Developmental pace is the rate at which a person arrives — at a skill, a concept, a capacity — and it varies enormously between people, and within one person across different domains.
Pace is ordinary variation. School treats it as a fixed background condition: children are grouped by birth date, taught the same content at the same time, and marked on the distance between where they are and where the timetable says they should be. That distance gets recorded against the child.
“Behind” is information about the ruler, not about the learner.
The machinery assumes a shared pace
Ironically, however, the current machinery of schooling and the judgements that underpin it are often deeply inconsistent with research evidence and detrimental to some students’ learning. The curriculum assumption that all students in a grade are about equally ready for the same learning is not supported by evidence. Assessing all students against the same learning expectations regardless of where they are in their learning and assigning A to E grades flies in the face of what is known from research about how to engage and motivate students and build self-confidence as learners. There is an urgent need for evidence-based reform of the machinery of schooling.
— Geoff Masters, The Children We Leave Behind: How School Could Be Done Differently (Routledge, 2026), p. 194
The assumption is not a finding. It has been checked against the research, and the evidence does not support it. A grade is a cohort of children born inside the same twelve months — nothing in that sorting ever asked where any of them had reached.
In many ways, what this book calls for is a paradigm shift: a change in how we think about learning at school. Currently, all students of the same age are taught the same body of content at the same time and are assessed on how much of it they can demonstrate. The alternative involves seeing learning as long-term growth, recognising that students are at widely different stages in this growth, and meeting individuals where they are.
— Geoff Masters, The Children We Leave Behind, p. 194
The same age is not the same stage
The principle is already written into statutory guidance — it just is not allowed to reach very far. Helen Edgar makes that argument directly, and it is worth reading in her words rather than ours:
The EYFS principle states, ‘that children are unique and “constantly learning…capable, confident and self-assured”‘ and that they ‘develop and learn at different rates’ (DfE 2021). This is not restricted to Early Years, we need these main principles rolling out further across primary and into secondary settings.
— Helen Edgar, Education Crisis – Neurodiversity Affirming Teacher Training Needed, Autistic Realms
When children’s development deviates from what is considered normal, they are often viewed through a deficit lens of problems, impairments, and delays.
— Helen Edgar, Education Crisis – Neurodiversity Affirming Teacher Training Needed, Autistic Realms
A system can hold “children develop at different rates” as a founding principle and still run entirely on age. Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is where children fall.
Pace is not one number
Developmental pace is not a single dial set slow or fast for a whole person. It is uneven by domain — which is what a spiky profile describes.
One of the primary things I wish people knew about autism is that autistic people tend to have ‘spiky skills profiles:’ we are good at some things, bad at other things, and the difference between the two tends to be much greater than it is for most other people.
— Autistic Skill Sets: A Spiky Profile of Peaks and Troughs, NeuroClastic
So a single label — ahead, behind, at grade level — is a summary of a shape it cannot represent. It averages the peaks and the troughs into one number and then treats that number as the child.
There are related pace concepts worth keeping distinct. Processing time is the time a bodymind needs to take something in and respond. Monotropic time is what happens to time inside a flow state. Developmental pace is the longer arc: when a capacity arrives at all.
“Better get used to it” has to ignore this
The most common argument for holding everyone to one timetable is that the world will hold them to one later. Alfie Kohn named that argument BGUTI — Better Get Used To It — and pointed out what it costs:
Almost by definition, the BGUTI defense ignores developmental differences.
— Alfie Kohn, Getting Hit on the Head Lessons, Education Week, 2005
It has to ignore them. The argument treats the timetable as fixed and the child as the variable, so it cannot survive noticing that children arrive at different rates. And the premise underneath it does not hold either:
But people don’t really get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young. In fact, it is experience with success and unconditional acceptance that help one to deal constructively with later deprivation.
— Alfie Kohn, Getting Hit on the Head Lessons
This does its worst work under behaviorism, because a model that watches only compliance cannot represent a child who needs longer — so needing longer reads as refusing.
Bend the clock, not the child
Crip time is the disability-community answer to the same question, and it is not simply “more time.”
Crip time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of “how long things take” are based on very particular minds and bodies. Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.
— Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip
Slow pedagogy arrives at the same place from early years practice, and gives us the sharpest phrase for what we want instead of a timetable:
‘A key advantage of the wayfaring metaphor is that it allows for children to take other roads on their developmental journeys, and to follow their own (emergent rather than inbuilt) timetable‘ (Gallacher In Press).
— Gallacher, quoted in Alison Clark, Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child
Emergent rather than inbuilt. A pace is not a property a child was issued at birth and can be measured against. It emerges from a person meeting an environment — which means the environment is half of it, and the half we can actually change.
What changes if you take pace seriously
The reform is not lower standards or a softer mood. It is a change in what assessment is for.
Reform involves changing the purpose of assessment. Rather than being designed to determine how well students meet grade expectations, assessments are designed to establish and understand the stages that individuals have reached in an area of learning to support their further learning and monitor their growth over time. This changed purpose begins with, and responds to, recognition that students in the same grade are at very different points in their development.
— Geoff Masters, The Children We Leave Behind, p. 153
…consider the idea introduced in Chapter 9 of a sequence of curriculum levels not tied to age or grade but through which every student advances at their own pace. Because there is no requirement that every student be taught the same grade curriculum at the same time, the primary purpose of assessment is no longer to compare every student’s performance with grade-level expectations. Instead, the purpose initially might be to decide the level an individual has reached in a subject.
— Geoff Masters, The Children We Leave Behind, p. 153
Multiage grouping is one long-standing way of building this into a room rather than bolting it on:
Children are not labeled according to their ability, and children learn at their own rate.
— Association for Childhood Education International, quoted in Why do we group students by manufacture date?, User Generated Education
We lose so much when we divide students by age… We lose peer mentoring, we lose the aspirations to be “like the big kids,” we lose the ability of younger kids to become leaders, and we lose the ability to let kids grow at their own rate.
— Ira Socol, The Multiage Magic
In practice this means asking a different question in the room. Not how far is this child from the benchmark, but what can they do now, and what comes next — and then teaching from there.
What developmental pace is not
An argument against age-graded expectations sits one careless line away from reading as an argument for lower ones. It is not that. To be explicit:
- It is not “slower is better.” Pace is not a virtue and speed is not a vice. A pace is survivable or it isn’t, and the environment decides.
- It is not a reason to withhold or delay support. “They’ll get there” is how a child waits years for help that was available on day one.
- It is not lower expectations. Presume competence, then teach from where a person actually is. Those are the same move, not opposite ones.
- It is not an argument against assessment. It is an argument about what assessment is for, and who it answers to.
- It is not a claim that age tells you nothing. Age tells you a birth date. It is being asked to report a stage, and it cannot.
Further Reading
Developmental Pace — Broadside
Two Hundred Years Before You’re Grown — Stimpunks Zine No. 34