The transition from preschool to primary school in early childhood education

1. Illustrative composite vignette: the first Monday of primary school

Illustrative composite vignette, constructed from patterns described in the literature reviewed; it is neither a field record nor an empirical datum of this study.

In a Mexican city that this article does not name, the first Monday of primary school begins on the previous Friday. The girl is about six years old and has not yet entered the classroom. On the first-grade desk there is already a readiness checklist: language, counting, following instructions, and autonomy, marked by someone the family does not know. Beside it, a one-page report assigns a color to the “entry level” and adds two lines of observation. It does not say who observed, or at what time a question may be asked. The preschool teacher who shared two school cycles with her —how she enters play, with whom she settles, which conflict she knows how to resolve— was not consulted. The first-grade teacher inherits papers, not a colleague.

On Monday the girl arrives with her mother. The room is set in rows: the play corner is not there, nor is the material that could be moved. On the board there is a stroke to be copied. She looks for that place and does not find it. The first hour is pencil work; play is absent. The teacher opens the report, reads the color, and does not find in that paper how this girl asks for help. The preschool teacher, in another school that this text also does not name, begins the cycle with another group. Between the two there was no visit.

At the door, the mother does not know what to ask. She would like to know whether anyone will speak with the preschool teacher, whether there will be any moment of play during the week, and how she will learn what her daughter understands and what frightens her. She does not know which question it is appropriate to put. She signs the list because she is told to, and she leaves without having asked. The other adult could not come, and there was no meeting. Between the two teachers there is no conversation. There is a file that arrived before the girl.

The vignette does not permit the claim that this occurred in a real school, nor an estimate of how many classrooms resemble it, nor an effect attributed to the list, nor a reading of the narration as an interview. It composes, within a single Monday, discontinuities that the studies describe separately and in other countries. Those five elements organize the discussion. They are not evidence.

2. Problem and state of the art: from readiness to relational transition

Two questions are often treated as if they were one. The first asks what the child brings on the day of entry. The second asks what is sustained among people when the level changes: who speaks with whom, what of play continues, what the family can ask, and what is heard of what children expect and fear. Individual readiness answers the first; relational transition, the second. Confusing them makes a score seem to close a process that recent frameworks in the corpus describe as multi-actor and longer than the first day.

A logic of trait and a logic of relation coexist in the corpus without merging. The first is present in objects of measurement at entry: the preliminary examination named by Macy et al. (2022), the profiling of Hannant and Guldberg (2026), the assessment whose implementation Holcomb et al. (2024) describe, and the scores that Perrigo et al. (2025) declare, already in the title, to be predictors of sixth grade in a population key. Several of these have no abstract here: they name the family of instruments, not a result. The second logic redefines readiness. Demirtaş and Taneri (2026) title it a relational capacity for transition and announce perspectives across levels. Without an abstract, that is an announced framework, not a finding: differences among actors are not reported.

Green et al. (2026) propose the step model of transition capital (Step Model of Transition Capital). What counts as “effective” is contextual; power imbalances appear where vulnerability is present, and the step also matters for families’ bond with the community. They apply the model, as a reflection, to four children of refugee background in Australia. The abstract enumerates neither steps nor trajectories: none are invented here. Capital names an unequal resource, not a score. Kurniati et al. (2025) read the step through critical pedagogy —dialogue, critical consciousness, and praxis. A finding of their review is that power, neglect of voices, readiness expectations, and inequitable practices marginalize disadvantaged children and families. Culturally responsive approaches are needed.

Degli Esposti and Cigala (2026) review children’s experience (23 articles, 2008–2025, two reviewers). Morawska et al. (2026) synthesize 61 parental studies and find a scarcity of interventions that carry evidence. Transition is no longer published only as a variable of the child or as an event. Wilders and Wood (2023) deny, with six children, that readiness is assessed at a single point. Yanık Özger (2024) uses three phases: preschool, summer, and primary school. López and Benner (2025) associate the challenges of the move into kindergarten with well-being across the elementary years. The inference is that a document from the day of entry is not the whole of support. The question, in PCC logic, fixes population (children in the transit, families, and teachers at both levels), concept (relational transition and readiness), and context (early childhood education and the first stage of schooling, Crossref articles from 2021 to 5 October 2026): what those studies describe, and what they do not authorize as a gate.

3. Method: PRISMA-lite review 2021–2026 and selection flow

A narrative review of bounded scope was conducted, PRISMA-lite: it uses the counting discipline of the flow but neither a public protocol, nor dual screening, nor a formal risk-of-bias assessment. There is no meta-analysis. Quasi-experiment, ethnography, profiles, reviews, psychometrics, and cohorts do not share a combinable outcome. Effects, correlations, and areas under the curve are not estimated. Each claim is an empirical finding from an abstract, a finding of a published review, a conceptual framework, an object declared by the title when there is no abstract, or a design inference of this article.

The search of 5 October 2026 used the Crossref REST API: 16 queries, a cap of 60 records, journal articles from 2021. It retrieved 960; 832 after deduplication; 319 after automatic eligibility by title (a term for transition, readiness, or continuity, plus a term for early childhood, preschool, or primary school; authors; year; secondary school, university, and adults excluded). Manual screening used title and abstract, when Crossref or OpenAlex provided them, and relevance to the axis. 24 remained: 16 with an abstract and 8 with title only.

What was included is the transit between early childhood education, preschool, kindergarten, or maternelle and primary school or entry kindergarten, or readiness, continuity, voices, families, collaboration, or instruments at that step. There is no cause-by-cause breakdown of exclusions between 319 and 24: the balance is reported. Eight sources are cited by title only: Meng et al. (2025), Burke et al. (2025), Beasley et al. (2023), Wang et al. (2026), Demirtaş and Taneri (2026), Schürer et al. (2026), Macy et al. (2022), and Perrigo et al. (2025). There was no independent dual screening and no risk-of-bias tool. Title and abstract were read, not the full text; part arrived through OpenAlex or Semantic Scholar. Luo and Yuan (2025) and Degli Esposti and Cigala (2026) are truncated, and the cut is not completed. “Significantly” or “more likely,” without a coefficient, is retained as a direction.

Method note: the corpus does not name a single cut. In several studies from the United States, kindergarten is the first year of elementary school and pre-K the year before; in Mexican usage, kínder is usually preschool, and primary school begins in first grade. The kindergarten of Slicker et al. (2021), Garber et al. (2023), Holcomb et al. (2024), Fyffe et al. (2024), and López and Benner (2025) does not coincide with the primary school of Luo and Yuan (2025), Tobin et al. (2022), Yanık Özger (2024), and Wilders and Wood (2023), the last of these from maternelle to Year 1 in an international school in Belgium. Meng et al. (2025) separate kindergarten teachers and primary teachers without fixing a country. Inference: carrying a United States entry assessment into Mexican first grade confuses two doors. The vignette is set in first grade so as not to pretend a study conducted in Mexico.

4. Children’s voices: belonging, play, and the fear of “not learning”

“Belonging” is not a scale in these studies. It is the integrative reading of this section —a synthesis inference— used to gather social concerns, connection with others, peer culture, and settings that welcome or exclude. More precisely, the corpus distinguishes two experiences that children can formulate: play that is withdrawn, and the fear of not being equal to a form of learning that no longer resembles play. Not every source that follows is a direct children’s voice.

Degli Esposti and Cigala (2026) include preschool or primary studies of the transit and expressly exclude disadvantaged contexts. Review finding: a complex picture, in which inclusive and supportive environments are essential. The abstract breaks off before the core features: they are not reconstructed, and this review does not use that work to speak of disadvantage. Wilders and Wood (2023), with six children and multimodal methods, in the move from maternelle to Year 1 in an international school in Belgium, find that the transition was lived as a passage from play to work and that the expectation of being ready was understood. The title condenses “if I play, I do not learn”; the abstract does not carry it as an identified quotation, and here it is framing, not verbatim. They argue that policy prioritizes performance, that the curriculum is schooled, and that readiness remains an attribute of the child. Six cases do not yield a prevalence. They do show another craft of time.

Luo and Yuan (2025) asked 41 children aged 5 to 6 in China —23 girls— with a mosaic approach. Empirical finding: readiness, for them, includes school supplies, subjects, interests and specialties, and habits. They coincide with adults on knowledge and rules, and add interests and strengths. Positive emotions: curiosity, expectation, achievement, and pleasure. Negative: academic load, pressure from the rules, and social concerns. The abstract announces two behavioral patterns and breaks off: they are not characterized. That load is the anchor, at this n, for the fear of not learning; no other clinical name is given to it. Yanık Özger (2024) documents that teachers did not create a supportive environment. The children informed themselves by observation and through older peers, with some parental support, and in peer culture partly resisted structured activities. The study reads that resistance —interpretive reproduction— as help for the transit. It is not stated how many interviews were with children. Peer agency appears where the adult did not prepare.

Schürer et al. (2026) title the perspectives of preschoolers in Australia and Denmark. Without an abstract there is neither a comparison nor a set of themes: only the object, children’s voice in two systems. Fyffe et al. (2024) do not interview the four children aged 5. Drawing on four mothers and three kindergarten teachers, and on visits during remote teaching, they describe those who enter in 2020–2021 after three or more years of play in a Reggio-inspired center as learners, explorers, communicators, and empathic. The authors suggest that this pedagogy prepared kindergarten. The country is not stated in the abstract. Kurniati et al. (2025) contribute the neglect of voices inside relations of power. The synthesis inference is that withdrawn play, academic load, and a peer who stands in for the adult are ways of living the transition, not a cell on a form that certifies it.

5. Families: expectations, culture, and connectivity with school

Morawska et al. (2026) find few evidence-based interventions for families. Of 61 studies, most were cross-sectional, qualitative, and of typical development; only a minority placed parental experience at the center. Six themes: emotions; the son’s or daughter’s readiness and adjustment; parental factors; positive aspects; practical matters; alliance and communication with the school. Review finding, in an ecological key: there is no homogeneous “involvement.” The abstract does not rank magnitudes.

Slicker et al. (2021) separate latent profiles in interviews from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten 2010–2011 (n = 12 670). Four profiles: high expectations and the smallest amount of home activities; high expectations and high activities; very high expectations and moderate activities; very high expectations and the greatest amount of activities. At entry, the fourth has the most advanced reading and mathematics; the authors call it the most favorable. The third surpasses the first and the second in both. There is no coefficient between the first and the second. Descriptive finding: expectation and activity do not always go together, and the highest profile at that cut joins very high expectation with much activity. It is not a causal effect of “involving more.”

Tobin et al. (2022), with five mothers in Ireland (Children’s School Lives), find positive connectivity, trust in the teachers, and a wish to take part, supported by regular communication and familiarity with the school. The n does not authorize the claim that every family trusts. Charlton et al. (2026) work with 12 Aboriginal parents in an urban community in Western Australia, through action research, group models, and yarning, co-facilitated by a community leader. Five domains are reported: practical barriers, social and cultural factors, relationships and communication, well-being, and early support. The finding includes food insecurity, cultural disconnection, difficult communication, and difficult access to assessments, alongside strengths in kinship and in the Aboriginal and Islander Education Officers. The title places in quotation marks a reluctance to send the children to school; the abstract does not attribute the phrase. It is framing, not a quotation verified here. For these families the transition is practical and cultural. A profile of the child registers neither food nor kinship.

Beasley et al. (2023) have no abstract. The title declares a qualitative study of the transition through the cultural lens of Mexican immigrant families: transition as cultural experience, not as a universal trait. It authorizes neither themes, nor quotations, nor a country of fieldwork. Green et al. (2026) illustrate unequal experiences with four children of refugee background in Australia. Design inference: family support is not an identical message or a signature. López and Benner (2025) define supports as school or classroom activities for children and families; the result is taken up in the next section. No abstract demonstrates a domestic readiness application.

6. Teachers across levels: pedagogical continuity and collaboration

Three titles without abstracts show that the field does not merge the two levels, and they do not say what each study found. Meng et al. (2025) compare readiness priorities and transition practices of kindergarten teachers and of primary teachers. Wang et al. (2026) announce primary voices on the continuous experience. Demirtaş and Taneri (2026) announce perspectives across levels and readiness as a relational capacity. A declared object, not a measured discrepancy. Citing them as proof that “they do not talk to one another” would be to cite beyond the text.

Garber et al. (2023), in the rural southeastern United States, bring together 59 pre-K teachers, 186 kindergarten teachers, and 387 children. Finding: kindergarten reported more practices than pre-K, and what was received varied by the students. Pre-K with more low-income families: more individual meetings, fewer visits and orientations. Kindergarten with a higher proportion of ethnic and racial minorities: more visits and more individual data. No coefficient and no mechanism. It is not a package: meeting, visit, orientation, and datum are not offered equally. Overall, little or no association with outcomes; the individual datum was associated with higher literacy at entry. The authors see it as promising, and as helping the step feel better. It is not a forecast.

Dinler and Cevher-Kalburan (2026) evaluate twelve online sessions, four weeks before the cycle, grounded, according to the abstract, in ecological systems theory. Quasi-experiment with a control: 40 preschool teachers and 152 children aged 48 to 72 months in southeastern Anatolia. At the close of the first semester, readiness and socio-emotional adjustment were significantly higher (an adapted scale and the SCBA-30); the diaries record a change in practice. The abstract does not describe visits to the other level. The title says transition to school and the endpoint is at preschool: it is neither resolved nor exported as collaboration across levels.

López and Benner (2025), with the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten 2011 (N = 13 390), define supports as school or classroom activities for children and families. The challenges —psychological adjustment— are associated immediately and in a sustained way with academic and socio-emotional outcomes. The mediation: high basic supports, fewer challenges and, by that path, higher achievement and better well-being. The moderation: the link between challenge and outcome does not change with the constellation of supports. No coefficient. What is “basic” is not itemized. Yanık Özger (2024) shows an adult setting that does not prepare; Fyffe et al. (2024), that kindergarten teachers can recognize strengths born of play in four cases. Inference: continuity is an act between two levels —visit, meeting, a datum talked through— and it may not occur.

7. Readiness instruments: what they measure and what they cannot sustain

Readiness instruments, when they are described, answer the question of a child’s development at a given moment. By their object, they do not answer the question of continuity between two schools. The argument about gates, dashboards, report generators, and home applications is a design inference: the corpus does not evaluate those artifacts.

Hannant and Guldberg (2026) evaluate an entry profiling: 58 dichotomous observations in seven domains —hearing, visual perception, internal senses and interoception, external senses, fine and gross coordination— with 51 educators and 391 children. They report face, ecological, and convergent validity, and inter-observer reliability, which they consider robust relative to standardized tests. The use the abstract defends is a map of strengths, timely support without external referral and, as a potential, fewer gaps and better identification of needs (they use the acronym SEND). The domains are the child’s, sensory and motor. They do not include collaboration across levels or family culture. The profile can orient resources and a conversation. It is not, by what it publishes, a rule for denying entry or a description of relational transition.

Holcomb et al. (2024), with mixed methods, study the kindergarten entry assessment in North Carolina. With no n in the abstract, and therefore no percentage: most felt prepared to administer it and most did not find the data useful. The interviews show a misunderstood purpose and frustration. Completing the protocol was not, for that group, finding a guide. Macy et al. (2022) announce a preliminary examination of a readiness assessment: without an abstract there is no result, and “preliminary” discourages a reading of definitive validation. Perrigo et al. (2025) declare kindergarten EDI scores as predictors of sixth-grade outcomes in the United States, in a population-health key. No magnitude here. Even if the full article reported one —which is not claimed— it would be a population question, not the Monday decision about one girl. Burke et al. (2025) announce authentic assessment and a multiyear comparison of family and teacher ratings: more than one perspective, not a cut-point. Whether they converged is not known.

They can describe development, orient supports in the school, and inform a conversation if someone gives them that use. Hannant and Guldberg (2026) illustrate the description; Holcomb et al. (2024), that the conversation does not arise from the datum alone. Design inference: they do not sustain deciding entry —no abstract fixes a threshold— nor replace the conversation between the preschool teacher and the first-grade teacher. The shared datum of Garber et al. (2023) was associated with literacy at entry, within a scant association of the set of practices: it is not a risk dashboard or a report without an interlocutor. They do not sustain the trajectory of a particular child. Perrigo et al. (2025) declare a population object, and this review does not attribute to it a precision it did not read.

The ceiling is categorical, not a trial the corpus does not contain. A screen-as-gate, a “risk of failure” dashboard from the entry score, an automatic report generator, or a home readiness application produces a document, an alert, or a task. They do not produce the visit, the meeting, the play that continues, or the family question. Nothing in the abstracts authorizes calling them support, and no area under the curve, correlation, or hit rate is invented for them. Whoever adopts them needs other evidence.

8. Discussion: transition as a situated relational practice

The vignette is not a Mexican finding. The list and the report repeat readiness as an attribute that Wilders and Wood (2023) see in the passage from play to work, and the datum that Holcomb et al. (2024) show applied without usefulness. Hannant and Guldberg (2026) defend another use of the profile: observing in order to support. If it is discussed, it approaches the datum of Garber et al. (2023); if it arrives alone, it falls into the frustration. It does not test instruments in Mexico.

The teacher who was not consulted is the discontinuity. Garber et al. (2023) see more practices, and unequal ones, on the kindergarten side. Dinler and Cevher-Kalburan (2026) move scores without describing the bridge. Yanık Özger (2024) documents an adult who does not prepare. Meng et al. (2025), Wang et al. (2026), and Demirtaş and Taneri (2026) make the two shores an object, not a team. Inference: continuity is telling one another what the list does not carry. Absent play is the core of Wilders and Wood (2023) and the antecedent of Fyffe et al. (2024). Luo and Yuan (2025) place interests inside being ready; the peer in Yanık Özger (2024) resists the task. Keeping play in first grade is a hypothesis, not a recipe from four cases.

The family without a question brings together, without merging them, Morawska et al. (2026), Tobin et al. (2022), Charlton et al. (2026), Beasley et al. (2023), Slicker et al. (2021), and Green et al. (2026). They are not transferred onto Mexican families. A signature answers neither emotion, nor logistics, nor culture, and the food insecurity of Charlton et al. (2026) does not fit inside a habits application. Beasley et al. (2023) do not describe schools in Mexico. Schürer et al. (2026) only announce the question put to preschoolers in two countries. Kurniati et al. (2025) locate expectations and exclusion in relations of power, not in an individual stumble.

The figure adds no data. It orders the contrast. The last column and the criteria that follow are design hypotheses, not a validated package or a list for punishing a teacher.

1. There is more support when information about a girl or a boy reaches a conversation between teachers at both levels than when it arrives only as a list or as a color.
2. There is more support when the time of the transition includes the close of preschool, the break, and the first weeks, rather than a single Monday of measurement.
3. There is more support when some form of play or of representation continues in first grade, as against a cut that children can read as the end of play.
4. There is more support when the family can ask a question and when the school recognizes practical barriers and culture, not only when a form is signed.
5. There is more support when what children expect and fear is heard, by means within their reach, instead of being inferred entirely from an adult scale.

No hypothesis was tested in the 24 studies together. They can fail: Tobin et al. (2022) show trust already achieved, and López and Benner (2025) show that basic supports do not cancel the link between challenge and outcome. For Mexico, the inference —without regulations or figures absent from the sources— is different. Where preschool is expected to be universal and there is talk of articulating it with primary school, the question is not which score opens a door that this arrangement does not condition on a screen, but what continuity there is between the last cycle and the first weeks. Transferring other countries serves so as not to import the gate, not so as to say that classrooms are already the composite Monday.

9. Limitations

The corpus is from a single database, the Crossref REST API, with journal articles from 2021 and a cut-off on 5 October 2026. Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, and regional indexes with broad coverage in Spanish were not consulted. Language bias is structural: almost all the journals on the list publish in English, although the sites include Anatolia, China, Ireland, Belgium, Australia, and the United States. By construction, much Latin American research not registered in the flow remains outside. The Mexican inference is weak on purpose. Screening was neither dual nor independent, there was no public protocol, and no formal risk-of-bias tool was applied. Work used titles and abstracts; eight included items had no abstract and two abstracts are truncated. Secondary deposits may diverge from the publisher’s abstract.

Slicker et al. (2021) and López and Benner (2025) are not combined: related cohorts, different questions and different n. Kindergarten, pre-K, preschool, maternelle, Year 1, and first grade are not the same object. Degli Esposti and Cigala (2026) excluded disadvantage; their complex picture does not represent it in reverse. The vignette adds no evidence. Dinler and Cevher-Kalburan (2026) are not a randomized trial of collaboration between schools; Slicker et al. (2021) are descriptive; Yanık Özger (2024) and Wilders and Wood (2023) do not estimate prevalences; Hannant and Guldberg (2026) do not study continuity across levels. The ceiling on screens, dashboards, generators, and applications is a category, not quantified harm: a reason not to call support what this search did not find as mediation.

10. Conclusions

The PCC question receives a divided answer. Children’s experience moves between the end of play, academic load, and curiosity, with peer agency when the adult does not prepare; the scoping review that calls for inclusive environments left disadvantage out. Families arrive with emotion, alliance, barriers, culture, and distinct combinations of expectation and activity. Among teachers, collaboration is the object of several titles and an unequal set of practices; training can move scores without documenting the bridge; basic supports are associated with fewer challenges and, by that route, with better well-being, without cancelling the link between challenge and outcome.

On the instruments, what can be defended is narrower than the gate: to describe and to orient support, not to certify the Monday, not to replace the two teachers, and not to predict a child with a precision this text did not read. The screen as a door, the risk dashboard, the automatic report, and the home application stay outside because they are not the relational act that the rest of the corpus is beginning to describe, not because their failure has been measured. Support, as an unvalidated hypothesis, is mediation and continuity. A list put on display is not the accompanied step, and a color that has been read is not the girl the preschool teacher knew. The Monday of the vignette remains a composition. The corpus distinction is not a composition: measuring at the door does not sustain, among people, the change of school.

NEXTECH.IA Editorial Lab / Ingeniero Mitre

References

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