England’s Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework: towards a minor literature

In the mid 1970s, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari radically conceptualised the novelist Kafka in terms of marginal subjectivity. Their book, “Kafka: towards a minor literature” (1975/1986) was a consideration of minor thought as “an agent of transformative experimentation and collective awareness” (El Moncef, 2020) within a major language.

Considering such agency, this paper, nearly fifty years on from Kafka, looks to extend our gaze beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s original theory towards ‘the people [who] are missing’ (Deleuze, 1989) - the minor readers. Evolving the concept of the marginal, the paper considers the major language of statutory text, in this case the curriculum aspects of England’s EYFS (DoE, 2021), as site of experimentation for the minor. Challenging mainstream society and projecting new visions of diverse collectives, the paper discusses the un-methodologies rupturing representation and breaking the habit of ‘making sense’ in order to free the EYFS from its signifying self, transforming its major language into minor literature.