Around the time a child turns three, a familiar conversation begins. A pre-school place is mentioned. Their friend is going. A space has opened up. There is talk of getting them ready for school. The childminder, who has known the child since they were a baby, who knows the words they say and the words they nearly say and the way they hold a spoon and what makes them laugh, is gently and reasonably moved on from. Often with thanks. Often with real warmth. And almost always with the belief that something bigger will now do something better.
I want to talk about that decision honestly, because I think it deserves more thought than it usually gets.
The reason most parents choose a childminder
Let us begin with the part of this conversation that rarely gets said out loud. Childminders are often chosen because we cost less. That is a fair factor. Childcare is one of the largest expenses a family will ever carry, and choosing the option that fits the household budget is not something to apologise for.
But when the choice begins as a financial one, it can unintentionally frame the next step as an upgrade, even when nothing needed upgrading. The childminder becomes the affordable option, and the pre-school at three becomes the proper preparation. That framing, I think, is where a lot of children end up being moved on from something that was actually working very well.
I also want to acknowledge, briefly, that not every childminder offers the same standard of care. No profession can claim that, and ours is no exception. What follows is a description of what registered childminding can offer at its best, and what the evidence supports.
Same framework, different experience
Every registered childminder in England works to the Early Years Foundation Stage. The same statutory framework that governs every nursery, pre-school, and reception class. The same seven areas of learning. The same safeguarding requirements. The same expectations around progress checks, key person relationships, and partnership with parents. The framework is not the variable.
What changes between settings is the daily experience of the child within that framework. And that is where the differences become interesting.
The conversation your child is having
Language develops through interaction. Specifically, through what researchers call conversational turns: the back-and-forth exchanges between a child and a responsive adult who is paying attention to what the child is saying, extending it, asking about it, and answering. The number of words a child hears matters. The number of conversational turns matters more. A 2018 study by Romeo and colleagues at MIT found that conversational turns predicted language development and brain activity in language regions far more strongly than sheer word count did.
This matters because the structural difference between a childminder and a larger setting is, more than anything else, the ratio. A registered childminder caring for three-year-olds works to a ratio of one adult to three children. In a pre-school or nursery room, the same age group is cared for at a ratio of one adult to eight, and in some settings, where a qualified early years teacher is present, that ratio extends to one adult to thirteen. These are not abstract numbers. They are the answer to a very practical question: how many sustained, responsive, back-and-forth conversations can one adult genuinely hold in a day?
Three is a number a person can do well. Eight is a number that requires triage.
I mention this with care, because I know that health visitors often advise parents that nursery is better for language development, and I know parents act on that advice in good faith. The advice is well-meant. It is also, when measured against what the research actually shows about how language develops, the wrong way round. More children in a room does not produce more conversation per child. It produces less.
Why mixed ages matter
A childminder typically works with a wider age range than a single nursery room does. On any given day I might have a one-year-old, a two-year-old, and a four-year-old in the same space. Most parents assume this is a compromise. It is not.
Younger children learn from older ones in ways that no adult can quite replicate. Vocabulary, pretend play, social negotiation, problem solving, the rhythm of taking turns, the language of disagreement and repair. A two-year-old who watches a four-year-old set up a small-world scene is absorbing a level of complexity that no curriculum can put in front of them. And the older child consolidates their own understanding by being around younger ones, not by caring for them, but simply through the way their play and conversation naturally adjust to the room they are in.
This is one of the quiet developmental advantages of mixed-age care, and it is largely absent in age-segregated settings.
What school readiness actually looks like
This is the part that gets missed most often. Parents move children to a pre-school at three because they want them to be ready for school. The assumption is that a more school-like environment will produce a more school-ready child. The evidence does not support this assumption.
School readiness is not built by doing school earlier. It is built by secure attachment, by language, by self-regulation, by curiosity, and by confidence. A child who arrives at reception able to settle, listen, ask questions, manage small frustrations, and speak in full sentences is ready for school. A child who can recognise a few letters but cannot regulate a difficult feeling is not.
In my own setting I do not run forced table-top activities. I do not teach phonics. I do not have children practise writing their names. This is a deliberate choice, and it is one I make with the evidence behind me. Research on early reading consistently shows that whether a child learns to read at five or at seven, by the age of eight they are reading at the same level. What changes is whether the child arrives at reading with their curiosity intact.
My children join activities when they are curious. They paint when they want to paint. They look at books because books are everywhere and we read them together. They count when counting is useful. They learn the shapes of letters because letters are around them and they ask. This is not a lack of rigour; it is rigour applied differently. It is a different theory of how children learn, and it is the theory the early years framework was built around.
What the reception teachers actually say
Some time ago I had a conversation with reception teachers at a couple of our local primary schools. The thing they said has stayed with me. They told me they loved the children who came from my setting. That those children were well prepared. That they settled quickly, spoke confidently, and asked questions.
I tell that story not to flatter myself, but because it is the most direct answer I have to the question parents are really asking when they consider moving a child on at three. Will my child be ready? The teachers who actually receive these children, year after year, can tell you. And the children who stay with a steady, responsive, language-rich early years setting until they start school tend to do remarkably well.
A note on shared care
Sometimes parents arrange for a child to spend part of the week with a childminder and part of the week in a pre-school. There are good reasons families do this, and I understand them. But I have noticed something over the years that is worth saying.
Children absorb the tone of the places they spend time in. When part of their week is spent in a setting where the play is louder, more competitive, or less consistently mediated by adult guidance, often simply because the ratio does not allow for that level of guidance, they bring that play back with them. Behaviour shifts. Kindness becomes harder to maintain. The play I see on a Monday after a Friday spent elsewhere is not the play we have been building together. This is not about fault. It is about what happens when settings operate at different ratios, with different rhythms, and different expectations of what children’s play should look like. The children themselves show us, repeatedly, that what surrounds them shapes them.
Why some childminders no longer offer places to three- and four-year-olds
There is one piece of context parents often do not see. The funded hours rate paid to settings for three- and four-year-olds is lower than the private fee most childminders charge. For some childminders, particularly those working alone, taking funded children at this age is no longer financially sustainable. A growing number have stopped offering places to this age group altogether.
This is part of why the move at three has become so common. It is not always the parent choosing to move on. Sometimes the childminder is the one stepping back, because the numbers no longer work. It is worth knowing, because it explains a landscape that can otherwise look like a developmental judgement when it is actually a financial one.
We are not glorified babysitters
I want to close with the thing that goes least said. A registered childminder is not a person who watches children. A registered childminder is the cook, the cleaner, the manager, the practitioner, the administrator, the designated safeguarding lead, the special educational needs co-ordinator, the first aider, the policy writer, the record keeper, the partner to parents, and the early years educator. All of these hats are worn by one person, in one day, often in isolation, and almost always without much external recognition that any of it is happening at all. It is a profession built on invisible labour. I am one of the lucky ones. I have staff. Most childminders do not.
The work is remarkable, and most of it goes unseen.
• • •
If you are weighing whether to move your child on at three, I would only ask this. Your child does not need a bigger setting to be ready for school. Your child needs to be heard, talked with, played with, and known. That is what a good childminder offers. That, more than anything else, is what is worth weighing.
Susanne Rice
Registered Childminder · MEd, MRes · EdD Researcher
Founder, Grounded Parenting & Growing Curious Children