What’s happening in our early years classrooms? The children we’re seeing, the babies of the pandemic, the ones who missed the simple, profound chaos of early childhood. They’re struggling in a way that demands we stop, pay attention, and fundamentally change what we do.
Ofsted’s recent work, from Bold Beginnings to Strong Foundations, isn’t just data. It’s a slow-building, heartbreaking ballad about the widening gap between the children who thrive and the ones who are quietly being left behind.
The Weight of the Missing Foundation
Let this statistic settle for a moment: Three in ten children are not ready for Year 1.
This isn’t an abstract number. This is Mia, whose motor skills weren’t developed by endless climbing and digging, now battling to hold a pencil. This is Jack, opting out of story time because the beautiful flood of language feels like a relentless, impossible wave.
While we’ve seen positive shifts in early reading and maths, our most vulnerable children, the disadvantaged, are still waiting for their verse. And here is the brutal truth: if we don’t close these gaps now, in these gentle, formative years, they don’t just stay the same. They widen. They deepen. They become chasms.
The Cruelty of Rushing: We’re Asking Them to Sing Before They Know the Melody
We all believe in inclusion. We say every child matters. But what are we doing?
Too often, we ask a child to write a complex story when their fingers can’t form the letters, or their phonics knowledge is too fractured to encode the words. We have turned our core curriculum into a “shopping list of activities” instead of a carefully sequenced, intentional journey.
Foundational skills are not optional experiences you can swap for the water table. Reading, writing, and number are the bedrock. They are the groundwork beneath everything else.
And the children who need us most? They are the quietest. They don’t draw our gaze like the chatty, confident children. They often build alone in the corner, their language development stalling with every silent, unscaffolded minute.
The Four Truths for Deep Roots
Our response must be immediate, intentional, and focused on the basics.
1. Practice Makes Permanent, Not Perfect
We need to slow down to speed up. Every time we move a child on before they have truly embedded a concept, we are being careless, not kind. We must know exactly what we want every child to learn, and then give them plenty of time to truly learn it. To own it. To carry it forward.
2. Language is the River
We have become obsessed with recording and proving that learning happened. However, before writing, children must compose orally. They need to hear beautiful, repetitive stories. The quality and quantity of a child’s language development rest entirely on their interactions with adults.
Find the quiet ones. The hesitant ones. The ones who’ve learned that staying silent is easier. They need your voice the most.
3. Inclusion Means Independence
Inclusion is not over-supporting. It’s not hovering. It’s providing our most vulnerable children with the foundational knowledge they need so they can achieve independently.
When we over-support, we send a message: “This is too hard for you.” When we teach them, we say: “I believe you can do this.”
4. Stage is Everything; Age is Just a Number
Some children must work at an earlier stage of the curriculum than their peers. This is not holding them back; it is building them up.
Rushing a child through to age-appropriate content when their knowledge foundation is fragmented is not kindness, it’s cruelty dressed up as inclusion.
The Path Forward: Be Obsessed with the Details
When inspectors look at your EYFS and KS1 today, they are laser-focused on the details, because the details matter:
- Pencil grip
- Letter formation fluency
- The quality of adult-child interactions
- Phonics instruction, is it systematic, or scattered?
Our current Reception cohort experienced unprecedented disruption. We can’t change that, but we can change what happens next.
We must prioritise spoken language and quality interactions over worksheets. It is important that we give our most vulnerable children more interaction, more practice, and more of ourselves. We must ensure every child has the foundational knowledge before we ask them to build something complex on top.
As Sir Martyn Oliver said:
“If we get it right for the most vulnerable pupils, we get it right for everyone.”
These early years are the days that shape everything, their academic achievement, their health, their wellbeing, and their entire sense of self.