There are phases in a child’s education that matter more. The formative Early Years, and the first 1000 days from conception, offer the chance to give children the Best Start in Life: a life-changing influence before destinies begin to harden.
The Middle Years, or Early Secondary Years, follow the key stage transition, when school approach significantly changes and adolescence begins to influence identity, confidence and learning. It can be the confirmer of destiny.
If we are to close gaps, we need to constrain our focus so that our expertise is focused in the phases that offer us the most influence on children’s lives. The children who carry the greatest disadvantage need us most at these pivotal times, when our leadership can still change the course of their lives.
The Formative Years
The first 1000 days from conception and through Early Years fundamentally influence, but not irreversibly, the future success of all children. Whilst the attainment and developmental gaps open around birth and widen ahead of Nursery, these are not irretrievable; early years offers a one-off window to close these gaps. This is our greatest opportunity to offer all children their Best Start in Life and to achieve greater social justice.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? (Mary Oliver)
The economics also work: investing money, time, resource and focus into the Early Years significantly reduces downstream costs to society; more importantly, closing gaps and applying equity in these formative years will last into adulthood.
It is this investment that lays the gauntlet in each of the following years to ensure that the catch up leads firmly to keep up and the best schools do that. It is who they are and they consider it inconceivable that they would fumble the gap-closing secured by colleagues in Early Years. Catching up is harder than keeping up.
The Middle Years | Early Secondary Years
The Early Secondary Years are the great confirmer of destiny, and rarely reversible. A time where gaps re-open or widen to the point of no return. We know that being under-resourced has a long-term drag on children: if schools are passive in the Early Secondary Years, children will step back, the hope built through primary education begins to fade, and an external locus of control reduces agency and opportunity.
The following brilliant extract from Mary Myatt is exactly why the Middle Years, the Early Secondary Years, are the opportunity to inspire lives, to enact a phase of education that, for too many children, acts as the great confirmer of destiny:
“…This is why ambition in these formative years matters so profoundly. Done well, we raise the intellectual pitch, we present pupils with demanding texts, with carefully sequenced ideas and genuine opportunities to think like historians, scientists and mathematicians. In doing so we don’t just prepare them for future exams, we open our whole world up to them.” (Mary Myatt, 2026)
And this considers the application of equity and the importance of the Early Secondary Years on those who rely of schools to open doors:
At the heart of this is a burning question about equity. A curriculum that lacks coherence or challenge does not fall equally on all pupils. Those who arrive at secondary school already fluent in the language of academic success and with expert support at home can compensate for what is missing in school. Those who rely on school to open doors, who need school the most, cannot. An ambitious Key Stage 3 is therefore one of the most significant moves towards true inclusion a school can make, not through rhetoric, not through more add-ons or interventions, but through the daily experience of expert teaching of a rigorous, thoughtful curriculum.” (Mary Myatt, 2026)
Much more important than that…
If your life depended on it …. you would (…achieve the required level of urgency, prioritisation and focus to close gaps)
We know that the most effective schools enable all children to catch-up and keep-up, achieving sector contrasting outcomes in Year 6 and continuing to close gaps in the Early Secondary Years. These schools typically do normal things incredibly well, seek to close any gap regardless of context, enact a curriculum deeply informed by assessment, with high expectations and with constrained and unswerving focus on high quality education. These schools struggle to talk about specific gap-closing strategies, because gap closing is what they do, it is their identity. They apply equity as normal, specifically gifting what each child needs, a deep understanding of pupil performance and an ability to not be distracted from it.
“Some people believe football closing the disadvantage gap is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.” (Bill Shankly)
Leadership of constraint and prioritisation
Closing the disadvantage gap and prioritising these pivotal phases of education requires leadership to deploy constraints and restraint; a level of prioritisation that orients attention and rewards gap closing. Schools and Trusts must resist chasing anything and everything, to dancing to all the tunes, so that they concentrate on what they are good at and directing their attention into the phases that carry the most hope for under-resourced children.
chase two rabbits, catch neither.
The hackneyed, yet true Hedgehog Concept (Collins) prompts us to remember why we exist as educators and to focus our energies on what we are best at – using education to transform lives, principally through the interaction of curriculum, assessment and pedagogy.
David Epstein (2026) points leaders toward the importance of seeking a greater understanding and deployment of constraints to achieve greater and sustained impact:
- Constraints sharpen focus: when everything is possible, priorities blur. Clear constraints force people and organisations to decide what matters most.
- The right limits improve creativity: Constraints push people beyond default solutions. They create the conditions for deeper problem-solving and more original thinking on well-defined problems and challenges.
- Too many resources can create waste and complexity: an abundance of resource and time leads to over-engineering, distraction and weak discipline.
- Leaders should design useful boundaries: Good leadership is not just about removing barriers; it is about setting intelligent limits: timeframes, decision rules, scope and priorities.
- Progress often comes from subtraction, not addition: improvement may come from stopping, simplifying or narrowing work rather than adding more initiatives.
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self… the anguish into which an unrestricted freedom plunges… I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite… my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.” (Igor Stravinsky)
Inspiring lives with greater opportunity and choice
The formative and middle years of education are life changing. We must, therefore, employ greater urgency, make a deeper investment and increase our focus on the quality of provision in these phases. This requires both constraint and constraints to harness our attention and place value where we have the greatest leverage to close gaps. So that we gift the Best Start in Life to all children and increase their life chances in the Early Secondary Years. Securing greater agency for children as they journey toward adulthood.
Inspiring lives with greater opportunity and choice.
Dan Nicholls | July 2026
Dan Nicholls 