When the Rhythm of Childhood Changes

One of the things I keep returning to in my practice is how much children can be expected to change when they leave early years environments.

It is not simply that the physical environment changes. The pace can change too. Expectations shift, routines become different and, gradually, the way childhood itself is experienced within education can begin to change.

In strong early years environments, children can be deeply known by the adults around them. Practitioners notice the child who needs time to watch before joining in, the child who regulates through movement, the child who communicates more confidently through play than through direct questioning, and the child who returns to the same experience day after day because there is still something within it they are trying to understand.

Relationships sit at the heart of this work. Children are not simply taught. They are observed, listened to and understood within the context of who they are.

The Rhythm of Early Childhood

There can be a particular rhythm to early years practice.

Children have opportunities to revisit experiences, remain absorbed in an idea and move between spaces in ways that make sense to them. They might build dens, mix potions in the mud kitchen, transport objects repeatedly from one place to another, return to favourite stories or create elaborate imaginary worlds whose logic is understood only by the children involved.

To an adult looking briefly from the outside, some of these experiences can appear simple. Yet children are experimenting with language, relationships, physical possibilities, emotions, ideas and cause and effect within them.

Scotland's national early years guidance, Realising the Ambition: Being Me, recognises this interconnected nature of children's development and learning. Importantly, the guidance is intended not only for early learning and childcare settings but also for those working in early primary school (Education Scotland, 2020).

That continuity matters because children do not wake up on their first morning of Primary 1 fundamentally different from the child who went to nursery the day before.

Time Matters

I think the pace of childhood matters deeply.

Some children need longer to observe before participating, while others need time to build enough trust in a relationship to take risks in their learning. Some need movement in order to regulate and think clearly, and others need to repeat an experience many times before they feel ready to change or extend it.

Responsive early years practice can create space for these different rhythms.

This does not mean children are left entirely to their own devices or that practitioners have low expectations. Quite the opposite. Skilled early years practitioners are constantly observing, responding, extending, questioning and deciding when to become involved and when to step back.

They also understand something important:

Development cannot always be hurried simply because an adult timetable says it is time to move on.

Then children enter school, and for some, the rhythm changes relatively quickly.

When the Environment Changes

This is not the experience of every child or every school.

There is excellent play-based and relational practice happening within Scottish primary classrooms, and national guidance actively encourages continuity across early learning and early primary education.

But practice is not uniform.

Research in Scottish Primary 1 classrooms has identified tensions in attempts to establish active, play-based approaches within the structures and expectations of primary schooling (Martlew, Stephen & Ellis, 2011).

For some children, the day may become more structured and adult-directed. There may be less uninterrupted time for play, movement may become more regulated, and children may have fewer opportunities to decide where their attention goes or how long they remain with an experience.

They may also begin to encounter a different language of education, one increasingly concerned with achievement, targets, progress, groups, completion and correctness.

None of these things is inherently wrong. Children deserve intellectual challenge and opportunities to progress.

But I think we should remain curious about what happens when the rhythm of education begins to move more quickly than the rhythm of the child.

When the Child Has Not Changed, but the Environment Has

For some children, transition is relatively straightforward. For others, it can be much more unsettling.

This is particularly important when thinking about children with additional support needs.

A child who regulates effectively through outdoor movement may find an environment requiring longer periods of sitting more demanding. A child who communicates confidently through imaginative play may find formal questioning harder. Another who previously had the freedom to withdraw, observe and return may require additional support when routines become less flexible.

The important point is that increased difficulty does not necessarily mean that something has suddenly changed within the child.

Sometimes, the environment has changed around them.

Scotland's approach to additional support for learning recognises that barriers can arise for many reasons, including circumstances associated with the learning environment itself.

That distinction matters enormously. Instead of asking only, “Why is this child struggling now?”, we can also ask, “What has changed around this child, and what might they need from this environment in order to participate?”

Those questions lead us somewhere very different.

The Energy Required to Fit

I sometimes wonder whether we underestimate how much energy children use adapting themselves to environments that do not naturally fit their needs.

A child may be trying to sit when their body needs to move, respond immediately when they need longer to process, or stop something they are deeply engaged in because the timetable requires everyone to move on. At the same time, they may be managing noise, transitions, expectations and complex social relationships while also being expected to learn.

Most adults recognise how exhausting it can be to spend a day in an environment that does not quite suit us. Young children can experience this too, but they may not yet have the language to explain it.

Instead, distress can become visible through withdrawal, frustration, restlessness, avoidance or tears.

The temptation is to focus entirely on changing the child's response.

A relational approach also asks what that response might be communicating.

Slowing Down Is Not Lowering Expectations

As a Froebelian, I do not believe that slowing down means lowering expectations.

It means recognising that depth, relationships, trust, play and understanding take time. Allowing a child longer does not mean expecting less of them. Sometimes it means giving them enough space to show us what they are actually capable of.

Friedrich Froebel famously described play as “the highest expression of human development in childhood.”

For Froebel, play was not separate from learning. It was fundamental to the ways children expressed their inner lives and developed their understanding of the world. The Froebel Trust similarly describes play as a principal means through which young children learn through direct experience.

That still feels deeply relevant.

Through play, children can test possibilities, revisit experiences, develop narratives, negotiate relationships, experiment with language, express emotion and solve problems. They can experience failure within relatively safe conditions, try again and sometimes work through ideas or feelings that they cannot yet explain in words.

This is serious learning, even when it does not look serious.

What Happens to Agency?

There is another part of transition that I think deserves greater attention: agency.

In early years environments, children often have meaningful opportunities to influence what happens to them. They can choose, initiate, move between experiences, observe before joining, return to an idea and negotiate with others.

Their choices do not exist without boundaries, but they can nevertheless experience themselves as active participants in their own learning.

Scottish research by McNair (2022), following 16 children as they moved from an early learning and childcare setting into four primary schools, raises particularly important questions about this shift. Her study explored changes in children's experiences of power and space during transition. One child's words, included in the title of the research, are striking: “I don't feel free … I am not in charge of me anymore.”

That deserves our attention.

Agency is not about allowing children to do whatever they want. It is about children experiencing themselves as people whose ideas, preferences and intentions have value.

Are Children Ready for School?

This is why I often find myself returning to the language of school readiness.

We frequently ask whether children are ready for school. Can they listen, follow instructions, manage routines, separate from their parents and sustain concentration?

These can all be reasonable questions in context.

But perhaps there should always be another side to that conversation:

Is school ready for the child?

Ready for movement and sensory needs. Ready for different ways of communicating. Ready for emotional needs and uncertainty. Ready for children who require longer to build relationships, who need to observe before participating, or whose development does not progress neatly according to adult timelines.

And ready for play.

Scotland's national practice guidance already gives us an important basis for this thinking because Realising the Ambition deliberately reaches across the boundary between ELC and early primary rather than treating them as completely separate pedagogical worlds.

Perhaps the challenge is therefore not simply knowing what good transition should look like.

It is ensuring that children experience that continuity consistently.

This Is Not a Criticism of Teachers

I want to be clear about this.

This is not a criticism of teachers.

Educators are working within systems carrying enormous and often competing demands. They must meet diverse learning needs while navigating curriculum requirements, staffing pressures, assessment, accountability and expectations around attainment.

Teachers do not individually create these systems, and many are actively trying to make them more humane.

Research into play-based pedagogy in Scottish P1 classrooms illustrates some of these tensions between teachers' pedagogical intentions and the structures within which they work (Martlew, Stephen & Ellis, 2011).

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

Children deserve challenge, rich knowledge and opportunities to learn to read, write, calculate, investigate and think critically about the world.

But intellectual challenge does not require us to remove the things that made earlier learning powerful.

Rigour and play are not opposites. Neither are achievement and relationships, or high expectations and emotional safety.

What Should Travel With Children?

Children do not stop needing nurture because they grow older. They do not suddenly stop needing movement, connection, autonomy or emotionally responsive relationships because they turn five, nor do they stop making meaning through play because their learning now takes place in a classroom.

Perhaps transition should therefore not be understood primarily as preparing children to leave early childhood behind.

Perhaps we should ask instead:

What should travel with them?

What should travel with children are the conditions that helped them flourish in the first place: strong relationships, curiosity, time to become absorbed, opportunities to move, freedom to wonder, permission to make mistakes, a sense of agency and the belief that learning belongs to them too.

The best early years practice reminds us that children learn when they feel safe enough to explore, secure enough to take risks and valued enough to believe that their ideas matter.

Those principles do not have an expiry date.

And maybe part of protecting childhood is not rushing children away from these things, but making sure we carry them forward with us as they grow.