What Do Children Lose When They Leave Early Years?

There is often a quiet sadness at the end of a child’s early years experience.

Not because children are growing up. That is natural and important.

The sadness comes from wondering what might be lost when children move from environments deliberately shaped around childhood into systems that can become increasingly shaped around timetables, attainment and adult expectations.

In many early years settings, children are deeply known.

Their interests, rhythms, sensitivities, humour, friendships and anxieties become familiar to the adults around them. They move between indoors and outdoors. They build dens, negotiate games, pour their own drinks, prepare snack, role-play families, superheroes and veterinarians, ask endless questions, and return to experiences again and again until understanding begins to settle.

Learning is everywhere.

It is not always separated into neat subjects or contained within timed blocks. It happens through conversation, movement, relationships, care routines, curiosity, investigation and play.

Then the child moves to school.

And sometimes, the experience of learning begins to change.

When the Environment Changes

This change is not inevitable, and it does not happen in every school.

Many primary teachers work extraordinarily hard to preserve play, relationships, creativity and child-led learning. In Scotland, national guidance actively supports continuity between early learning and childcare and the early stages of primary education. Realising the Ambition: Being Me extends across ELC and early primary, while the Early Level of Curriculum for Excellence generally spans from age three to the end of Primary 1 (Education Scotland, 2020; Scottish Government, 2021).

Yet policy intention and lived experience are not always the same thing.

Research in Scottish Primary 1 classrooms has identified tensions in the implementation of play-based pedagogy, particularly when teachers are also working within the expectations and routines of formal schooling (Martlew, Stephen & Ellis, 2011).

For some children, the transition can therefore involve more than moving building or changing teacher.

It can mean learning a different way of being a learner.

A child who previously moved freely may be expected to sit for longer periods.

A child accustomed to choosing where to direct their attention may increasingly follow adult-selected tasks.

A child whose learning was expressed through movement, conversation and imaginative play may encounter greater emphasis on producing visible outcomes.

The child has not suddenly become different.

But the environment around them may have.

Children Do Not Stop Needing Play at Five

In Scotland, play-based pedagogy within the early primary years has rightly received increasing attention.

But its interpretation varies.

In some classrooms, play is deeply embedded within pedagogy. Children investigate, create, collaborate and revisit ideas through rich environments and thoughtful adult interaction.

In others, play can become more peripheral. It may occupy a particular corner, appear within a designated period of the timetable, or be positioned alongside the more serious business of learning.

This distinction matters.

Children do not stop needing play because they turn five.

Friedrich Froebel understood play not as an interruption to learning, but as one of the fundamental ways in which young children encounter and interpret the world. He described play as:

“the highest expression of human development in childhood.”

Within Froebelian practice, play allows children to express ideas and feelings, explore relationships, investigate possibilities and construct understanding through direct experience.

Contemporary Scottish guidance similarly places child-centred play pedagogy at the heart of early learning and extends that principle into the early stages of primary education (Education Scotland, 2020).

Yet play can still become vulnerable when it is judged against more easily measurable forms of learning.

There is a persistent temptation to think that the older a child becomes, the more serious their learning should look.

But serious learning does not always look serious.

It can look like two children negotiating the rules of an invented game.

It can look like a group building a structure that repeatedly collapses.

It can look like a child returning to the same imaginative scenario for days because there is still something within it they need to understand.

It can look noisy, physical, repetitive and joyful.

None of those things makes it intellectually insignificant.

What May Be Lost Is Agency

Perhaps what concerns me most about transition is not simply the potential loss of play.

It is the potential loss of agency.

In early years environments, children often have considerable influence over how they use their time and space.

They choose where to play.

What to investigate.

Who to be with.

Whether to join immediately or watch first.

How long to remain with an idea.

When to abandon it.

When to return.

This does not mean early years environments are without boundaries or adult expectations. Good early years pedagogy is carefully designed and skilfully facilitated.

But within those boundaries, children can experience themselves as people capable of making meaningful choices.

The transition to school may alter that balance.

Research exploring Scottish children’s own experiences of moving from ELC into primary school has raised important questions about power, space and autonomy. McNair’s study of children transitioning into four Scottish primary schools found that some children experienced significant changes in their freedom and ability to access spaces after entering school (McNair, 2022).

That matters because agency is not simply about allowing children to do whatever they want.

It is about experiencing yourself as someone whose choices, ideas and intentions matter.

When children lose opportunities to exercise agency, they may also begin to experience learning differently.

Something they once inhabited can become something done to them.

When Learning Begins to Define the Child

School also introduces children to increasingly visible ways of comparing achievement.

Children begin to notice.

Who finishes first?

Who is in which group?

Who needs help?

Who gets the answer right?

Who finds reading easy?

Who finds numbers difficult?

Formal assessment has an important role in education. Teachers need to understand what children know and what support they require.

But assessment also has a social and emotional life.

Children do not encounter it neutrally.

They begin to make meaning from the messages around them about competence.

A child who once understood themselves as an imaginative builder, storyteller, organiser, climber, negotiator or problem-solver can gradually encounter a narrower vocabulary for success.

Good at reading.

Behind in writing.

Strong at maths.

Needs support.

None of these descriptions is necessarily harmful in itself.

The danger comes when a measure of attainment quietly becomes a measure of identity.

Young children are still forming their understanding of who they are as learners.

We should therefore be careful about the stories education helps them construct about themselves.

Relationships Do Not Become Less Important

There is another significant transition.

Relationships.

In early years settings, care and education are often almost impossible to separate.

A practitioner may support a child through tears in the morning, notice that they are unusually quiet before lunch, help them negotiate a friendship, celebrate a newly mastered skill and talk informally with their parent at collection.

Knowledge of the child accumulates through hundreds of small encounters.

Families also become part of this relational world.

They may know who comforted their child after a difficult morning.

Who noticed the beginning of a friendship.

Who knows that their child dislikes sudden noise.

Who understands why separating at the door has been difficult that week.

Then transition arrives.

New adults.

New routines.

New spaces.

New expectations.

New relationships have to be built.

Scottish statutory guidance recognises that transitions can be both exciting and challenging for children and parents and emphasises the importance of supportive, caring relationships and well-managed transitions (Scottish Government, 2021).

What concerns me is the possibility that, as children grow, relationships can begin to be discussed as though they are primarily a support for learning.

I would turn that around.

For young children, relationships are part of the learning.

Feeling known, safe and emotionally held is not something that happens before education begins.

It is part of the condition that makes education possible.

For Some Children, the Change Is Greater

This becomes particularly important for children with additional support needs.

I would be cautious about claiming that all children with additional support needs necessarily find early years easier than school. Children are individual, and good or poor experiences can occur in either environment.

But there is an important environmental question to ask.

Some children benefit significantly from movement, predictable relationships, flexible routines, sensory regulation, outdoor access, opportunities to withdraw and communication through play.

When the expectations of the environment change, their ability to participate may also change.

A child who regulated effectively through movement may struggle in an environment requiring more sustained sitting.

A child who communicated confidently within imaginative play may find formal questioning more demanding.

A child who could withdraw temporarily and then return may struggle when routines become less flexible.

In these circumstances, increased difficulty does not necessarily mean that something has suddenly changed within the child.

It may indicate a change in the relationship between the child and their environment.

Scotland’s current statutory guidance on additional support for learning explicitly recognises that additional support needs can arise from the learning environment as well as from health, disability, family circumstances or social and emotional factors. It also stresses that transitions for children with additional support needs require careful, child-centred planning (Scottish Government, 2026).

This distinction matters.

It moves us away from asking only:

“What is wrong with this child?”

and towards asking:

“What has changed around this child, and what might they now need?”

Rethinking School Readiness

This brings me to the phrase school readiness.

It sounds sensible.

Of course we want children to arrive at school confident and able to participate.

But perhaps we have spent too much time considering whether children are ready for school and not enough time asking whether schools are fully ready for children.

Ready for their movement.

Ready for their curiosity.

Ready for their different developmental rhythms.

Ready for their need for connection.

Ready for children who communicate in different ways.

Ready for play.

Ready for uncertainty.

Ready for children who need longer to watch before joining.

Ready for children who do not arrive neatly aligned with adult expectations.

The transition to school should not require children to demonstrate that they have successfully moved beyond early childhood.

In Scotland, this principle is already present within policy.

The Early Level of Curriculum for Excellence deliberately spans ELC and Primary 1, and national guidance calls for continuity in children’s learning and development across the transition (Education Scotland, 2020; Scottish Government, 2021).

So perhaps the real challenge is not one of policy ambition.

It is one of consistent enactment.

This Is Not an Argument Against School

None of this is an argument against schools or teachers.

Quite the opposite.

Primary teachers are working within increasingly complex environments, supporting diverse needs while responding to curriculum expectations, assessment, staffing pressures and wider demands.

Nor am I arguing that children should remain in nursery indefinitely or that formal teaching has no place in primary education.

Children deserve intellectual challenge.

They deserve to learn to read, write, calculate, investigate and engage with knowledge that extends their understanding of the world.

But challenge and childhood are not opposites.

Neither are rigour and play.

Neither are attainment and relationships.

Education does not need to become less humane in order to become more intellectually demanding.

What Early Childhood Pedagogy Can Teach Us

The best early years environments remind us of some remarkably simple things.

Children learn when they feel safe enough to explore.

They learn through relationships with people who know them well.

They learn by doing.

They learn through repetition.

They learn through curiosity.

They learn when their ideas matter.

They learn through movement and conversation.

They learn with other children.

They learn through play.

And they do not suddenly stop learning in these ways when the calendar tells us they are old enough for school.

Perhaps the goal of transition should therefore not be to prepare children to leave early childhood behind.

Perhaps it should be to ask which parts of early childhood pedagogy deserve to travel with them.

More continuity.

More agency.

More movement.

More play.

More attention to relationships.

More trust in children’s capacity to make meaning.

The strongest transition may not be the one in which children adapt most quickly to school.

It may be the one in which school recognises enough of the child who has arrived.

Because children should not have to surrender the conditions that helped them flourish simply to demonstrate that they are ready for the next stage of education.

Perhaps what they need most is not to leave early childhood behind too quickly, but to have its wisdom carried forward with them.