Somewhere Between Reception and Year 1, We Decided Play Was For Babies

It was 2012, and I’d just left Year 5, my favourite year group, to teach Reception instead.

I thought I already knew how children learned.

I didn’t.

Not yet.

That first term was one of the hardest of my career.

By the end of the year, it had become one of the most rewarding because I’d discovered something I should have understood long before.

Play isn’t preparation for learning. It’s how children learn.

Every day I watched four and five year olds direct their own learning through nothing more than pretend, repetition and curiosity.

The role-play corner taught language and negotiation.

“You be the customer. I’ll be the shopkeeper.”

The sandpit taught engineering long before anyone called it that.

Children built walls, watched them collapse, worked out why, and tried again.

The bikes taught patience, conflict resolution and teamwork.

“It’s my turn.”

“You can have two more laps.”

No worksheet could have taught those lessons in quite the same way.

This is what the early years are built on.

Play.

Not because it’s a reward for learning.

Because it is learning.

Then September came.

In just two weeks, those same children would be expected to spend most of the day sitting at tables.

The sand disappeared.

The water trays disappeared.

The role-play corner shrank.

Free play, for many children, became something squeezed in around the edges.

I’d been told there was a time when children were given an entire term to make that transition.

Not anymore.

The pressure on schools meant two weeks was considered enough.

And I’ve never quite stopped wondering why.

Because children don’t suddenly stop needing to learn through play simply because they’ve moved classrooms.

I see it now with our own daughter.

She loves role-play.

Not because it’s cute.

Because it’s how she makes sense of the world.

She practises ordering food in her pretend restaurant.

She rehearses how to ask another child if she’d like to play.

She experiments with what to do when the answer is no.

These aren’t games filling an afternoon.

They're rehearsals for the conversations she'll have one day, the confidence to ask and sometimes be told no, and still try again anyway.

As teachers, we’ve watched thousands of children learn.

As parents, we’ve become even more convinced that play isn’t something to move beyond.

It’s something to protect.

Thankfully, not every school approaches Year 1 in the same way.

We’ve seen schools creating gentler transitions because they’ve looked at what children actually need, not just what’s administratively convenient.

And we know many educators are working incredibly hard to keep play where it belongs, at the heart of learning.

It’s one reason Finland has taken a different approach for decades.

Formal schooling doesn’t begin until children are seven.

Before then, learning is still rooted in play.

Different country.

Different education system.

But the same understanding.

Children don’t stop learning through play because they’ve had a birthday.

Somewhere between Reception and Year 1, we decided play was for babies.

Children never did.

They still need it.

From the Classroom

Where we go beyond the essay.

Every article ends with a deeper reflection drawn from our years in the classroom.

This week, we’re exploring:

• Why Year 1 has become one of the most misunderstood years in education.

• The four changes we’d make if we could redesign the Reception to Year 1 transition.

• How parents can protect the benefits of play long after children start school.

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