2024 Jenny Leaper Lecture: Supporting Every Child to Flourish

How do educators and parents support EVERY child to succeed and flourish? Findings from longitudinal research and the voices of children and parents.

Description:

In this public lecture, Professor Iram Siraj will report on 50 family case studies, drawing on extended data from the Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE 3–16) study, the UK’s first major study to focus on the effectiveness of early years education. The case studies research generated evidence that extends our understanding of how child, family, pre-school and external factors and experiences interact and contribute to children’s levels of achievement through the learning life-course.

Professor Siraj will draw on the perceptions of children and their parents who either succeed against the odds or who follow a predicted trajectory according to their social class. In so doing she will address the question: What can educators and parents learn from this? How can we, through our early childhood education programmes and homes, support EVERY child’s learning? Every child’s learning life course is determined by a unique combination of experiences and events in the early years of life. Some risk factors have the potential of leading to underachievement, while others provide resources and resilience. Risk and resilience factors interact in complex ways so that very different life courses may lead to similar outcomes, yet life courses that appear very similar may also lead to different learning outcomes. The impact of negative experiences varies according to individuals’ perceptions of the experience and according to the social support networks and cognitive and affective resources they draw upon at home and pre/school when facing these experiences.

Throughout their learning life course, children adapt, either positively or negatively, to the physical and social environmental influences that they experience. These adaptations affect their future learning, and the resulting learning outcomes in turn shape the future environments that they offer to their own children.

Presenter:

Professor Iram Siraj (OBE) trained as an early childhood teacher and has worked in pre-schools in England. She is currently Professor of Child Development and Education at the University of Oxford, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Maynooth in Ireland and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

Iram loves Australia and is a committed Thought Leader for Goodstart Early Learning and has helped to shape policy in VIC, NSW and SA. She has led on longitudinal studies, including E4Kids and the FEEL study in Australia, and the EPPSE study in the UK. She led the influential Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY) study, which first developed the concept of Sustained Shared Thinking (SST) which has appeared as a key construct in the EYLF.

She is the co-author of several complementary scales that measure academic, social-emotional, physical development and pedagogical leadership quality in settings with young children, including the MOVERS (2024), the SSTEW (2024), ECQRS-EC (2025) and the latest PLEY scales (2025) by Routledge.

Iram's visit to Melbourne in August 2024 has been kindly co-sponsored by Goodstart Early Learning.

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