Who Decides If a Child Is Ready for School? New Study Says Everyone Does

For decades, the question of whether a child is ready for school has been treated like a developmental verdict, a line that a five-year-old either crosses or does not. A new study published in the Early Childhood Education Journal challenges that framing at its core. Researchers Esra Nur Demirtaş and Ahu Taneri of Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University in Turkey argue that school readiness is not a fixed threshold inside a child’s head at all. Instead, they reconceptualize it as a relational transition capacity, a property that emerges from the interactions among children, families, and schools rather than from any single set of skills measured on a checklist. The finding lands at a moment when governments worldwide are expanding early childhood programs and policymakers are hungry for clarity about what actually prepares children for the classroom.

The study’s methodological approach is deliberately comparative. Rather than surveying one group of adults about what readiness means, the researchers adopted a qualitative embedded single-case design and gathered semi-structured interviews with twenty-one participants spanning the full arc of the transition to primary school. The sample included eight primary school teachers, six preschool teachers, and seven parents. This three-way structure matters because most existing research has relied on single stakeholder perspectives, which the authors identify as a significant gap in the literature. By placing the accounts of the people who teach five-year-olds, the people who teach four-year-olds, and the people who raise them side by side, the study could map exactly where their constructions of readiness converge and, more revealingly, where they diverge.

The interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis, a systematic method for coding textual data into categories and themes. The researchers grounded their work in an ecological tradition that traces back to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development, which holds that child development cannot be understood apart from the nested systems of family, school, and culture that surround it. That theoretical commitment shows in the results. Readiness, in this study, is not a list of attributes but a network of relationships, and the same network looks different depending on where an observer stands within it.

One of the study’s clearest findings is that school readiness extends well beyond the early literacy and numeracy skills that dominate popular anxiety about starting school. Across all three stakeholder groups, participants described a multidimensional construct encompassing language and communication skills, self-regulation, motor development, and social-emotional adaptation. This aligns with a substantial body of prior research. Longitudinal work has shown that early attention and social skills predict later academic achievement, sometimes as strongly as early math and reading scores, and studies of preschool social-emotional learning have repeatedly linked emotional competence to early school success. The Turkish study adds texture to that consensus by showing that even when stakeholders agree on the broad dimensions of readiness, they weigh them very differently.

Those differences follow the logic of each group’s pedagogical role and observational context. Primary school teachers, who must manage a classroom of twenty or more children the moment school begins, emphasized classroom functionality. For them, readiness is whatever allows the daily machinery of instruction to run: a child who can sit, follow routines, listen, and participate without constant individual intervention. Preschool teachers, observing children in a play-based and developmentally oriented environment, focused on developmental precursors, the underlying capacities in self-regulation, language, and motor coordination that make classroom functioning possible later. Parents, meanwhile, prioritized observable academic indicators and motivation, the things they can see at home: a child who recognizes letters, counts, and seems eager to learn. Each perspective is internally coherent, yet none captures the whole picture alone.

This divergence is not merely a curiosity of perception research. It has practical consequences for how transition programs are designed and evaluated. If parents believe readiness means knowing the alphabet while teachers believe it means being able to wait one’s turn, then a family preparing a child at home may be optimizing for the wrong target, not through negligence but through a rational reading of what they can observe. Prior comparative studies in Singapore, Australia, and the United States have documented similar mismatches between parental and teacher priorities, and research on family-school connectivity during the transition to primary school suggests that communication gaps between home and school are a persistent feature of this developmental juncture. The new study reframes these mismatches not as errors to be corrected but as structural features of a multi-actor system that must be actively coordinated.

The relational framing also carries a pointed implication for accountability. If readiness is a capacity that emerges from interactions among children, families, and schools, then responsibility for a successful transition cannot rest on the child or the family alone. This echoes the influential ecological model of the kindergarten transition developed by researchers including Robert Pianta and Sara Rimm-Kaufman, who argued decades ago that the transition to school is shaped by the social ecology of classrooms, families, and children together. It also resonates with the concept of readiness as a relational construct advanced by Australian researchers Sue Dockett and Bob Perry, whose work on transition programs has shaped policy across the Asia-Pacific region. What the Turkish study adds is a fine-grained, interview-based account of how that relationality is actually constructed in the language of the people involved.

The study’s context gives its findings additional weight. Turkey has been rapidly expanding preschool enrollment, with national education statistics showing continued growth in early childhood provision, and the country’s Ministry of National Education has updated its preschool curriculum in recent years. In systems undergoing that kind of expansion, the alignment between preschool pedagogy, primary school expectations, and parental understanding becomes a live policy problem. A preschool sector that emphasizes play and holistic development feeding into a primary sector that emphasizes formal instruction creates precisely the discontinuity that transition research warns against. The authors’ finding that preschool teachers speak in terms of developmental precursors while primary teachers speak in terms of classroom functionality is, in effect, a description of that discontinuity rendered in the vocabulary of the educators themselves.

Methodologically, the study is candid about its scope. Twenty-one interviews in a single case cannot establish how widespread these patterns are, and the authors do not claim statistical generalizability. What qualitative designs of this kind offer instead is analytical depth: a documented account of how meaning is constructed, with enough detail for readers to judge its relevance to other contexts. The researchers followed established guidance on saturation in qualitative sampling and reported their analysis procedures transparently, and the work received ethics approval from Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University with informed consent from all participants. The interview data themselves are not publicly available, owing to the confidentiality of information about identifiable teachers, parents, and children, though the authors note the data are available upon reasonable request.

The conceptual payoff is the study’s central reframing: school readiness as a multi-actor, context-dependent transition capacity rather than a fixed developmental threshold. In practical terms, that means the question worth asking is no longer simply whether a child is ready for school, but whether the relationships surrounding that child, between home and classroom, between preschool and primary school, between what parents can see and what teachers need, are configured to carry the child across the transition. The authors suggest this relational and ecological perspective offers a more accurate account of how readiness is constructed across educational contexts than any single-informant checklist can provide. For a field long dominated by assessment instruments and readiness screenings, the message is quietly radical: readiness is not something a child has, but something a community does, and the adults who disagree about its definition may be the very people who need to start talking to each other.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder perspectives on school readiness during the transition from preschool to primary school

Article Title: School Readiness as a Relational Transition Capacity: A Comparative Study of Stakeholder Perspectives Across Educational Levels

Article References: Demirtaş, E. N., & Taneri, A. (2026). School Readiness as a Relational Transition Capacity: A Comparative Study of Stakeholder Perspectives Across Educational Levels. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02361-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02361-y

Keywords: school readiness, school transition, early childhood education, preschool, primary school, parental involvement, family-school relationships, self-regulation, social-emotional development, qualitative research, stakeholder perspectives, developmental psychology