After years of many early years practitioners and teachers spending their valuable time looking for superficial outcomes and becoming over-reliant on electronic versions of Development Matters, we now have an opportunity to refocus practice on meaningful and respectful observation of children and to think more deeply about what we are seeing.
Development Matters (2012) was never intended to be used as a tick-list, and its warnings that ‘children develop at their own rates, and in their own ways’ have been carried forward in the Birth to 5 Matters guidance (2021):
‘Learning does not move forward in a straight, predictable and linear way. It can stall or even backtrack in one area, while strides and bursts are made in another area. Development should not be expected to be even across all areas, and the balance is likely to shift from one time to another.’
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