Mainstream education promotes a narrow conception of listening, centred on the reception and comprehension of human meanings. As such, it is ill‐equipped to hear how sound propagates affects, generates atmospheres, shapes environments and enacts power. Yet these aspects of sound are vital to how education functions. We therefore argue that there is a need to expand listening in education, and suggest that listening walks could provide a pedagogy for this purpose. Using interview data in which early years practitioners reflect on a listening walk, we show how the method can: (i) produce heightened multisensory experiences of spaces; (ii) generate forms of difficulty and discomfort that produce new learning; and (iii) influence practice, particularly practitioners’ ability to empathise with young children. Listening walks function by disrupting everyday sensory habits, provoking listeners to listen anew to their own listening, in an open‐ended way that is not tied to predetermined learning outcomes. The method therefore has wider pedagogic potential for rethinking education and childhood beyond rationality, representation and meaning.

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's report on equality and education published in the mid-1960s (Coleman 1966) made a blunt statement that children, especially the 'non-white children' in the USA were not enjoying equal opportunities in education, as they were not coming to school 'ready'. Reading the report now, the race and class bias in system is very apparent; it sought to compensate for the perceived social-cultural-economic characteristics of the home and family environment that was emphasised as playing a decisive role in children's school achievement. The report concluded that in order for children to succeed in school, they needed to be prepared through preschool programmes, such as Head Start. The longitudinal success of Head Start in the USA reported by Weikart in the 1990s presented findings about the long-term situation for children who had participated in early education programmes (Gilford 2013). It showed improved school outcomes, improved career prospects, reduced social and health interventions in later life. This inspired many nations to invest more into early interventions and early childhood education, acquired a role, to 'prepare' children for school in order to help them succeed. With greater investment has come increased scrutiny, control and revised expectations of quality in early education. SureStart initiated in the UK in the late 1990s was an example of such political and pedagogical response towards achieving equality of education through early childhood education (Needham and Anning 2017). The longitudinal research legacy of both of these programmes emphasised the importance of the home learning environment together with access to a preschool pedagogy that balances both adult-lead and child-lead, play-based learning (Schweinhart 2013; Sylva et al. 2010). Nevertheless, the neoliberal political legacies in the USA, UK and elsewhere often prefer to extend more school-like experiences to children aged five and under (Sahlberg 2015; Moss and Urban 2020). Encouraged by research, many nations have committed to the idea that children who attend Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) are more likely to be successful when they start school than those who do not (OECD 2012, 2017). Children's readiness for school is frequently cited among governments' motives for this investment in the early years sector. 'How children are prepared for school?' continues to be a keenly debated political question in international forums where early child development seems to be increasingly perceived as a preparation for primary school (United Nations 2015). The Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and Goal 4.2 in particular (United Nations 2015) establish Early Childhood Education (ECE) as a global target in order 'to prepare' children for school and to ensure that they are ready as well as able to 'learn', calling for at least one year of preschool education to be compulsory for all children in all member states. UNICEF (2019) advocates the impact of quality pre-primary education on completion rates and more successful progress in l...

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