Undoing the expressive child: gender, space and the transition from EYFS to year 1

The transition from the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) to Year 1 has been widely examined in relation to pedagogical continuity, school readiness and play-based learning. While these discussions illuminate children’s experiences of transition, less attention has been given to the spatial and material conditions through which gender expression becomes possible across changing spaces and routines. Drawing on a year-long doctoral study in Reception, alongside informal observations of Year 1 spaces and practitioner discussions, this paper examines how anticipated spatial, material and institutional reconfigurations may reorganise children’s expressive possibilities. Informed by posthuman, new materialist and New-Hermetic Materialist perspectives, the analysis considers how children, practitioners, spaces, resources, routines and gendered infrastructures become entangled. It argues that transition is not only pedagogical but material-relational, and conceptualises the undoing of the expressive child as a gradual narrowing of the conditions through which movement, play, clothing, participation and identity can be recognised and sustained.