Parents visiting our Early Years classrooms sometimes ask, gently, when the learning starts. They are watching it. That is the difficulty with play: it is the most productive thing a small child can do and it looks like nothing at all.
What is actually happening
Take a group of four-year-olds building a ramp to roll a ball down. To an adult eye, that is play. Underneath it:
- They are testing a hypothesis about steepness and speed, and revising it when it fails
- They are negotiating roles and resolving a dispute without adult arbitration
- They are using comparative language: faster, steeper, further, heavier
- They are encountering, for the first time, the fact that a rolling ball always slows and stops
- They are building the persistence to try a seventh time after six collapses
That last one may matter more than all the others. Concentration is not a fixed trait a child either has or lacks. It is built, and it is built by being allowed to stay with something absorbing for long enough to get past the first frustration.
A child interrupted every twenty minutes to move to the next scheduled activity is being trained, very efficiently, not to concentrate.
Structure inside the freedom
This is not unsupervised free play. Our Early Years programme runs at least four units of inquiry a year, and across EY 1 to EY 3 every transdisciplinary theme is explored at least once, with Who We Are and How We Express Ourselves returning every year.
The units are real. Three and four year olds investigate their own bodies and feelings, how weather changes and affects us, what living things need to survive. Five year olds investigate the five senses, life cycles, and how communities design services for their people.
The rigour is in the planning. The freedom is in the doing.
Concepts arrive early
We deliberately introduce ideas earlier than is conventional, because young children handle them better than adults expect.
An EY 1 child noticing that dropped things always fall downwards is meeting gravity, years before the word is useful to them. An EY 2 child investigating pushes and pulls is meeting force and motion. An EY 3 child tracking a butterfly's life cycle is meeting change as a concept, not just a caterpillar.
None of this is taught as vocabulary to memorise. It is experienced, so that when the word arrives later it has something to attach to.
The other ladder
Running alongside is the life skills ladder, and in Early Years it is unglamorous and enormously important.
Washing hands, using a spoon, drinking from an open cup, putting on shoes, saying please and thank you, tidying toys away. Then a fork and spoon together, pouring without spilling, buttoning fully, packing one's own bag, crossing a road holding an adult's hand. Then the beginnings of shoelaces, spreading with a butter knife, wiping one's own spills, recognising coins, greeting a visitor politely.
Every one of these is competence, and competence is where confidence actually comes from. A child who can manage their own body and belongings enters a classroom differently from one who cannot.
An education is incomplete if a child can explain gravity but cannot tie their shoelaces. We take both halves of that sentence seriously.
What to look for when you visit
Whether you are considering us or anyone else, here is what we would look at in an Early Years room.
- Where are the children's voices? Are they talking to each other, or only responding to an adult?
- How long can one child stay with one thing? Watch for absorption. It is the clearest signal in the room.
- Whose work is on the walls? Twenty identical crafts mean an adult made the decisions. Twenty different attempts mean the children did.
- What happens when a child struggles? Does an adult solve it immediately, or wait?
- Are the children physically capable? Can they manage their own bags, shoes, water bottles and spills?
You can learn more from fifteen minutes of watching those five things than from any brochure, including ours.