Two pieces published this week come at the same underlying problem from opposite ends of the same field.
The first is from Kathryn Scott and Hannah Cohen at Big Change, in response to Lucy Powell, the UK Secretary of State for Education, who has been talking about reforming English schools. Their argument, which I share, is that reform should be centred on the young people it exists to serve, and that the way to build a school system worth having is to look to the leaders, both the young people themselves and the practitioners, who are already showing what such a system can look like. They cite Big Education, Voice 21, Gesher School, Bounce Forward, and a wider community that Big Change has been backing for years, as evidence of what learning can look like when it is built around purpose, agency, relationships, and growth rather than around the binary of academic success or wellbeing.
The second is from Salzburg Global, by Sreehari Ravindranath, Sarah Khan, Tabassum Amina, Bhawna Shrestha, and Manjula Dissanayake, and grew out of a panel that Dream a Dream convened during gLOCAL Evaluation Week 2026, drawing on perspectives from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Their argument is that social and emotional learning arrived late to a conversation that South Asian societies had been having for generations, and that the frameworks brought in from elsewhere had never really been designed to see the traditions of care, belonging, and collective well-being that were already there.
It is a problem I keep coming back to in different forms.
Decades of evidence, institutions built without it
Most of what we now know about the first years of a child's life is not new. Attachment theory has been on the record since the 1950s, the Adverse Childhood Experiences study was published by Felitti and Anda in 1998, James Heckman was making the economic case for investing in the earliest years more than twenty years ago and won a Nobel doing it, and the neuroscience of early brain development has been consolidating for a generation. The Nurturing Care Framework, produced jointly by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the World Bank, was formalised in 2018. Some of the science is more recent, and new evidence continues to arrive, but the substance of what we know has been on ministers' desks for decades, available to anyone who wanted to act on it, and almost none of it has been used to build the institutions a child now passes through.
The architecture that surrounds a child, from compulsory schooling and the administrative separation of maternal and child health through to welfare, labour law, parental leave, urban planning, and the statutory age at which formal learning begins, was mostly designed before we understood the period before school, and some of it has been built or reformed since the evidence arrived and simply carried on as if it had not. And so every reform cycle, in every country I know of, asks the same narrower question, which is how to make the existing machine run a little better. Curriculum, assessment, accountability, inspection, and teacher supply are not bad questions on their own. They are simply questions about a machine whose purpose was fixed before anyone thought to check whether the machine was the right one for the job.
The one period without a system at all
The first 1,001 days, from pregnancy to age two, are the period where all of this shows up most starkly, because they are the one part of a child's life with no system to reform. Education has one and health has one, but the years in between belong to neither and end up spread across health, social protection, local government, and a patchwork of private and voluntary provision, with no minister answerable for the whole, no protected budget, no measurement architecture that anyone owns, and no design intent anywhere in the system that the two sides of the gap should ever meet in the middle.
I wrote earlier this year about why this points towards a Ministry for Childhood in every country, and that earlier piece was a consequence of what I am setting out here rather than a repeat of it. What happens when no-one owns the ground between health and education is that the ground disappears, and with it the children who are living on it.
A global argument, not just a UK one
This gets sharper the further outside the UK you go, because much of the world inherited its education and health architecture through colonial transplant. The countries with the least room to manoeuvre inherited the most rigid versions, and the reform advice they still receive, from consultants, donors, and multilaterals alike, is largely about improving delivery inside those inherited structures rather than asking what should be delivered in the first place. The instruments were not designed for the children who now use them, nor by the people who now teach them, and the standard against which those children are judged is still the one that was built somewhere else, at another time, for another purpose entirely.
When the architecture and the evidence conflict, we adjust the child
The pattern this produces, everywhere I have seen it, is a version of the same move. When what the system is trying to measure and what is actually happening disagree, it is the reality that gets marked down as the deficit rather than the instrument, and the reality being marked down is nearly always the individual person, because the person is what every system knows how to see.
School readiness is a good place to start. UNICEF's own School Readiness: A Conceptual Framework, authored by Pia Rebello Britto and published in April 2012, defined readiness across three dimensions rather than one: children's readiness for school, schools' readiness for children, and families' and communities' readiness for school. Fourteen years on, systems everywhere have implemented one dimension out of the three, and it is the one that measures the child. Governments count how many children reach a literacy or numeracy threshold before they turn five, and I know of almost no country that has a comparable instrument for asking whether the schools those children walk into were themselves ready. My problem is not with the concept of school readiness, but with the two thirds of the framework that were quietly set aside.
The same move is visible in most of the debates you can name. Caregivers are told to talk more to their infants, without anyone asking whether they have housing, or income, or a moment of respite. Screen time advice is issued to parents, rather than to the companies whose products the parents cannot switch off. The play debate asks whether children are playing enough, rather than whether their streets, playgrounds, and schools have been designed to let them. And the workforce that carries the most consequential years of human development, the early years educators, the nursery staff, and the keyworkers, is disproportionately made up of women at the bottom of the wage distribution, and the reform response has been, largely, to demand more of them rather than to change the terms on which they work. Every one of these is the same move, in which the person is asked to change what they cannot change while the structure around them is left alone.
What Kathryn and Hannah make visible
Kathryn and Hannah's whole argument turns on naming the young people and the practitioners who are already showing what a school system built around every young person can look like, and the list they point at is a strong one. Big Education, Voice 21, Gesher School, Bounce Forward, and the wider community Big Change has been backing for years are exactly where any government serious about school reform should be looking. What the strength of that list also makes visible, if you follow it back through a child's life, is that no equivalent list exists for the years before the school gate, because the ecosystem that would produce one has never really been built.
The parallel from South Asia
The Salzburg piece points at a different edge of the same absence. The authors set out to map local conceptions of social and emotional competency in the countries they work in, and kept running into concepts that the available international frameworks could not hold. Their conclusion was not that the local understandings were incomplete, but that the frameworks had never been designed to see them in the first place, and what school readiness does to four-year-olds, they are saying, measurement frameworks can do to entire traditions of knowledge.
"Evaluation shapes visibility," they write. What is easiest to measure ends up being treated as what matters most, and what matters most attracts the money, the attention, and the legitimacy. Which is, in the end, why the first 1,001 days are underfunded almost everywhere: not because the evidence is missing, but because the period is the hardest thing in a child's life to put on a dashboard, and the architecture only funds what it can see. Attachment does not sit on a scorecard, responsive caregiving does not appear in any inspection framework I have come across, and emotional safety is not a line item in any budget I have ever seen. Play, for exactly the same reason, keeps getting cut when the money gets tight, because most of its value lives outside the instruments the funders are using.
The Salzburg authors also describe the familiar pattern of frameworks generated in a small number of centres and exported outwards for adaptation, with countries of the Global South cast as sites of implementation rather than as sources of theory in their own right. What I have been saying about the age of the architecture, and what they say about the direction of the flow, are one and the same problem, seen from two different sides.
A first attempt at ownership: the Babies Bill
In the UK right now, the first serious attempt I know of to build this kind of ownership into law is going through Parliament. On 17 June, Sir Desmond Swayne MP introduced the Infants, Parents and Carers Bill, known as the Babies Bill, into the House of Commons, and its Second Reading is scheduled for Friday 4 September. The Bill is being backed by the 1001 Critical Days Foundation, of which I am a trustee.
The Bill does not set out to create a new system, but to put the system that already exists across the 1,001 days on a statutory footing. Maternity, health visiting, parenting support, infant feeding, perinatal mental health, parent-infant relationships, safeguarding, and support for children with special educational needs and disabilities are, at the moment, held together only by non-statutory government guidance covering April 2026 to March 2029, which means that under a change of government, or a change of chancellor's priorities, any or all of it can quietly disappear. The Bill would give the whole set of provisions a statutory foundation, and would require an annual report to Parliament on what is being provided and what difference it is making.
A statutory floor and an accountability duty may sound like a small thing, but it is the thing this piece has been arguing for, and it does two things at once. It says, in the language legislation uses, that the first 1,001 days are the country's business rather than a policy document with a shelf life shorter than a spending review, and it gives Parliament the responsibility of asking, every year, whether the state is doing what it said it would. This is not a Ministry for Childhood, nor a rebuild of anything, but it is, as far as I know, the first serious attempt in a major legislature to hold the ground between health and education in law rather than in policy, and it is a mechanism that any other country could adapt. The framing of the Bill is very British, and does not need to travel. The mechanism does.
Universal science, local response
There is a real challenge here, and I want to name it rather than avoid it. If the case is that we should rebuild systems around what we now know about the first 1,001 days, and if the Salzburg piece is right that the trouble with global education discourse is that frameworks generated in one place travel outwards as the answer, then a global argument about early childhood is at risk of doing exactly what it is trying to criticise.
The Salzburg authors point at the resolution themselves. The neurobiological evidence about the first years of life is universal, or as close to universal as human biology gets, but the response to that evidence cannot be universal, and should not try to be. The traditions of collective responsibility, intergenerational learning, and community care that the authors describe are not local adaptations of a global model, they are alternative accounts of human development in their own right, and the systems most likely to hold the first 1,001 days properly are, in my experience, often the ones that were not designed by transplant to begin with.
So global reform in this space cannot honestly propose a single answer. What it can propose is a shared refusal to accept that the child is always the deficit in the arithmetic, when the framework has never once asked the question of the institution.
The substantive material for that is already there. The Nurturing Care Framework sets out most of what a country would need, and General Comment No. 7 of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 2005, argues explicitly against treating young children as adults-in-waiting rather than as rights holders now. Both have been sitting on the shelf, largely unused, for longer than most of the current reform cycles have even been running, and neither is embedded in the machinery of any country's reform agenda in the way that Sustainable Development Goal 4 has been embedded for schooling. The evidence for both is more than there, but the ground they cover has no ministry, no institution, and no dashboard that anyone is willing to hold.
Reform will not fix this by trying harder inside the frame that already exists. It will only fix it by asking a different question, not how to make the machine run better, but whether the machine was ever built for the job in the first place.