Starting School: Young Children Learning Cultures Book

How does the home experience of children from poor and ethnic minority communities influence their adaptation to school? How does the traditional 'child-centered' and progressive pedagogy of early years classrooms meet the needs of children from culturally diverse backgrounds?

Starting School seeks to address these key questions by tracing the learning experiences of individual children from a poor inner-urban neighborhood - half of them from Bangladeshi families - as they acquire the knowledge appropriate to their home culture and then take this knowledge to their reception class. The book highlights the small differences in family life - in parenting practices, in perspectives on childhood, and in beliefs about work and play - which make a big difference to children's adaptations to school. In other words, it shows how children succeed and fail from their early days at school.

It shows too how the 'good intentions' of good teachers can sometimes allow children from certain backgrounds to become disaffected, and learn to fail; and it suggests ways of working with children from working class and multicultural families which may help both children and parents to gain a better understanding of school learning in the UK.