands sharper ones, from a team who all know what they’re looking for.
Younger children add a further layer, because they can’t yet tell you what they’re learning. Reading the cues, the furrowed brow, the repeated action, the deep sigh before the third attempt, is a skill in itself, and it’s one of the things our Characteristics of Effective Learning course spends real time on. The other habit the course builds is valuing process over outcome: the learning in the collapsed tower is usually richer than the learning in the neat one.
From observation to planning, and to parents
Once observations capture how a child learns, planning gets sharper almost by itself. The child who persists longest outdoors gets their next challenge outdoors. The one bursting with their own ideas gets open-ended resources and the time to follow a thought through. Environments and routines can be shaped to give all three characteristics room to breathe, which sometimes means changing the timetable rather than the child. It also gives supervision meetings something far meatier to discuss than tidy-up rotas.
Parents deserve this picture too. “She kept trying different ramps until the car reached the door” tells a parent something genuinely useful about their daughter, in a way “she had a lovely day” never will. And because Ofsted expects the characteristics to be implemented and monitored, observations made against them do double duty: better practice on Monday, better evidence at inspection.
See the learning, not just the activity
The Characteristics of Effective Learning course covers recognising all three characteristics in play, planning with a CoEL approach and sharing children’s learning styles with parents, with a completion certificate for your CPD and compliance records.
“Enjoys construction” can stay in the report if you like. Just make sure the next sentence says how he builds, because that’s where the child actually is.