When school readiness lives in the room: A follow-up reflection on what it means to do context of school readiness on the ground

By Dr. Aaron Bradbury

In the days after my article on school readiness was published which you can read here (Nursery World), My inbox filled with messages from practitioners, teachers, leaders, and childminders from every corner of the early years sector. Many of them echoed one another, often almost word for word: “Aaron, we completely agree. But how do we actually do this on the ground?”

What struck me was not that professionals lacked strategies, far from it, but that they were trying to locate themselves inside a narrative that has, for so long, refused to acknowledge the reality of their work. What people were really asking was this: How do we practise in a way that honours the truth we see every day, when the conversation around school readiness still imagines that children arrive in September as blank slates with identical lives behind them?

Readiness is something that lives in the tiny, daily interactions that unfold between children and adults who commit to seeing beyond the script. I think of a practitioner I  recently observed on a research visit in September, a child who walked into Reception on the first day of term as if he was bracing himself for impact, shoulders tight, eyes darting, holding onto a carrier bag that had clearly lived several interactions before this one. The practitioner didn’t begin the day with a checklist or a baseline assessment. She crouched down, softened her voice, and said, “I’m glad you’re here.” In that moment, she was not assessing his readiness; she was creating it. Every part of her response was shaped by her understanding that this child’s story did not begin at the classroom door.

It is this willingness to see children as already in motion, already formed by context, that marks the real work of readiness. No practitioner sees a child’s behaviour in isolation. They see the sleep deprivation, the housing instability, the missed health checks, the parent who is doing their absolute best under the weight of circumstances they didn’t choose. They see the child who has lived with unpredictability, the child who has had to grow up too fast, the child whose first five years were punctuated by transitions none of us would want a four-year-old to navigate. And they know that the ability to sit still, or recognise letter sounds, or follow a routine cannot be disentangled from these experiences.

This is the developmental reality that rarely makes its way into national guidance, yet it is the reality practitioners build their practice around every single day.

One practitioner wrote to me saying, “I spent the first half term giving children what they’ve never had, not what the curriculum says they should have…..” There is an honesty in that statement that exposes how deeply relational and responsive early years pedagogy is. She wasn’t rejecting expectations; she was reframing them. She understood that no phonics scheme, no readiness framework, no policy target can compensate for the absence of safety, co-regulation, language exposure or stability in a child’s early life. So, she began where the children were, not where the guidance imagined them to be. And that is precisely what context-aware practice looks like.

It is also, in many ways, what sits at the heart of the Child in the NOW model written by Bradbury and Grimmer, 2025. Long before we talk about progression or curriculum coverage, we talk about the child’s Being, who they are today, how they feel in this moment, what their emotional landscape tells us about their needs. When practitioners tune in to this, they are not lowering expectations; they are honouring reality. From this sense of being grows Belonging, the child’s experience of being held in relationships where they feel seen, safe and significant. Without this belonging, readiness becomes performative rather than authentic.

Only when being and belonging are in place can we begin to support Becoming, the gradual shaping of identity, confidence and capability that emerges through secure relationships and meaningful play. And finally, we move towards Believing, the quiet but profound sense a child develops that they are capable, valued, and able to take part in the world of learning.

This is not an add-on to readiness. It is readiness. It is the developmental soil from which all other learning grows. And practitioners across the country are already working in this way, often without naming it, but intuitively understanding that children’s present needs, not externally imposed expectations, should guide the early days of school.

Much of the professional response to my article centred around families, not in the deficit-driven way we often see in policy documents, but in a deeply human way. Practitioners talked about parents who were doing everything they could while working antisocial hours, managing uncertain housing, navigating disability, or living through acute stress. They talked about the guilt many parents carry, not because they are “failing”, but because they are raising children in conditions that have grown harder year on year.

When we reduce readiness to what parents “should” be doing, we do not simply misinterpret families; we misinterpret the society in which they are parenting.

The conversations that followed my article made it clear that early years professionals are already practising in ways that honour context, but they often feel unseen within national discourse. They hold children close when the world has been unpredictable. They slow down the day when a class arrives dysregulated. They rework the curriculum because the children in front of them need connection, not content. They reimagine routines so that a child with limited language is not set up to fail. They are constantly reading the emotional wellbeing of the whole room, responding not only to what children do, but to what has shaped them.

This is the work that never appears in official documentation, yet it is the work that holds the early childhood sector, and many families, together.

When professionals asked me what to “do” next, I found myself returning to this truth: readiness is not something children bring with them, but something that emerges through relationships. Every time a practitioner sits beside a distressed child rather than calling it “challenging behaviour”, readiness is being built. Every time a teacher listens to a parent’s story before reading the baseline sheet, readiness is being built. Every time a school slows the transition into Reception because they know children need time to attach, readiness is being built.

We do not talk enough about the emotional labour of this work. We do not talk enough about how practitioners carry the weight of structural inequalities on their shoulders every time they walk into the room. And we do not talk enough about how much professional judgement, instinct and humanity is required to meet children where they actually are.

So, when the sector asks, “How do we do this?” my answer is simple: many of you already are. You are already practising with your eyes open to the stories children bring. You are already resisting frameworks that would have you ignore the very conditions shaping children’s lives. You are already doing the slow, relational, context-aware work that readiness actually requires.

What we need now is a national conversation that catches up with the reality of what practitioners are doing every day. A conversation that stops pretending development happens in a vacuum. A conversation that recognises early years pedagogy not as preparation for school, but as a response to the world children are living in.

School readiness will remain a hollow concept until we locate it within children’s lived experiences, not in their competencies, but in their contexts. And when we do that, we begin to see readiness for what it really is: a shared, relational process that grows in the spaces between children and the adults who choose to truly see them.