Reflex action: how lack of movement could be holding back the Covid generation
Integrating Retained Primitive Reflexes – Watercliffe Meadow
When Ian Read, Headteacher at Watercliffe Meadow Primary School in Sheffield, first encountered the concept of retained primitive reflexes, it was almost by accident. Nursing a running injury, he met a specialist who asked him about behaviour patterns in his school since the pandemic.
“He knew I was a headteacher,” Ian recalls. “And he started asking me questions about the children. He started doing impressions of kids – how they sat, how they moved. He was showing me exactly what we were seeing. And then he started talking to me about retained primitive reflexes.”
That conversation set off a year-long journey of discovery, research, and practical intervention that has culminated in an innovative SHINE-funded project.
The issue Ian wanted to tackle was clear: a sudden, stark rise in neurodiversity, particularly among younger cohorts since the COVID pandemic.
“The neurodiversity is off the scale,” Ian explains. “We had maybe one or two non-verbal autistic children in previous years. Suddenly we had 10 to 15 with very little language.”
He suspected that technology, gaming, and social media might be factors, but needed a clearer understanding of the underlying developmental mechanisms.
This is where the concept of retained primitive reflexes came in – those automatic responses present in newborns that should naturally fade within the first 9-12 months of life as a child learns to roll, crawl, walk and speak.
If not “integrated” through movement, these reflexes can linger and interfere with learning, focus, and motor control.
“If you can’t sit still, how can you focus?” Ian asks. “That’s the kind of impact we’re seeing.”
The SHINE project aims to test whether simple, structured movement routines could help integrate these reflexes in school-aged children.
One of the videos produced for teachers, showing the programme in action.
Working with a kinesiologist, Watercliffe Meadow developed a 36-week programme of short, daily movement sessions. “Three to four minutes, twice a day,” Ian explains. “It had to be manageable. If it was too onerous, it wouldn’t work.”
Videos have been produced showing how and when to use the exercises, so that more teachers can introduce them into lessons.
The exercises are simple – “just cross-body movements, while sitting or lying on the carpet or on sitting a chair” – but surprisingly difficult for many children.
“At the start of the year, kids couldn’t do them. They were all over the place,” Ian says. “But I’ve seen massive improvements. They can now hold their posture, isolate movements, and coordinate much better.”
More importantly, the team saw life-changing results in individual cases. Two non-verbal autistic children began speaking within three months of starting the reflex work.
“That was the moment that convinced me. You couldn’t really put it down to anything else,” Ian says. He attributes the breakthrough to working on two specific reflexes – the palmar (grip) and rooting reflexes – both closely tied to speech production.
Each child taking part in the programme was screened before they began. The screening revealed that virtually no child in the school’s reception class had fully integrated reflexes. “They should all be integrated by 9 to 12 months,” Ian says. “But not one child was fully green on our rating scale.”
That, he believes, reflects a much wider societal problem. “Children just aren’t moving enough in early life to wire their brains properly. I think we’ve changed childhood in less than 10 years.”
The causes are manifold – screen time, indoor lifestyles, COVID lockdowns – but the result is clear.
“A lot of our pupils leave school at the end of the day and go straight onto a screen,” Ian says. “We know they’re tired in the morning because some of them have been gaming till 3am.”
And in deprived areas, such as the part of Sheffield Watercliffe serves, screen-based entertainment is often the only affordable option for families.
Part of the project has involved running parent workshops to raise awareness of the importance of movement and play. “We talked about nursery rhymes, explaining how they’re not just fun, they help integrate reflexes. But lots of parents don’t know them anymore,” Ian says. “We’ve instinctively known what to do for centuries, but we’re losing that knowledge.”
As the first year of the SHINE project wraps up, Ian is already thinking ahead.
“The movement programme we’ve developed is helpful, but next year I want to link it more into play,” he says. He’s revising the school’s play strategy and hopes to map specific activities to individual reflexes. “If child A hasn’t integrated reflex X, then activity Y will help – that’s the level of clarity I want.”
Ian is convinced he has uncovered an issue that is impacting children’s development, and that others need to hear about it.
“Everyone is talking about the consequences – children can’t focus, can’t sit still – but nobody’s talking about the cause,” he says. “This is a thing that’s happening, and we need to do something about it.”
Thanks to SHINE’s support, Ian has been able to take a hunch and turn it into a structured intervention, one that might just change the way we think about child development in the digital age.
“I couldn’t have done it without the SHINE funding,” he says. “It’s made me do it properly –gather evidence, develop resources, and start real conversations. And now, I just want more people to join that conversation.”