What matters to children will develop into a series of books supported by conferences with follow on support through seminars/practical workshops/presentations and on site support.

In the book First hand experience: what matters to children the authors’ analysis of what matters to children is at the heart of everything they have written. They are convinced that simply providing “things for children to do” is an inadequate description of what needs to be done to improve children’s opportunities to experience the world at first hand. Their position is that the things children do, while they are 3–8 years old, should be the things that really matter to them, not the things that matter to their educators, or to the authors of helpful advice on provision and resources. The authors’ thinking about what matters to children is described in full on the page for the letter ‘I’ which they have used to stand for the active learner, the child at the centre of the whole process of education. ‘What matters to children’ is also represented on every page of this alphabet: authors have used these ideas as strict criteria for the suggestions they make for each area of enquiry.