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“The period during the early years is the most fascinating in terms of brain development,” says Sam Wass, professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience and director of the Institute for the Science of Early Years and Youth at the University of East London.

“The total number of neurons and connections that we have in our brains increases over the course of the first years of life,” he explains, “peaking somewhere between the ages of 2 and 5, and then starting to decline.”

In addition, he argues, we are “at our most powerful” in terms of “our raw learning capacity” around Reception age.

However, harnessing that power is not easy. Younger children may have more capacity to learn, but they also get overwhelmed more easily and are slower to process information, Wass explains.

So how can schools and early years settings hit the sweet spot of learning for the youngest pupils? ����Vlog sat down with Wass to find out.

You describe the period of 2 to 5 years old as a time when we have this peak number of connections in the brain. Is this the age, then, when we have the greatest capacity to learn?

Sam Wass: In some ways, yes. We know that the number of synapses (neuronal connections) peaks somewhere between 2 and 5 years old, depending on where exactly in the brain you look. It is during this period that children are incredibly good at spotting statistical patterns in complex input. This is crucial for early language learning, for example, which is all about spotting regularities and patterns in speech.

But it’s also crucial for learning how to convert the small, flat patterns of light that hit our retina into a 3D model of the world that allows us to move about; for learning how to coordinate the 60 to 70 muscles needed to reach out and pick up an object in front of us; and for all other forms of learning, too.

In many ways, these early forms of learning, which are about first beginning to extract meaning by spotting patterns in the world, are much harder and more complex than the phonics and number learning we do later when we start school.

Does this mean that younger brains learn in a different way to older brains?

Yes, in lots of ways. These differences determine both where younger brains surpass adults in raw learning, and also what they struggle with most.

Our brains are prediction machines. With every single word that you see as you read this, your brain is generating a guess for what word you’re going to read next. We learn by checking how our predictions match up with what we actually experience. Every time we shift our eyes, we guess what we’re going to see before we look; every time we bite into something, we guess what it’s going to taste like in advance; and so on.

Children’s brains don’t have so much experience on which to make these predictions - so this process of making predictions happens very differently.

In some ways, this helps. For example, young children’s brains can’t predict so well what they’re going to see next - so they find it easier to spot unexpected or surprising patterns. Adult brains see what we expect to see, which can make it harder to spot something if we’re not expecting to see it.

But in other ways, this lack of prior knowledge means that younger brains are less efficient at processing sights and sounds around them - and it means that they get overwhelmed more easily.

Generating predictions for what someone is going to say next is the most efficient way for our brains to process complex information from our environments. It’s easier to tune in to things if we can anticipate what’s coming in advance. If we can’t do that so well, then that makes our brains less efficient, so we need slower, more predictable content.

What can help?

Repetition is useful. One of my big heroes is Anne Wood, the TV producer who designed Teletubbies and In the Night Garden, who has amazing insights into how children’s brains process sights and sounds differently.

In Teletubbies - and this was 25 or 30 years ago - Po’s TV screen would light up on her tummy and they’d go into a two-minute video clip. It would come back to the Teletubbies again and they’d say, “Again! Again!”, and then the clip would repeat.

‘First time around, they don’t extract as much meaning. Second time around, they find it easier to pay attention’

For adults, this is aversive. The first time we watch something, our brains use their prior knowledge - of the language they’ve heard and similar scenes that they’ve seen before - to predict what we’re going to see and hear next. So we extract all the meaning the first time around.

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Children’s brains don’t have that prior knowledge. So the first time around, they don’t extract as much meaning. For them to make a prediction, it helps if it’s something they’ve watched before. Second time around, they make better predictions, and - as a consequence - find it easier to pay attention.

How else is information processing different between young children and adults?

Another big difference is to do with brain rhythms.

In my lab, we use a technique called electroencephalography to measure the brain’s naturally occurring brain rhythms.

What we’re measuring is the weak electrical activity generated when a message passes across a synapse (the connection between two neurons in the brain). When you measure a whole brain at once, you get summed patterns of synchronous firing across millions of neurons.

From that we know that our brains are fundamentally rhythmic.

Adult brains show strong rhythmic firing - strongest at about seven cycles per second.

Children’s brains are rhythmic, too - but the rhythms are slower, weaker and more irregular. The strongest cycle you’d get in a four-year-old would be more like four to five cycles per second.

That’s the case with everything: their heart rates are more irregular, their breathing patterns are more irregular and their sleep cycles are more irregular.

All these internal rhythms are messier in children.

How does this affect how we teach young children?

When we pay attention, our brain rhythms “tune in” to the rhythms in the speech that we’re paying attention to. Children, with naturally messy brain rhythms, find it easier to tune in to content with exaggerated rhythmicity. It’s why lots of children’s books - like We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen or The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson - use rhythm and rhyme.

But teachers should also think of rhythms in terms of how they move from one piece of content to another.

For example, in phonics you naturally teach in a cycle. You introduce a new sound. You say: “What does it look like? What does it sound like? Let’s give an example of a word. Let’s try to write it. Let’s try to write it embedded in a word.” And you can go through this exact same sequence for every new speech sound that you introduce.

This is useful because it generates rhythms and repetition - but it’s not about repeating exactly the same content. It helps children to learn what’s coming in advance, aiding focus and retention.

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If I generate a strong, stable, very predictable rhythm, it’s easier for a brain to lock in. So when the new content comes, the child is tuned into it.

Should this apply more broadly to behaviour management, pastoral support and timetabling?

Rhythms and predictability are really important at larger time-scales, too.

In my group’s research, we take day-long physiological recordings from children in schools and nurseries, and we see exactly the same process of predictions and anticipation that I’ve been talking about at the daily scale.

In the 10 to 15 minutes before a break, for example, a child’s body is already starting to anticipate the break in advance. Their heart rate increases, their systolic blood pressure increases, their muscle tone changes. These anticipatory changes help to manage the transition because they’ve got themselves into the right state before the transition has occurred.

It’s just the same as bedtime routines, which allow a child’s body to start preparing for the transition to sleep in advance.

The clearer and more predictable a daily routine is from a child’s perspective, the better they are able to make these sorts of anticipatory changes. This can help with other types of transition, too - from choosing time to circle time, from outdoor time to indoor time, and so on.

There’s always more scope for teachers to think about the ways they can bring predictability, repetition and rhythms into the structure of the day. This can be particularly useful for managing transitions that a child might struggle with - such as arriving “wired” from home and settling into the day, or managing the transition from high-energy breaktime back into quiet, focused learning.

You mentioned pace earlier, specifically slower-paced learning. Could you expand on that?

Children’s overconnected brains take longer to process sights and sounds than adult brains do. For example, adult brains can see a frame change happening up to about 10 frame changes per second. For an 18-month-old, it’s one frame per second, and for a four-year-old, it’s about three frames per second.

‘Hyper-articulating emotional communication helps young children to understand emotions’

A lot of videos - including ones that teachers use in lessons - are really fast-paced. Very young children will just see those as a blur. Their brains won’t be able to make out the detail.

Similarly, a lot of facial expressions and gestures naturally happen really fast. It’s important to slow these down when you can. It feels really stupid to hold a smile for three seconds because that’s not what we do as adults. But everything needs to be slowed down for the early years.

Is this hard for adults to achieve?

There is evidence that, thanks to urbanisation and, particularly, technology, adults are speeding up over time. We live fast-paced lives nowadays.

But for young children, who haven’t had so much experience with technology, this speeding-up process hasn’t happened yet. So in many ways, the gap between an adult and a young child in terms of pacing is larger nowadays than it was before adults started using screens - say, 100 years ago.

So while adults might understand, intellectually, that a four-year-old brain is much slower than their adult brain, the effort required to force yourself to act that slowly is greater now than it was 100 years ago.

Is there anything practical that teachers can do to help them overcome that gap?

It’s worth thinking about clarity - things like hyper-articulating our mouth movements as we speak, as actors do on stage. All teachers should do it because it makes speech more intelligible in a noisy setting. And if it’s easier to make sense of, then it’s easier to extract meaning and make predictions.

We can also think about hyper-articulating our emotional communication. On good early years TV - like In the Night Garden - when people are happy to see each other, they don’t just give a quick smile. They clap their hands and they jump for joy. Hyper-articulating emotional communication helps young children to understand emotions, in the same way that hyper-articulated mouth movements help them to understand speech.

What we really ought to do is what [the CBeebies TV character] Mr Tumble does. He’s great at doing these big, exaggerated emotional expressions, the same as you get on a cartoon character’s face.

Anything that makes content extra clear helps because it makes it more predictable. And for children who don’t have so much prior experience as adults do, you want to make yourself more predictable.

Also, pairing multiple modalities is great - so using vision, hearing, touch, all the senses.

It can work in every subject. For example, in maths it helps to give children something physical to explore, like a number box.

Teaching in songs is a great idea because songs set up a rhythm, make you exaggerate your mouth movements, and you can pair actions, too.

So your advice to EYFS teachers is to slow down, exaggerate and repeat?

Yes, don’t feel this pressure to always be doing something new.

Lots of people still have this idea of stimulating the young brain - that the more stimulation we give to a child, the faster their brain will develop. Every day has to be different, and they want parents to see that when they’re picking their children up or via the photos they post on the school app.

In fact, from a neuroscientist’s perspective, the more we understand about how brains learn, the more we understand that less content repeated more times equals better learning.

So rather than feeling a lot of pressure to do something new every day, teachers should appreciate that what children need is to be doing exactly the same thing, preferably with exactly the same language and exactly the same learning resources, at exactly the same time each day.

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