A new national curriculum for all under-5s will cause untold damage to the development of young children, a powerful lobby of academics says today.

The highly prescriptive regime for pre-school children, which is due to become law next year, has been introduced by stealth, they say. It will induce needless anxiety and dent children’s enthusiasm for learning, according to the group of experts in childhood development.

They say that the severity of the compulsory measures, which will apply to an estimated 25,000 nurseries across the private and state sectors, has gone virtually unnoticed and risks an array of educational and behavioural problems for the country’s children.

A letter signed by the group, and seen by The Times, is highly critical of the Government’s drive to make children aged 3 and 4 write simple sentences using punctuation, interpret phonic methods to read complex words and use mathematical ideas to solve practical problems.

The group, including the leading child psychologists Richard House, Dorothy Rowe and Penelope Leach, and Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, are today launching a campaign called Open Eye to promote the message that babies and young children learn most naturally and effectively through free play, movement and imitation, rather than formal teaching.

“An overly formal, academic and/or cognitively biased ‘curriculum’, however carefully camouflaged, distorts this learning experience,” they say.

“An early ‘head start’ in literacy is now known to precipitate unforeseen difficulties later on — sometimes including unpredictable emotional and behavioural problems.”

The new early-years foundation stage framework (EYFS), which becomes law next autumn, will affect all nurseries and kindergartens in England. The system requires children to be continually assessed according to 13 different learning scales, including writing, problem solving and numeracy.

It could also have profound implications for thousands of non-mainstream preschool organisations, such as Steiner kindergartens, where formal learning is not introduced until children reach 6½. Montesorri schools, which also have a less academic approach, will also be affected.

Richard House, senior lecturer in psychotherapy and counselling at Roehampton University, southwest London, said that the element of compulsion surrounding the new legislation been introduced “by stealth”.

Unlike the national curriculum for schools, which does not apply to independent schools, the framework will apply to all pre-school settings — state, private and voluntary.

“What is most objectionable is that the framework is compulsory. The central State is defining what child development is. It means that a pre-school would have to pursue the Government’s defined view of healthy child development, even if it contradicts their own view,” Dr House said.

“Some people do not want their children doing synthetic phonics or quasi-formal learning at 3 or 4 but they could be left with little choice. There would be a very strong case for mounting a legal challenge under the human rights legislation,” he said.

Experts believe that the legislation will impose a system of “audit and accountability” on children that will profoundly affect the way in which teachers interact with them.

Margaret Edgington, a leading independent early-years consultant, said: “We are going to end up with lots of children who can read and decode print but who haven’t got the skills to understand what the words mean.”

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