*The summer before school is not a preparation window. It is the last of
the ordinary time. And ordinary time, spent well, is the best
preparation there is.*
By Susanne Rice \| Grounded Parenting
Something happens when the school place is confirmed. The letter
arrives, or the email, in England, on national offer day in April, and
almost immediately, a quiet but persistent anxiety sets in. Should we be
practising letter sounds? Should they be able to write their name?
Should we be visiting the school more, talking about September more,
preparing more? Should we be doing something with these next months that
we are not doing? There is, suddenly, a very long runway to September.
And the temptation to fill it with preparation is considerable.
The answer, almost always, is no. But the anxiety does not respond well
to 'no' without an explanation. So here is the explanation.
Your child does not need the summer before school to be a preparation
window. What they need, what the research consistently points to, and
what nearly two decades of watching children cross the threshold into
school have taught me, is that the summer be what it has always been.
Unhurried. Ordinary. Theirs.
September is not the test. The early years were the preparation. And
by the time summer arrives, that preparation is already done.*
What school readiness actually is
The phrase 'school ready' has become one of the most anxiety-generating
in the early years parenting vocabulary. It implies a checklist. A
standard to be met. A set of skills that children either have or lack,
and that parents have either produced or failed to produce.
The research tells a different story entirely. The factors that most
reliably support a child's success in school are not academic skills.
Children do not need to write their name, recognise letters, or count to
twenty before they start. Reception teachers are trained to meet
children exactly where they are academically. A child who cannot write
their name is not behind. They are at the beginning, which is where they
are supposed to be.
What is consistently identified as the foundation for school success is
something built over years, not weeks. It is the quality of the child's
language, not whether they know letter sounds, but whether they have
been talked with, read to, sung to, and listened to across thousands of
ordinary days. It is emotional regulation, not perfect behaviour, but
enough security and enough practice with feelings that the child can
manage the demands of a classroom without completely falling apart. It
is a sense of themselves as a curious, capable person who is allowed to
try things, get them wrong, and try again.
None of those things is produced by the summer holidays. They are
produced by the years that came before them.
The child who arrives at school in September, having had a childhood
full of play, conversation, connection, and the quiet confidence of
adults who believed in them, is more ready than any amount of August
drilling could produce.*
What the early years were actually for
This is what the school readiness conversation so often misses: the
early years are not a waiting room for school. They are a period of
extraordinary developmental significance in their own right. The brain
in the first five years is building architecture, neural connections,
regulatory capacity, language structures, and the foundations of
curiosity, creativity, and resilience that will underpin everything that
follows.
What builds that architecture is not structured learning. It is play.
Rich, self-directed, unhurried play, in the company of adults who are
genuinely present and genuinely interested. It is conversation, the
back-and-forth of a child asking a question and an adult taking it
seriously, not rushing to the answer but sitting with the child in
wonder. It is the experience of being seen clearly by the people who
matter most, and of having that seeing communicated back: I notice you.
I am interested in you. You are capable. The world is safe enough to
explore.
The child who has had that, in whatever form it has taken in their
particular family, their particular setting, their particular ordinary
life, has been prepared. Not for school specifically. For life. For the
capacity to enter a new environment, find their footing, build
relationships, manage difficulty, and remain, underneath all of it,
themselves.
That is what the early years were for. And the summer before school is
not the moment to panic that it was not enough. It is the moment to
trust that it was.
What parents are tempted to do, and why it can backfire
In the weeks before September, a particular kind of well-intentioned
preparation tends to appear. Workbooks bought to practise letter
formation. Flash cards for number recognition. Extended conversations
about what school will be like, what the teacher will expect, and what
the child will need to be able to do. A raising of the stakes, dressed
up as preparation.
Most of this is harmless in small doses. But when it becomes the tone of
the summer, when the message, week after week, is that September is a
significant event that requires preparation, it does something that
careful parents rarely intend. It communicates to the child that the
world they are about to enter is not yet ready for them. There is a gap
between where they are and where they need to be. That the adults around
them are not quite confident about what comes next.
Children read that message with extraordinary precision. They do not
read the content of the preparation, the letters, the numbers, the
conversations. They read the anxiety underneath it. And anxiety at the
threshold, as any early years practitioner knows, makes the threshold
harder to cross.
It is a recurring pattern. A child who is four and a half, confident
and curious, full of language and play and a settled sense of
themselves, and a parent who, somewhere in the summer, begins drilling
letter sounds at the kitchen table because September is coming and
something should be happening. By August, the child is saying 'I can't
do it' before they have even begun. They start school in September,
wonderful in every way that matters, warm, communicative, playful,
persistent. The letter sounds were never the problem. The message that
had settled in, that there was something they needed to be and weren't
yet, takes considerably longer to undo.*
What actually helps in the summer
The things that genuinely support a child through the school transition
in September are almost entirely relational and environmental. They are
not academic, and most of them require nothing to be bought or
practised.
Keep the rhythms familiar.
Predictable daily rhythms, consistent mealtimes, a reliable bedtime, and
the same sequence of events a child has come to know and trust create
the regulatory foundation that makes new environments manageable. The
more settled and familiar the home feels, the more internal resources a
child has to cope with the novelty of school. Summer is not the time for
big changes. It is the time to let the ordinary be ordinary.
Protect the play.
Unstructured, child-directed play is not a luxury in the summer before
school. It is the most developmentally appropriate activity available.
The child who spends the summer building, digging, inventing,
pretending, and following their own curiosity wherever it leads is doing
exactly the cognitive and creative work that school will call on. Let
the days be spacious. Let the agenda be theirs.
Talk about school without raising the stakes.
Brief, matter-of-fact mentions of September are more helpful than
extended conversations. 'You'll meet your teacher in a few weeks' is
better than 'Are you excited? Are you nervous? What do you think it will
be like?' The second approach, however kindly meant, invites the child
to rehearse uncertainty. The first gives them the information and moves
on.
Stories and books about starting school, read for pleasure rather than
instruction, help a child build a mental picture of what is coming
without loading it with significance. The key is keeping the tone
ordinary. As a matter of fact. This is a thing that happens, and it will
be fine.
Let yourself be confident.
This is perhaps the most important thing on the list, and the hardest.
The child at the school gate in September is reading your face for
information about whether this crossing is safe. A parent who
communicates calm and confidence, even if they do not entirely feel it,
gives their child something invaluable: the evidence that the threshold
is crossable.
That confidence is not about pretending everything is fine. It is about
trusting what the early years built. Trusting that your child is more
capable than the workbook suggests. Trusting that the relationship you
have built, across all the ordinary days, all the unhurried afternoons,
all the moments of genuine connection, is exactly what they need to
carry with them into September.
This looks different in every family. The working parent who has had
less time than they wished. The single parent who has carried more than
their share. The family navigating additional needs, or a child whose
profile means that ordinary has always looked a little different. The
foundation built is still real. The preparation is still done. Ordinary,
in whatever form it has taken, is enough.
The last of the ordinary time
There is something worth naming about the summer before school that gets
lost in the preparation anxiety, and it is simply this: it is the last
of a particular kind of time. The time before the structure of formal
education organises the year. The time when the days are long and
largely undecided, when a child is not yet a pupil, when the world is
still primarily experienced through play and relationship rather than
curriculum and assessment.
That time is not nothing. It is not empty waiting. It is childhood, in
one of its most generous forms. And the best thing you can do with it is
not to fill it with preparation. It is to be in it, fully, with your
child. To let September come when September comes, and to trust that the
person you have been helping to grow across these years is ready, not
because you drilled the letters in August, but because you were present
across all the ordinary days before it.
You did not prepare them for school this summer. You prepared them
for life. You have been doing it for years. That is enough. It is more
than enough.*
The summer before school is not a preparation window.
It is the last of the ordinary time.
Spend it ordinarily.
Susanne Rice
Susanne Rice
Registered Childminder · MEd, MRes · EdD Researcher
Founder, Grounded Parenting & Growing Curious Children
Founder, Grounded Parenting & Growing Curious Children
developmentally for your child, what is happening for you, and how to
navigate the first weeks of term, Ready: A Grounded Parenting Guide to
Starting School is available at groundedparenting.co.uk.*