I am a passionate advocate for early identification.

Before I was a consultant,  I spent 20 years working in schools, 17 years in school leadership and I spent 13 years as a SENCO. I have fought hard for inclusion, challenged local authorities when children were not getting the support they needed, and at times made myself deeply unpopular by refusing to accept that inadequate provision was good enough. I also served as a stakeholder inclusion partner on a local authority inclusion board.

So this is not an argument against identifying need, securing specialist support or intervening early. It is an argument for being very precise about what we identify, why we identify it and what happens to children as a result.

Recent discussion about identifying very young children who may be “at risk” of later becoming NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) has made me uneasy.

I understand the intention; nobody wants to wait until a young person is 16 or 18 before asking why things have gone wrong. We know that disadvantage matters and that early experiences matter. We know that high-quality early education can change trajectories. It’s well documented that a high quality early education has the potential to impact positively for life.

Identifying need is not the same thing as identifying future failure, there is a difference between identifying risk factors and identifying children as risks. Language matters.

I have heard this language before

Perhaps my discomfort is partly personal. When I was about 13, my dad became a governor at my school. He was an articulate, intelligent man who had left school without any qualifications because he grew up in real poverty and often worked instead of going to school. The National Assistance Act came just a little too late for him. Later, he studied for qualifications at night school.

At my dad’s first governors’ meeting, the member of staff sitting next to him didn’t realise he was a parent governor. They just knew he was new. They said:

“Of course, you can’t expect much in the way of academics, they’re all miners’ children.”

Those children, of course, included me.  I was a pupil at the school. (As it happens my dad was a rare thing in my family, not a miner, but a joiner!)

Years later, when I was a headteacher myself, I was in a heads meeting where another headteacher who had recently taken over a local school and was bemoaning the “lack of aspiration”, “poor life choices” and “lack of respect for education” amongst the families in their school community. Then came “multi-generational unemployment”.

“Most of those kids,” they told me, “have parents, grandparents and even some great-grandparents who’ve never had a job in their lives.”

I let them pontificate for a while then I quietly told them to go back to school and find the old log book and go back to the mid 1970’s.

“Look for Ruth Bargh,” I said.

“That’s me.”

“And those families you’re talking about? Most of them are related to me.”

Deficit thinking doesn’t always announce itself as low expectations. Sometimes it presents itself as professional knowledge about a community.

“My dear, when you open your mouth, you show your roots.” This is what a university professor said to me almost 4 decades ago, it still smarts.

I knew exactly what he meant. My roots were audible. I didn’t belong here.

Ian Cushing’s work on language and social justice is important here. He challenges deficit views of language and asks us to consider whose language is treated as legitimate, whose is corrected, and how judgements about language can become judgements about intelligence, aspiration and belonging (Cushing, 2023; 2024).

Years later, I have had colleagues, some educated at expensive private schools, begin conversations with me by saying: “What you need to understand about poverty is…”

Come back and tell me what I need to understand about being poor when you’ve shaken all the furniture to see if there’s any loose change so you can go to the shop to buy bread. Then we can talk.

That is not an argument against research or expertise, it is an argument for humility, for listening to voices of people who have for years been told that people who’ve no idea what their lives are like are the experts and know best. It’s an argument for not putting individual human beings into boxes. We are not statistics, we’re people. Statistics can tell us a lot, but nothing replaces our knowledge of the unique child. A key principle in the statutory EYFS.

Poverty is real, structural inequality is real. Their effects on children’s lives are real. But poverty is something a child experiences, It is not something a child is.

Children do not develop in a vacuum

Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological thinking has shaped much of my own thinking. Bronfenbrenner reminds us that a child’s development does not take place in isolation. Children live within interacting systems: family, school, community, services, culture, economic circumstances, public policy and the wider social world. Education matters enormously, but it is one part of a much larger ecology.

That seems particularly important when we start talking about future NEET status.

Whether a young person is in education, employment or training at 18 is influenced by far more than what happens in those early years.

Health, disability, housing, poverty, family circumstances, employment, mental health, post-16 provision, transport, local employment opportunities, the economy, government policy and many other factors will impact on outcomes for children and families.

Some of those circumstances do not even exist when the child is four.

To isolate education from that ecology and then attach a future socioeconomic risk to an individual preschool child seems to me extraordinarily dangerous. It risks locating a structural problem inside the child.

What does the evidence actually tell us?

The research being cited in this discussion gives us every reason to act early.

EPPSE’s Performing Against the Odds demonstrated the complex interplay between disadvantage, educational experiences, family factors, risk and protective factors. Importantly, it also showed that trajectories can change (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2011).

The High Achieving White Working Class Boys study is powerful for precisely the same reason. It looked at boys from economically disadvantaged backgrounds who were nevertheless achieving highly. Their existence should make us cautious about turning patterns associated with a group into predictions about an individual child (CREC, 2016).

And the Perry Preschool Project remains important evidence that high-quality early childhood education can have effects stretching far beyond the early years (Schweinhart et al., 2005; Heckman et al., 2010).

To me, those studies say:

Take inequality seriously. Invest early. Provide excellent early education. Identify barriers. Strengthen protective factors.

They do not require us to attach an imagined future identity to a four-year-old, the case for early action is not automatically a case for early labelling.

What are we actually measuring?

There is another problem.  At the end of Reception, children are assessed against the same 17 Early Learning Goals, despite there potentially being almost a year’s age difference between the youngest and oldest children in the cohort. The EYFS Profile is designed as an assessment at the end of Reception, not as a predictive test of future employment or social participation.

We know GLD is associated with later outcomes, but GLD is an indicator, not a causal mechanism.

Sitting underneath that outcome are language, physical development, relationships, self-regulation, executive functioning, health, opportunities, attendance, family circumstances and socioeconomic conditions. We should be very careful about taking an imperfect snapshot of development at five (or in some cases 4) and turning it into a trajectory towards eighteen. There is a danger that we become so focussed on ensuring the child achieved GLD that the curriculum becomes narrowed to meet some highly questionable and arbitrary goals.

What if we’re looking through the wrong lens?

Another issue that worries me increasingly is that we’re often looking at young children’s development through lenses more suited to older children. Sometimes children are identified as having an additional need because they cannot cope with what school is asking them to do.

But before locating the difficulty within the child, we should ask whether what we are asking is developmentally appropriate in the first place. A four-year-old who struggles to sit still for long periods may need additional support, or maybe they may are just a four year old and a curriculum that expects them to sit and listen and look at a powerpoint for 30 minutes is inappropriate.

A child who finds an overly formal curriculum difficult may have SEND, or the curriculum may simply be poorly matched to their developmental needs. Sometimes both things will be true.

This is not an argument for failing to identify SEND. Children with additional needs deserve timely identification, reasonable adjustments, specialist expertise and proper support.

I am not naïve, I work with enough schools closely to know that there are many children with complex needs in our education system.  I also know that some children who are behaving exactly as someone who knows about child development would expect, have been labelled as “behind” due to developmentally inappropriate expectations , particularly in published curricula written by those with no understanding of early development.

We should not confuse a child’s inability to fit an inappropriate system with evidence that something is wrong with the child. Bronfenbrenner helps us again here.

Development emerges through the relationship between the child and the environments around them. So when something is not working, the first question cannot always be:

“What is wrong with this child?”

Sometimes it needs to be:

“What is happening around this child, and what could we change?”

What does an “at risk” label make adults do?

This is perhaps my greatest concern.

Once a child is labelled “at risk”, what happens next?

More targets, more assessments, more catch-up. more interventions, more adult-led interventions and groups, more monitoring.

Every one of those things may be well intentioned. Some will be essential. I have spent years fighting to secure precisely that kind of additional support when children need it.

But intervention is not neutral, Every intervention replaces something else. More of the above usually means less time with peers, learning how to co-operate, hold a serve and return conversation, socialize, negotiate, share and take turns.

Imagine two children in the same Reception class.

One is judged secure. She spends long periods playing, building, talking, moving, negotiating, imagining, solving problems and becoming deeply involved in what she is doing.

The other has been identified as “at risk”.

He moves between a vocabulary intervention, additional phonics, fine motor work, an attention group, handwriting catch up and perhaps some social skills work.

All perfectly defensible in isolation.

But at the end of the week, I want us to ask:

Which child has had the richer curriculum?

The children facing the greatest disadvantage must not receive the least playful childhood.

Play is part of the intervention, not the thing we remove

This has become increasingly clear to me through our recent work on Perspectives on Play: Learning for Life (Brock, Jarvis, Olusoga and Swailes, forthcoming), particularly around SEND and neurodiversity. Children do not all play in the same way. Difference is not automatically deficiency.

Intervention can increase access, communication, participation and belonging. At its best, it is transformative. But intervention can also become something adults do to children in order to make them conform more closely to our expectations. There is a difference between supporting participation and demanding conformity, between enabling play and replacing it.

In authentic play children make decisions, communicate, negotiate, imagine, collaborate, solve problems, persist, cope with uncertainty and exercise agency. Ironically, many of these are the very capacities we later claim we desperately want young people to possess. Children should not play because it might make them more employable. Children have a right to play because they are children now and we should be very cautious about allowing anxiety about children’s futures to remove the developmental experiences they need in the present.

Identify need, not destiny

So yes, identify early. Identify speech, language and communication needs.

Identify SEND, identify poverty and disadvantage, identify barriers to participation, identify children who need additional resources, stronger relationships, specialist support and richer experiences.

None of this identification will help if the resources aren’t provided to do something about them. Not a government mandated programme or “outervention” that removes the child from their peers, but skilled, attuned adults who understand child development, who support and encourage, play alongside, nurture and develop.

Let identification make us more curious, not more certain. Ask what the child needs, what the family needs, what the system needs to change.

Sometimes the answer will be intervention but the intervention does not necessarily mean removing the child to do small group or 1:1 work  (outerventions). There is a place for those, but there’s also a place for changing the environment, curriculum, routine, interaction, expectation or opportunity around the child.

What I cannot support is taking a young child, assessing them within one part of a huge and complex ecology, and beginning to write an adult future around them.

I’ve heard versions of that story before.

“You can’t expect much from these children.”  

“There’s no aspiration in these families.”

“When you open your mouth, you show your roots.”

They were wrong then. We should be very careful not to create more sophisticated ways of being wrong now.

Risk should make adults more curious about children’s circumstances, not more certain about children’s futures.

Identify need, not destiny.

References

Brock, A., Jarvis, P., Olusoga, Y. and Swailes, R. (eds.) (forthcoming) Perspectives on Play: Learning for Life. 4th edn. Abingdon: Routledge.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Centre for Research in Early Childhood (CREC) (2016) High Achieving White Working Class Boys Project. Birmingham: CREC.

Cushing, I. (2023) Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England’s Schools. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cushing, I. (2024) ‘Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy’, Oxford Review of Education.

Heckman, J.J., Moon, S.H., Pinto, R., Savelyev, P.A. and Yavitz, A. (2010) ‘The rate of return to the HighScope Perry Preschool Program’, Journal of Public Economics, 94(1–2), pp. 114–128.

Schweinhart, L.J., Montie, J., Xiang, Z., Barnett, W.S., Belfield, C.R. and Nores, M. (2005) Lifetime Effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40. Ypsilanti, MI: HighScope Press.

Siraj-Blatchford, I., Mayo, A., Melhuish, E., Taggart, B., Sammons, P. and Sylva, K. (2011) Performing Against the Odds: Developmental Trajectories of Children in the EPPSE 3–16 Study. London: Department for Education.