A book can help with
For the enormous first day, and the parent letting go at the gate.
Starting school is one of the biggest things that happens to a small person. New building, new rules, new grown-ups, a whole day without you, and a hundred unspoken things to work out about where to hang a coat and who to sit beside. The excitement and the dread usually arrive together.
A book is the gentlest sort of preparation, because it makes the unknown familiar before they ever walk in. Reading about a character who feels nervous and then has a perfectly ordinary day gives a child a picture of how this goes, and gives you both a way to talk about it in the weeks beforehand rather than on the doorstep.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there. The page on first days covers nursery and new classes too.
The first mornings
Nursery is usually the first place a very young child goes without you, and every bit of it is unknown until they have done it a few times. What follows makes the room familiar before they ever walk into it.
Lift the flaps to find Spot among the coat pegs, the sand tray and the painting table, which is really a tour of a nursery in the shape of a game. Hill’s flaps have survived forty years of toddlers pulling at them. About as gentle an introduction as exists.
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A first day at nursery told almost entirely in its sounds: the door, the crying, the spoons, the yawns. The crocodile is the child, the wobble is right there in it, and so is the going home again. Unusually good on the fact that the grown-up finds it hard too.
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Over thirty flaps answering the question a three year old asks over and over, with a lively crowd of children working out what school is actually for: making friends, learning things, and what happens in between. Usborne’s board format survives being pulled at. The oldest book in this band, and the one they will still want at four.
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The first day
This is the age it happens, and the worries are usually practical as much as emotional. These meet both.
A whole class of children through their first term, with all the small practical details a child actually wonders about: pegs, dinners, playtime, the toilets. The Ahlbergs understood exactly what reassures a four-year-old. Detailed, warm and enormously calming before a first day.
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Wemberly worries about everything, and about starting school most of all, until the day comes, she meets a fellow worrier, and it turns out fine. Henkes captures the anxious child so precisely that they feel entirely understood. Perfect for the week before.
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Moving up
Later school changes bring their own worries, mostly about friendships and getting things wrong.
Mildred Hubble is the least competent pupil at her new boarding school and makes an absolute mess of everything, and is loved anyway. For a child anxious about being the one who gets it wrong, Mildred is enormously comforting. Funny, short and the start of a whole series.
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A new class, and her best friend has been put in a different one. Stella freezes when she has to speak in front of people and slips into Spanish when she is nervous, and the book stays kind about that the whole way through. Better suited to the child who is dreading September than the one who cannot wait.
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The move to secondary
This one is a different school altogether: a bigger building, a timetable, and friendships that get reshuffled whether anybody wants them to or not. What follows is about the year before it as much as the first week of it.
Nate is ten, about to start Year 6, and certain of one thing, which is that his best friend since nursery will be beside him for it. Then they are put in different classes. Told in verse, so it reads quickly and hits hard, and it is very good on the anger Nate calls the Beast. His youngest brother is taken seriously ill partway through, so it is not a light read.
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Hazel has never much bothered with friends and is good at competing instead, and then she takes on a boy in her class whose behaviour everybody else has decided to tolerate. Sharp, funny and unusually clear about how much easier it is to say nothing. Good for the child heading somewhere new who has decided they will manage alone.
or on Bookshop.org
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Something to do together
A picture countdown to the first day, and a page for drawing what the new school might look like inside. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Almost all of the wobble is fear of the unknown, so anything that makes the new place familiar in advance helps: a visit, a walk past the gates, a book read a dozen times.
So keep goodbyes short and cheerful even when it hurts, since teachers consistently report that a lingering goodbye makes settling harder rather than easier. And do ask how the settling is going rather than only how they seemed at drop-off. Most children are perfectly happy within minutes of you leaving.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.