Young children’s experiences, which include their transition to school, can influence not only their academic outcomes but also their life chances. This understanding has led to governments in England investing in the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector over the past 20 years. Over time a “discourse of readiness” has become increasingly apparent in ECEC policies. The revised Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) (DfE, 2012a) framework states that the purpose of the framework is to ensure children are ready for school. Increased political involvement in the sector has led to parents/families, ECEC practitioners and teachers sharing the task of preparing children for school. The aim of this research is to explore parents’, ECEC practitioners’ and teachers’ beliefs about the nature of children’s school readiness and the relationships between them as they prepare and support children during their transition to school. A case study approach was adopted. There are two cases, each comprising a school and an ECEC setting (sharing the same site) and their respective groups of parents. Interviews and focus groups were used to gain insights into parents’, ECEC practitioners’ and teachers’ beliefs and relationships. In this thesis the conceptual framework ‘The Relational Transition to School’ has been developed. The framework identifies both readiness and adjustment as two aspects of a transition. Also represented are the relationships between those who prepare and support children. Four types of relationships were identified: a distant relationship, a dominant relationship, a familiar relationship and a utopian relationship, with each relationship having different qualities. Certain relationships and the associated interactions were prone to change during the transition. Findings highlight practices that foster the qualities of relationships which are more likely to support children’s adjustment to school. Using these findings ECEC practitioners, teachers and local and national political administrators of education can aim to create transition policies and practices that foster these relationships between the adults. Through maintaining the focus on these relationships, children are likely to have a successful transition and positive attitude to school.

Fantasy play is when children explore and travel through time and space, to interpret experiences into stories and to act them out. Children love this kind of play and it is really important for developing skills which will be used later in life. Today, computers are increasingly present in children's lives, and the development of technology over recent decades has changed the way children play. This thesis explores the possibility of young children (aged 3-4) enacting their fantasy play in a virtual environment. Three different games were designed and implemented on a Mitsubishi DiamondTouch (DT) multi-touch interactive tabletop. Three evaluation studies were conducted and the performance of the children's fantasy play was examined. In each study, children were recruited from a local preschool class. The first study was designed to compare fantasy play in physical and virtual settings. Children from the preschool class in a state primary school were invited to play with both a real tree house and its virtual implementation on a Mitsubishi DiamondTouch (DT) multi-touch interactive tabletop. Overall, the children played quietly and alone. The results evinced several problems in the interaction with the tabletop as children struggled to drag the objects displayed on the table surface. Therefore, the study did not provide conclusive evidence of a distinction in fantasy in physical and virtual environments. The second study was concentrated on testing solutions for the interaction difficulties evinced in the first study. A new application named The Magic House was developed and implemented on a Mitsubishi DT multi-touch interactive tabletop and tested twice with the preschool children. The results showed that most of the interaction problems from Study 1 were eliminated; evidence of more fantasy play was captured, and children played more confidently in the second evaluation session. The third study was designed to investigate and to compare children's fantasy play in physical and virtual settings. A new physical setting and the virtual implementation on the Mitsubishi DT multi-touch interactive tabletop of materials named The Farm were designed and examined with a group of preschool children. The results revealed that high occurrence of fantasy play was observed in the virtual setting and several similarities and dissimilarities between the two settings was also highlighted. Overall, this thesis produced knowledge on how the application on the multi-touch interactive tabletop environment was designed and evaluated with preschool children. The thesis results demonstrate that appropriate interaction design of virtual environments could stimulate preschool children's fantasy play and the tabletop can be operated by children as young as three. This thesis also specified requirements for designing and facilitating tabletop environments for preschool children's fantasy play.

This dissertation is an exploration of a group of Early Years Practitioners’ perceptions of gender. The current media and educational interest in the gendered brain suggests that children’s learning might be differentiated according to their sex. Based on assumed biological differences, approaches to the care and education of children could be established on sex categories rather than on an individual’s needs. My focus here is to explore understandings of gender to gain insight into how these might influence practitioners’ expectations of children’s behaviour and learning in the nursery environment. The study is premised on the belief that practitioners’ perceptions of gender could result in self-fulfilling prophecies being (re)produced and (re)created. Binary expectations could limit opportunities for children due to stereotypical assumptions and practices being employed. The dissertation adopts a Foucauldian lens to identify practices and perceptions that foreground children’s gender and sex categories and which do not reflect child-centred approaches. A number of themes permeate the dissertation, including the nature of gender, sexuality and play. The research data was collected from a group of eight Early Years Practitioners who took part in five discussion sessions as well as from a toy survey given to that group and a further 92 participants. The findings indicate that there is a belief among practitioners that gender impacts upon learning, behaviour and children’s play. In addition, there are clear indications that the participants believe children’s, especially boys’, early play behaviours predict their future sexual orientation. The conclusions presented suggest that changes to the education and training of Early Years Practitioners are required in order to raise awareness of gender issues in nurseries. I suggest that placing gender back on the training agenda with the use of Dewey’s critical thinking and Schon’s reflection-on-action may support changes to practice that could, in turn, provide children with more equitable teaching and learning experiences. Finally, areas for further research are proposed that investigate the perceptions of gender as understood by children and their parents.

Observation of children, based upon careful watching and listening, is a key aspect of effective early childhood pedagogy, and yet research shows that early years practitioners struggle to observe children satisfactorily and find difficulty in planning provision based upon their observations. This finding is unexpected as there is a focus upon child observation in practitioners‘ initial training. This study set out to consider this anomaly through exploring new practitioners‘ understandings and uses of child observation during their first year of employment. The study took the form of a collective case study involving ten newly qualified early years practitioners. Taking an ethnographic approach, the project used participant observation in three early years settings, combined with semi-structured interviews with new practitioners and their mentors, to collect evidence of child observation in practice. Thematic content analysis of data, supported by the use of NVivo2 software, focused upon three aspects of the research question: firstly, new practitioners‘ understandings of the nature and purpose of child observation; secondly, why and how they use it; and, thirdly, observation as an aspect of their work within early years settings. Findings indicate that new early years practitioners demonstrate both informal practice, underpinned by an ethic of caring which guides observant, responsive work with young children; and formal practice, rooted in a developmental view of childhood leading to conscientious recording of predetermined, sequential, learning outcomes. The former is an intrinsic, connected response whilst the latter results from implementation of external policy requirements. Drawing inspiration from Dewey‘s pragmatist philosophy of education and from notions of wise practice, a new dynamic and relational approach to child observation is proposed, which may unite these dichotomous modes of thought and action and so enhance early years care and education.

This thesis is concerned with developing our understandings and knowledge of children within Early Years Learning (EYL) and the importance of movement and play in processes of social class and cultural (re)production. The ways in which parents from different social classes are involved and invest in their children s education and physical activity have been researched quite extensively. This research therefore looks at the nature of transactions and interactions within EYL settings and the influence social class and parental investment has on children s embodiment, knowledge construction and learner identities. The study pays particular attention to how social inequalities are produced and reproduced within EYL through differences in its organisation, curriculum structures, pedagogical interactions and transactions. Data were collected over a ten month period of sustained critical ethnography in three socially and culturally diverse EYL settings in central England through observations and informal conversations. The collected data were first analysed ethnographically to determine the organising categories and concepts of the setting, while second order analyses brought into to play the researcher s sociological interests in questions of equity, social reproduction and control, imposing another layer of questions on the study. A Bernsteinian theoretical lens was adopted to interrogate the transactions within EYL settings in relation to power and control, while those of others (namely habitus , physical capital and the corporeal device - pace Bourdieu, Shilling, Evans and Davies respectively) were used to embellish such understandings and bring processes of embodiment to the fore. The findings illustrate the complexity of the discourses and practices that children negotiate when re-contextualising knowledge and constructing their learner identities within EYL settings. They also reveal how children learn about their own and others bodies through the various forms of play that feature in EYL settings and that these processes are profoundly class related. At the heart of the thesis lies the claim that extant social class hierarchies and ability differences are sustained rather than eroded or lessened through the structure, organisation and transactions of EYL settings. Finally, recommendations are made as to how UK Government policy relating to EYL might begin to promote pedagogies that enhance the potential for greater social mobility in the UK.

This study is an exploration of five children’s relationship with the existential as it is played out in their everydayness at the nursery. Previous research in the field has looked at teachers’ perceptions of pre-school children’s existential questions, showing, thus, a place for a study on children’s existential encounters. My focus lies with the subjective meanings and the emotional qualities of these encounters, specifically how they are embodied in children’s play in the form of a word but also an object, an image, a movement or silence as well as in their ordinary doing and their very being at the nursery. I am also interested in how the existential reveals itself in children’s everyday relationships with others as well as how it is precisely through my relationship with them that I, as someone who looks for it, can get closer to it. For that I use psychoanalytic observation as a methodology that stays with the child’s interior worlds as they unfold in her play and in the relationship with the observer. My methodology is informed by relational psychoanalytic thinking and feminist writings that allow me to locate meaning in the liminal spaces between the self and the other, the interior and the exterior. In the analysis, I use writing as inquiry as a means to explore an integrative approach by moving between psychoanalytic theories and existential-phenomenological ideas to think the existential with. I explore children’s existential encounters with the questions of nothingness, strangeness, ontological insecurity, death and selfhood as they emerged in the context of our relationship in the course of the observations. I also discuss how time, space and relationship - as inherent in the existential but also implicated in the method of psychanalytic observation - manifested in children’s existential encounters. Finally, I look at the idea of the interpersonal unconscious as a creative source of meaning and discuss how the existential emerged embodied in symbolic articulations in the form of character, imagery, sounds and scents.

In this thesis, I explored children’s experiences of role-play in relation to notions of self. The research took place in two pack-away settings in the Private, Voluntary and Independent (PVI) sector of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). The experiences of eight children, aged between three-year-three months and four-years one month, were investigated over a period of seven months. I used an adaptation of The Mosaic Approach (Clark and Moss 2001) combined with a reflective lenses approach (Brookfield 1995) to create a three-dimensional view of the children’s experiences. The children and I used a range of tools to gather data including digital cameras, conferencing, drawing and map-making. Children were conceptualised as agentic and capable of commenting on their lives and experiences (James et al 1998, Qvortrup 2004, Cosaro 2010). The findings revealed that children engage in Wave Play, a fluid form of role-play in which they move both props and ideas from space to space. Practitioners support the children in finding the necessary props and allowing them to move from one area of the setting to another. The children displayed positive self-esteem and effective social behaviours showing an awareness of themselves as social beings. They were confident that their needs will be met when they request support. In their role-play activities, they showed their understanding of themselves as integrated selves; beings, becomings and having beens (Cross 2011). Adults in pack-away settings can support children effectively by adopting a flexible pedagogical approach.

Categorisation is the process by which items, behaviours and events are compartmentalised according to their defining attributes or properties. This may be based on simple perceptual similarities or on more complex conceptual webs. Whatever their selection criteria, categories expedite inferential capabilities, facilitating behavioural predictions and subsequently enabling response. Categorisation waives conscious effort whilst preserving that which is salient and as such, provides a highly efficient means of delineating and organising information within semantic memory. An ability to categorise is therefore fundamental to an individual’s capacity to understand the world and a necessary precursor to academic achievement. This thesis comprises a series of studies that were devised in order to investigate categorisational development in children. Study 1 involved the development of a theoretically and practically valid testing mechanism. A sample of 159 children, aged 30-50 months, participated in a series of investigations aimed at establishing the impact of test format and presentation dimensionality on categorisation performance. As a result of this, a new test battery was devised which enabled more fine grain differentiation than had been possible with the tests used by previous researchers. The battery measured four different aspects of preschool children’s categorisational abilities -categorising according to shape; according to colour; when presented with drawings of items, and when presented with the same items in the form of toys. Results found that children’s ability to categorise differed significantly according to their sex, socio-economic background and the dimensionality of the item. Study 2 utilised the same battery with 190 participants from demographically diverse cohorts. Significant differences were found between high and low socio-economic groups and between boys and girls. A Mixed- Factorial ANOVA, with a post-hoc Bonferroni demonstrated a main effect of sex; a main effect of cohort and an interaction between sex and cohort. A Kruskal-Wallis Test also showed age to be significant, confirming the findings of previous researchers concerning a developmental trajectory. However, it also found that relatively sophisticated conceptual webs emerge earlier than had previously been thought. Whilst the results from Study 2 had demonstrated relative homogeneity amongst socio-economic groups, it was noted that participants from the most disadvantaged neighbourhood performed better than those from the other low socio-economic cohort. As the two Nurseries employed different approaches, with one offering a formal curriculum and the other emphasising child-led play, it was decided that the final study would focus on categorical development in these two cohorts. The final study therefore investigated conceptual development during 96 participants’ first twelve weeks of nursery education. Forty-eight participants were drawn from a Community Nursery with a strong emphasis on child-led play and 48 were drawn from a Nursery attached to a Primary School, where the emphasis was on more formalised learning. Children’s categorisational abilities were measured during their first week in Nursery using the test battery devised for Study 1. They were then re-tested using a matched battery twelve weeks later. Change scores were calculated and analysed using a series of one-way ANOVAs. As anticipated, all participants made gains but the children who had participated in play made significantly greater gains in three out of the four measures. It is thus asserted that play is a key conducer in cognitive development and a causal executant in establishing rudimentary automaticity and, as such, should be the polestar of preschool education. This is particularly important for boys from low socio-economic backgrounds who face contiguous disadvantage. Therefore, this research demonstrates that memory-based research with young children should be conducted with toys and objects, rather than images, and that the link between social and educational stratification has its roots in early childhood and is best addressed through the provision of high-quality play opportunities.

This exploratory, psychosocial study looks at what it means to be ‘school ready’ to the parents of children eligible for Pupil Premium funding, in a mainstream inner London primary school. Existing research exploring the topic of school readiness and transition to primary school remains predominantly in international territories. Furthermore, there is paucity of rich, qualitative accounts of parental views and experiences, despite the vital role parents play in supporting their child's education. A psychoanalytically informed approach, Free Association Narrative Interviewing (FANI), was used to interview three participants twice. The interview data was analysed using Thematic Analysis. The five themes identified are discussed in relation to existing research and psychological theory. The implications for the Educational Psychology profession, as well as for schools and other professionals, have been explored. Limitations of the current study, and thoughts about future research are considered.

In the context of early childhood education, in England and internationally, ideas and practices of ‘readiness’ have been of interest within research, policy and practice for some time. Much critical research, scholarship and activism has focused on exploring developmental aspects of this phenomenon arguing for: more ‘appropriate’ standards of ‘readiness’ against which to judge children’s learning and development; closer relationships between schools, preschools and communities that produce culturally responsive concepts of ‘readiness’; and the critical examination of the relationship between early childhood and compulsory school education. Within this body of work there is significant emphasis on developing and articulating alternative ideas and approaches that can unsettle dominant, normalizing practices of teaching and learning. Within these critical explorations of ‘readiness’ however, there is an avenue of scholarship that, seemingly, is as yet unexplored – one that addresses the concept of ‘readiness’ itself and asks how it may be possible to conceptualize ‘readiness’ in a way that is consistent with, and responsive to, complex processes of teaching and learning. This is not just a shift in practice, or in policy narratives, but is an ontological and epistemological change – a reconceptualization of ‘readiness’ that takes as its starting point a fundamental assumption of the positive and productive force of difference, in learning and in life. This thesis explores the ontological and epistemological shifts required to move away from ideas of ‘readiness’ that attach progression to a mechanistically linear movement. It develops and articulates an approach that embraces the emergent and unpredictable nature of learning, from which a concept of ‘readiness’ emerges which works with open, non-linear and emergent dimensions of education as necessary aspects of the complex systems within which we work. The thesis works with the concept of a ‘diffractive methodology’, exploring the concept of ‘readiness’ through ideas and theories drawn from complexity theory, from the immanent philosophy of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, and through onto-epistemological ideas of materiality and the entanglement of matter and meaning explored in particular by Barad. Methodologically, this study works within the space opened up by recent developments within ‘post-qualitative’ approaches to research. Working with concepts of ‘sensation’ and ‘affect’ it engages critically with often taken for granted concepts and practices such as: assumptions concerning empirical/theoretical research; ideas of ‘data collection’ and ‘data analysis’; and the production of knowledge in and through experience. Deleuzian philosophy (among other influences) is approached in this methodological context as an open system, as opposed to a totalizing structure. Concepts including ‘sensation’ and ‘affect’ are approached as potentialities, the methodological value of which is affirmed through the ways in which they have been productively put to work in the context of this study in order to produce spaces in which it is possible to think and act in ways that challenge conventional structures. What is developed in this thesis is a concept of ‘readiness’ as an ‘active-affective-ethical-relation’, as opposed to a fixed and normalizing identity. It is argued that, through this reconceptualization of ‘readiness’ as a central concept within early childhood education, other taken for granted concepts are unsettled, in particular ideas and practices of assessment. In exploring these concepts, the original ideas produced within this thesis, in relation to both early childhood education and research methodology, aim to contribute to the creation of more ethical and inclusive spaces of early childhood education and educational research.