Ruthlyn James | After the whistle: What happens when the stadium lights go off

When the final race at Champs is over and the stadium lights dim, something deeper settles in. Beyond the medals and celebration, there is a quiet return to reality.

For one week, Jamaica celebrates the full child. Strength, speed, discipline, resilience, identity. We see children not just as learners, but as capable, complex individuals. But when the lights go off, they return to classrooms that often do not recognise that same fullness. The system narrows again. The child becomes a grade, a behaviour report, a performance metric.

What we are witnessing is not just a shift in environment, but a shift in expectation, from expression to conformity, from strength to standardisation. The athlete becomes the restless child. They were celebrated. Now they must conform.

We have made progress in access. More children are entering our classrooms, including those who would have previously been excluded. That is important. That is necessary. But we must now ask the harder question. They are in, but what comes next? Because presence is not participation.

A child can sit in a classroom and still not be reached. A classroom can be well-resourced, structured, and aligned with curriculum expectations, yet if the brain is not regulated, not processing, not ready to receive, then learning does not occur.

This is the part of the conversation we are not yet fully addressing.

We have built inclusion around physical access and instructional delivery. But we have not sufficiently built for developmental readiness. We have focused on how we teach, but not enough on how children develop the capacity to learn.

And so, across our classrooms, we are seeing increasing numbers of children who cannot sustain attention, who struggle to regulate emotion, and who cannot process instruction at the pace required. These are developmental realities across our student population.

Emerging local research supports this concern. Work by M.S. Bartley in the Caribbean Journal of Education highlights that school climate is not simply a backdrop to learning, but a determining factor in students’ behavioural regulation, engagement and emotional well-being. In parallel, P.A. Bourne’s examination of youth mental health in Jamaica points to increasing levels of depression and psychosocial risk among adolescents, noting that these outcomes are closely tied to environmental stressors and developmental gaps within the school experience. As the literature suggests, student behaviour and mental health cannot be separated from the conditions in which learning occurs. What we see in our classrooms, therefore, is not isolated behaviour, but the cumulative expression of unmet developmental needs over time.

When children reach the secondary level, the conversation shifts toward discipline. We increase deans of discipline. We tighten structures. We respond to behaviour as it presents. But behaviour at that stage is not the beginning of the story. It is the outcome of a developmental trajectory that began years earlier.

In early childhood, the focus is often placed heavily on early literacy and numeracy, and rightly so. But alongside literacy, there must be equal emphasis on psychosocial development. Regulation, attention, emotional understanding, and social interaction are the foundation upon which literacy depends.

When these developmental windows are not fully supported in the early years, the gap does not remain static. It expands.

In primary school, the demands increase. The expectation to sit, attend, process, and produce becomes more pronounced. For children who have not developed these foundational capacities, school becomes increasingly difficult to navigate. By the time they reach secondary school, the system is no longer building these skills. It is responding to their absence. And that response is often discipline.

If we are serious about improving educational outcomes, reducing behavioural challenges, and strengthening transitions from primary to secondary, then we must shift our focus earlier. We must treat psychosocial development with the same urgency and structure as literacy.

Because when the developmental foundation is strong, behaviour stabilises, attention improves, and learning becomes accessible. But when it is not, no amount of structure at the secondary level can fully compensate for what was not built in the early years.

What Champs shows us is that our children are not lacking ability. They are thriving when their strengths are engaged. They are regulated through movement. They are focused through purpose. They are disciplined through structure that aligns with how their bodies and brains function.

But when they return to spaces that do not account for those needs, something shifts.

A child may be physically present, but internally overwhelmed. The environment may be accessible, but not tolerable. Over time, this creates internal strain. What we often interpret as behaviour may in fact be a response to overload. And if that continues, it compounds. A child who may have started with a single challenge can develop anxiety, disengagement, or behavioural difficulties.

Not because of inability, but because of misaligned support.

The urgency now is not just to expand access, but to deepen it. Developmental readiness must be embedded from early childhood. Movement, regulation, language, and emotional development must be intentionally built into the classroom experience from the beginning. This requires a deliberate policy shift to embed psychosocial and regulatory development within early childhood standards, teacher preparation and classroom practice.

If we do this well, transitions from primary to secondary will not be marked by crisis. Behaviour will not need to be managed at the level we are currently seeing. Students will arrive better prepared, not just academically, but developmentally and socially.

But if we do not, we will continue to celebrate our children for one week, and struggle with them for the rest of the year.

Ruthlyn James is the founding director of Adonijah Group of Schools Therapy and Assessment Centre. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com