High-quality play-based practice in reception year leads to improved outcomes for all

The Reception year in schools in England is entering a period of intense scrutiny and heightened expectation. Early childhood now sits at the heart of the government’s Opportunity Mission, including a focus on improving outcomes at the end of Reception. This renewed attention is encouraging, acknowledging that the early years are fundamental in laying down foundations for lifelong learning. However, alongside that recognition comes a rise in pressure on schools.

Local authorities have been issued with statutory Good Level of Development (GLD) targets¹ requiring the national level to increase outcomes by around seven percentage points by 2028² – an expected improvement rate double that achieved between 2021 and 2025. There are wide regional and local authority variations in the achievement of the GLD. To support the higher GLD target, the government’s Best Start in Life strategy has made Reception a national priority³, and is introducing and extending tools and improvement programmes to help achieve this. These include support to improve Reception teaching through the new Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams⁴, enhanced Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP) data and training, strengthened literacy and maths support via English and Maths Hubs, intensive specialist engagement with the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) programme, and new guidance for Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP) assessment⁵. This support package creates an important opportunity but also a huge challenge: how to raise outcomes significantly without allowing accountability pressures to erode the developmentally-informed, play-based pedagogy that Reception-aged children still need.

Reception class in England has always been firmly and rightly situated within the EYFS, a unique stage in education that runs from birth, with its own statutory requirements. This feature of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) has been the envy of other countries and yet for some years now, Reception teachers have been reporting a growing tension. Government policy direction has meant school-based practice has drifted further towards that of Key Stage 1. This pressure to accelerate formal learning decreases the value of play, introduces one-size-fits-all schemes, and encourages ways of teaching that centre adult-led learning at a time when children’s developmental levels upon entering school are moving in the opposite direction.

Children are arriving in Reception with increasingly diverse developmental profiles and with higher levels of need than ever before. This includes language delays, earlier levels of emotional and social development, gaps in early executive functioning and a huge increase in Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). The result is a landscape where practice is increasingly at war with policy and where teachers are being asked to solve an impossible equation – improve educational outcomes whilst also catering for children’s current levels of development.

Without explicit protection of high‑quality play‑based pedagogy in Reception, there is a continuing danger that many schools’ well-meaning attempts to improve outcomes are leading to approaches that work against what we know about the way young children learn. This can end up having unintended negative consequences: 

• Practitioners feel pressured to drive learning forward in ways that conflict with what they feel children need and teaching becomes too formal too soon;
• Children spend more time in adult‑led teaching and less time experiencing high quality play;
• Vulnerable children, who benefit hugely from play-based approaches supported by attuned adults, lose access to the very experiences that drive their development. 

“Without explicit protection of high‑quality play‑based pedagogy in Reception, there is a continuing danger that many schools’ well-meaning attempts to improve outcomes are leading to approaches that work against what we know about the way young children learn.”

During my fifteen years working alongside schools and early years settings in Lewisham, as a school improvement officer and later as strategic lead, one of my central responsibilities was supporting teachers and leaders to strengthen the quality of provision and improve outcomes in Reception classes. Lewisham is an inner London authority with high levels of deprivation, and many children enter school significantly below age-related expectations. Yet the borough achieved exceptional improvements by working alongside both school leaders and Reception year practitioners to maintain a sustained commitment to high-quality, play-based pedagogy rooted in equity, inclusion and strong outcomes for all learners. By 2016 Lewisham became consistently one of the very highest-performing local authorities in England, averaging 10 percentage points above the national Good Level of Development (GLD) rate. Lewisham also became one of the authorities where children eligible for free school meals (the main measure used to define those at risk of educational disadvantage) did better than anywhere else nationally. The targets for GLD that are currently being set for local authorities were exceeded by Lewisham at that time. John Goodey, an Executive Head Teacher in the borough at the time recalls:

“When I look back at my time as a Lewisham Head, I remember an Early Years community of practice that was diligently built up across the borough over a number of years. The Local Authority Early Years team of highly qualified experts helped our settings become centres of excellence that enabled young children to thrive. Children learned well because they had agency in making decisions, they were engaged in stimulating play and they were supported through dialogue with a well-trained practitioner. Importantly, they also learned how to connect and relate well with others; building strong bonds with their teachers who coached them to manage their emotions and feelings and understand those of others. Our GLD scores were high because we trusted our Early Years team and protected their pedagogy. The outcomes then followed!”

What we discovered as a learning community was that:

1. Developmentally-appropriate practice accelerates progress; 
2. Vulnerable children benefit the most from this approach, but overall outcomes are improved too; 
3. Success grows from trusting and supporting schools to use professional judgement in teaching children the way they learn best.

What follows is a summary of the principles and practices that shaped our work during those years supporting schools in Lewisham – principles that continue to underpin my work nationally and internationally with school leaders and Reception teams.

Much of this approach was informed by the Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education project (EPPSE)⁶, a landmark longitudinal study led by the Institute of Education and funded by the Department for Education. EPPSE demonstrated that high-quality early education has a measurable impact on young people’s academic attainment and pro-social outcomes well into adolescence. Crucially, the study identified the key features of high-quality practice in pre-school and Reception provision, through the Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years report (REPEY)⁷. This highlighted the importance of:

• Strong parental partnership which impacts on the home learning environment;
• High-quality, well-organised learning environments;
• A balance between adult-led and child-initiated learning;
• Rich, sustained interaction, especially in play (known as ‘sustained shared thinking’);
• Adults supporting children to talk through conflicts and develop self-regulation;
• Formative assessment to meet children’s particular needs, particularly formative feedback during activities.

The report also argues that ‘where young children have freely chosen to play within an instructive learning environment, adult interventions may be especially effective’ and that ‘any heavy emphasis upon direct teaching and programmed instruction should be avoided in the early years.’⁸

These principles shaped the foundations of our work in Lewisham and remain just as relevant and necessary in the current policy landscape.

“This landmark longitudinal study demonstrated that high-quality early education has a measurable impact on young people’s academic attainment and pro-social outcomes well into adolescence.”

What children need in Reception: a model for learning that lasts

If the aim is to close gaps and improve overall outcomes in all areas of learning and development, then Reception provision must be rooted in what we know enables young children to thrive.  The following model highlights four requirements for learning that must be in place for young children to learn deeply, securely and with joy. 

Requirements of Learning

Emotional Safety: Children learn best when emotional wellbeing is high, and they feel secure, regulated, and connected to those around them. This is enabled by warm relationships, predictable routines, emotional, physical and sensory wellbeing, and adults’ belief in children as capable and confident learners. As the OECD points out, ‘Early learning occurs in the context of relationships’.⁹

Engagement: Children learn best when they are in high engagement states. Play, curiosity, agency, experiencing success and quality interaction with others feed these high levels of involvement in which deep and lasting learning occurs. In the words of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child: ‘The brain circuits underlying motivation are critical for attention, learning, and decision-making’.¹⁰ Or to put it simply, as the world-renowned education theorist Sugata Mitra notes: ‘If children are interested, then education happens.’¹¹

New Knowledge:  Children need access to ideas, information, skills, experiences, and concepts they have not yet mastered.  This happens through both intentional and responsive teaching from adults, children observing and learning alongside others, and through their own self-directed play and exploration. As the DFE recognises in its current EYFS statutory framework:‘Children learn through play, by adults modelling, by observing each other and through adult-guided learning’.¹²

Consolidation: Children need repeated opportunities to revisit, practise and apply new knowledge if learning is to become secure. While some consolidation can occur through brief adult-led input, it is most powerfully strengthened through high-quality play and meaningful real-world experiences. When continuous provision enables children to return voluntarily to ideas that matter to them, testing their own working theories and refining skills, learning is more deeply embedded. These high-engagement moments are enriched even further when attuned adults are present to notice, scaffold and extend the child’s thinking.

‘Play is one of the most important ways in which young children gain essential knowledge and skills’ (UNICEF)¹³.

Whilst hard to quantify the learning impact in exact terms, the Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Early Years Toolkit’ states that:

‘Play-based learning approaches improve learning outcomes by approximately four additional months.’¹⁴ 

Recommendations for policy changes

Any future policy for Reception year should be firmly grounded in research-based evidence regarding how young children learn best. Developmentally-appropriate play-based pedagogy is not a barrier to improved outcomes; rather, it is one of the most powerful routes to achieving them, while also safeguarding children’s wellbeing, motivation and long-term engagement with learning.

The enablers of learning outlined below represent core pedagogical principles that make the Requirements of Learning possible in practice. These enablers should be embedded in policy and reflected consistently across all Department for Education (DfE) documentation relating to Reception year practice. They should run through all DfE funded professional development, and training and guidance provided to inspectors. Any programme, scheme, framework or support promoted or funded by the DfE should actively align with these enablers and should not introduce recommendations that contradict or undermine them.

“‘Play is one of the most important ways in which young children gain essential knowledge and skills’ (UNICEF)“

Policy should make clear that where schools face a choice between implementing a strategy or preserving an enabler of learning, the enabler should take precedence. Protecting these pedagogical conditions is essential if Reception classes are to be places where all children, especially those with the lowest starting points, can thrive, learn deeply, and achieve well.

Enablers of learning in Reception classes are:

• Skilled, knowledgeable and confident practitioners, who understand child development and effective play pedagogy, and the importance of executive functioning and self-regulation, alongside secure understanding of the EYFS curriculum;
• Practitioners who feel empowered and supported to use their professional judgement to make decisions and adaptions to meet individual developmental, sensory and emotional needs, ensuring practice is responsive rather than uniformly applied;
• Strong reciprocal partnerships with parents and carers, ensuring a two-way exchange of information that enriches the home learning environment and strengthens continuity for the child;
• A culture of belonging, where each child is deeply known, respected, valued and represented and where emotional safety, identity, relationships and respect are prioritised to enable children to feel secure, confident and able to embed new learning;
• An ambitious and responsive curriculum, shaped by children’s starting points, interests and motivations rather than by external pressures or overly prescriptive schemes;
• Thoughtfully planned, rich indoor and outdoor learning environments that enable exploration, deep engagement, collaboration, and challenge;
• A timetable which blends short bursts of adult-led and adult-initiated learning with long periods of self-directed learning (play) indoors and out, allowing children the time and agency they need to practise, repeat, consolidate and extend their learning;
• Attuned adults who are available to join children in their play, and know how to interact in ways which boost language and deepen learning – building connection, modelling vocabulary, and encouraging creative and critical thinking through sustained shared thinking episodes;
• Adult-led teaching that is kept brief, engaging and introduces new knowledge and skills that children can revisit, consolidate and apply independently in their play, so that this learning becomes embedded;
• An approach to literacy and mathematics that balances short daily bursts of adult-led learning, with plentiful time for adults to help children to explore, rehearse and apply these skills within meaningful, self-directed play.

“Policy should make clear that where schools face a choice between implementing a strategy or preserving an enabler of learning, the enabler should take precedence.”

Recommendations for school leaders

Policy changes should also recognise and support the pivotal role of headteachers and senior leaders. To ensure that high quality play-based, practice can flourish in Reception year, strong leadership in the early years should involve:

• A clear understanding by both leaders and practitioners of early child development and play-based pedagogy, and how these shape children’s progress across all areas of learning;
• Establishing clear processes to evaluate and improve play-based practice, drawing on internal evaluation, practitioner expertise and, where appropriate, external support and challenge. The focus should be on the quality of learning rather than compliance with a particular approach. Leaders should be confident in identifying what high-quality, developmentally-appropriate practice looks like or should draw on external expertise to support their own expertise in this;
• Ensuring that decisions remain rooted in statutory EYFS requirements, including the educational programmes, the Characteristics of Effective Learning and the intended purpose of the Early Learning Goals, as an assessment checkpoint, not a curriculum. Non-statutory schemes and guidance should not override these statutory elements;
• Articulating and sustaining a coherent pedagogical vision for Receptionthat places children’s progress, wellbeing and equity at its core, and is grounded in the enablers of learning set out above;
• Exercising professional judgement with confidence, such as deciding to adapt, or replace initiatives, schemes or programmes that do not align with the enablers of learning, or the needs of the current cohort;
• Recruiting practitioners with strong early-years expertise or implementing a professional development programme to build this expertise consistently across the team;
• Investing in professional development that is responsive to the school’s particular needs and incorporates the enablers of learning outlined above. This should include focused training on high-quality interactions and learning environments, supporting early mathematical and literacy development through meaningful and engaging experiences (including play), strengthening practice in the prime areas of learning (personal, social and emotional development, language and communication, and physical development), inclusive practice and developing confident, knowledgeable early years leadership;
• Creating a culture in which practitioners feel trusted and supported to respond to children’s individual developmental, sensory and emotional needs, drawing on their professional knowledge rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model to all children;
• Investing where it makes the biggest difference. Funding decisions should prioritise the conditions Reception children need in order to learn well, including high quality professional development, adequate staffing levels that allow time for sustained interaction, and high-quality indoor and outdoor play spaces;
• Designing timetables that allow adults to spend substantial time engaging in sustained shared thinking with children during play, ensuring that adult-led input does not erode the long, uninterrupted periods of play that young children need.

What is currently getting in the way?

Well, as Rudy aged 4 talking about his day in Reception Class put it: “All we do is sit on the carpet and line up”.    As his Mum, Elly put it:

“Rudy really struggled in his first Reception class. He was a bright, curious and very capable boy, but at just 57 months old he simply couldn’t cope with the formality and lack of active learning. The long whole class teaching sessions, day after day were just too much for him. His little brain just couldn’t stay engaged or focused for that length of time, and we could see the joy draining out of him. He started getting really upset about going to school, eventually refusing to go to in completely. When we raised our concerns, the Head explained that the amount of time spent on the carpet wasn’t optional and that the Multi-Academy Trust was part of a DfE-recommended phonics scheme which had to be followed to the letter.

In the end, we made the difficult decision to move him and found another Reception class which was much more play-based with short phonics sessions of around 15-20 minutes and lots of child-led play throughout the day. Rudy settled immediately, was happy going and is now doing really well in reading and writing. Why can’t all Reception classes be like this?”

The DfE’s current focus on Reception rightly centres on the importance of early development, language and high-quality pedagogy, but several aspects of the current national improvement agenda risk unintentionally constraining practice.  

In my work with hundreds of Reception teachers each year, a consistent message emerges: expectations, recommendations and programmes are increasingly crowding the Reception day and limiting the conditions in which young children learn best. Policy-makers should therefore take the following points into account:

• A growing accumulation of adult-led requirements (such as lengthy phonics and maths sessions, daily handwriting recommendations and multiple intervention programmes) create overcrowded timetables and reduce the time available for sustained play and rich interactions;
• An over-emphasis on adult-led teaching restricts adults’ availability to join children’s play, when evidence from the Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education project (EPPSE) shows that children’s deepest thinking, language growth and problem-solving flourish in child-initiated contexts supported by high quality adult interactions;
• Despite strong evidence that motivation, agency and meaning-making are key drivers of early literacy, dictation is often recommended as a core way of supporting writing, thus limiting children’s own attempts at generating their own writing;
• Highly prescriptive expectations from some phonics programmes and literacy hubs can prevent teachers using alternative approaches that might better meet the needs of their children;
• Commercial schemes for mathematics that are not written with the school’s specific children in mind, allow limited flexibility for personalisation and often fail to align with children’s developmental stages or real-world understanding;
• The statutory on-entry baseline assessment provides no formative assessment value, yet still absorbs time at the point when adults most need to be observing children naturally and building relationships;
• Ofsted inspectors’ understanding of early years pedagogy is often inconsistent, particularly in those inspectors with strong pedagogical steers that are not rooted in child development principles or EYFS statutory expectations.

“Expectations, recommendations and programmes are increasingly crowding the Reception day and limiting the conditions in which young children learn best.”

Teacher’s concerns are heightened by the increasing numbers of children entering Reception with significantly delayed developmental profiles, alongside insufficient support for meeting rising levels of SEND. Taken together, the pressures listed in this section risk pulling Reception provision further away from the play-based, relational and developmentally-informed pedagogy that research consistently identifies as most effective. The growing pressure to raise Good Levels of Development (GLD) outcomes intensifies this, with many schools likely to feel compelled to teach more directly to the Early Learning Goals that make up the GLD, even though they were never designed to operate as a curriculum. This shift risks narrowing learning and undermining the essential dispositions that underpin long-term success, particularly for children at the lowest starting points.

The Reception teachers I meet are certainly not resisting improvement. On the contrary, they are deeply ambitious for their children’s outcomes and what they need is the professional space to make improvements in ways that are genuinely responsive to the children in front of them.

Endnotes

1. Children are defined as having reached a good level of development (GLD) at the end of the EYFS, if they have achieved the expected level for the ELGs in 12 areas: the prime areas of learning, of which there are seven under the areas of personal, social and emotional development; communication and language; physical development (gross and fine motor skills) and five under the specific areas of mathematics and literacy. Source: ‘Early years foundation stage profile handbook’, DfE, (updated 9 September 2025). Their main purpose is to support transition to year 1.

2. “Reception year is a national priority for regional improvement for standards and excellence (RISE) teams and we will drive improvements in the quality of teaching in reception, including increasing access to proven early language programmes, ensuring that children get a fairer start to school.”, Best Start in Life, July 2025.

3. Giving every child the best start in life, DfE, July 2025. The government’s strategy for improving child development and meeting the ambition that 75% of 5-year-olds in England have a good level of development (GLD) by 2028. Details of the early learning goals can be found in the EYFS handbook.

4. Regional improvement for standards and excellence (RISE), policy paper, 3 February 2025; updated 25 September 2025.  RISE provides both targeted interventions for eligible schools and a universal service.  RISE seeks to deliver four national priorities, including reception year quality.

5. The EYFS profile is a statutory assessment of children’s development at the end of the EYFS, usually the end of the academic year in which the child turns 5 (reception year).

6. Effective pre-school, primary and secondary education project (EPPSE 3-16+): How pre-school influences children and young people’s attainment and developmental outcomes over time, Research Brief, June 2015.

7. Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY), Iram Siraj-Blatchford, Kathy Sylva, Stella Muttock, Rose Gilden, Danny Bell, DfES, 2002.

8. Ibid. page 40.

9. The Power and Promise of Early Learning, Shuey, E. and M. Kankaraš (2018), OECD Education Working Papers, No. 186, OECD Publishing.

10. Understanding Motivation: Building the Brain Architecture That Supports Learning, Health, and Community Participation Working Paper No. 14, National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2018. 

11. Transcript of a keynote speech, The hole in the wall: self-organising systems in education, Sugata Mitra, 2010.  

12. Early years foundation stage statutory framework — For group and school-based providers: Setting the standards for learning, development and care for children from birth to five, DfE, July 2025, page 7.

13. Learning Through Play: Strengthening Learning Through Play in Early Childhood Education Programmes. UNICEF, 2018.

14. Early Years Toolkit: Play-based Learning, Education Endowment Foundation, 2023.