When Ofsted released its research review into best practice in early years teaching near the start of this academic year, there was one area of focus that stood out: the importance of executive functions.

What is executive function?

Executive functions are a set of skills that help us stop inappropriate actions and ignore distractions (“inhibition”); process and hold information in memory (“working memory”); and shift flexibly across different tasks or goals (“cognitive flexibility”).

In early years environments, asking children to complete even simple tasks, such as tidying up toys after play time, requires these skills: young children must inhibit the desire to continue playing, remember instructions and hold them in mind, shifting away to a new activity.

According to Ofsted, “well-developed executive function leads to better educational attainment as well as a healthier life”.

Teachers should therefore “consider what we know about executive function, how children’s executive function develops and what early education can add to that development”, Ofsted explains.

In practice, this means teachers will need to revisit information periodically with their classes, actively encourage children to engage in activities that require executive function skills, and “continually and incrementally” increase the demands being placed on those skills.

But is that the whole picture of what the research tells us about the role of executive functions in the early years?

We think there is more that teachers need to understand. Here are four key points to focus on:

1. Early years executive functions change rapidly

Executive functions develop rapidly and dramatically over the early years, with emerging evidence suggesting that they build on simple attention skills, such as regulating and directing attention (Hendry et al, 2016). When observing these skills in action, you might see a young child move rapidly from being able to pay little attention to showing a remarkable degree of focus.

Many early years activities, even really “fun” ones, require executive functions. For example, when playing musical statues, one needs to inhibit the temptation to continue dancing after the music stops.

Children’s ability to do this can change rapidly as they develop, even without specific support for executive function development.

This development can also be variable. Children will develop at different rates and an individual child may demonstrate different levels of executive function skills in different situations.

All of this has implications for how we interpret and apply research into executive functions. Given the rapid development of these skills in early childhood, implications for practice should be drawn from research with this age group rather than inferred from research with older children and adults.

In the early years, child-led or guided-play pedagogy can provide opportunities for children to practise their executive function skills that may not be available in teacher-led approaches more commonly used with older age groups.

2. Executive functions work in concert

Executive functions skills should not be thought of in isolation; they work in concert.

Let’s take maths as an example. All mathematical activities pose executive demands. Keeping information in mind and working out what to do with that information (“working memory”) is highly relevant to early maths learning. For example, when counting a set of items, children need to keep track of the count sequence and update this for each additional item.

“Inhibition” is also important in early maths. When thinking about quantities, children often need to ignore irrelevant information: for example, “four mice” is a bigger number than “one elephant”. “Cognitive flexibility” is also required when shifting between representations, for example, objects and digits.

These executive skills come together across most early years maths tasks. For example, to count a number of objects accurately, a child must focus on one-to-one correspondence, ignore distracting or irrelevant features of those objects, and remember where they got to in the counting sequence.

As activities become more complex, the executive challenge increases, as new knowledge and skills build on earlier understanding. For example, even when children are familiar with counting objects, reporting their cardinal value (how many objects a number refers to) can be difficult, especially when objects are mixed in their identity or extend to quantities that cannot be easily subitised (the act of looking at small numbers of objects and being able to perceive how many there are without having to count them).

Comparing different amounts of objects can also be challenging, as one might need to inhibit irrelevant dimensions of objects, such as their size, to focus on number: for example, when reporting that three apples are more than one watermelon.

3. Executive functions are best understood in context

Given the executive contributions to many early maths skills, it is not surprising that multiple studies have reported that preschoolers with the strongest executive functions skills also have the strongest concurrent and future mathematical skills, and improve in their maths to a greater degree than equally young children with lower executive skills.

Interestingly, some studies also report that the converse is true, with strong early mathematics associated with greater growth in executive skills over time, although here the findings are more mixed.

It’s safe to say, though, that there is strong evidence for an interplay between executive functions and mathematical learning in the early years, and that it is most helpful for teachers to think of executive functions in context - as directly applied to particular mathematical tasks they would like their children to engage with - rather than something that is wholly separable and separate from these skills.

Indeed, growing evidence from the US, and preliminary evidence in the UK, suggests that integrating executive functions and mathematics learning, rather than thinking of them as separate, is the best way to maximise benefits for children’s early mathematics.

If we run an intervention that focuses only on improving executive function skills, for example, we can’t expect this to lead to improvements in maths performance, just because the two things are linked. For executive functions improvement to really matter to early mathematical learning, such interventions must be combined with carefully chosen mathematical content.

4. Executive function skills are difficult to measure

Given that the correlations between early mathematics and executive functions are so robust, some have questioned whether it would make sense to try to measure executive functions in the early years.

Unfortunately, isolated executive functions assessments can be unreliable or misleading. Such assessments suffer from what is called “the task impurity problem”; they draw on several different skills - such as developing language comprehension, motor or other cognitive skills - which means it is not easy to measure just one type of skill in isolation.

So, rather than wasting time and energy trying to measure executive functions, it would perhaps be more useful to train teachers to recognise the executive demands of the tasks they ask children to complete, and to adapt those tasks more effectively.

For example, in maths, if a child struggles to remember instructions in counting activities, teachers could break them down into more manageable chunks, as this reduces demands on working memory.

For children who are very familiar with mathematical concepts, on the other hand, teachers could gradually introduce increasing levels of executive challenge (by changing the rules of the task or increasing the amount a student has to remember) to facilitate deeper engagement with, and learning of, the material.

Ultimately, Ofsted was right to draw attention to the value of learning more about executive functions. However, there are important implications of research on the development of executive functions that shouldn’t be forgotten when it comes to applying that research in the early years classroom.

Lucy Cragg is an associate professor at the University of Nottingham, Camilla Gilmore is professor of mathematical cognition at Loughborough University, and Gaia Scerif is professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford