In your article on the country’s first Montessori Sure Start Children’s Centre (“Montessori goes mainstream as Sure Start centre opens”, August 14), Philip Bujak, chief executive of the Montessori St Nicholas charity, is quoted as saying “the Montessori curriculum matches with the Early Years Foundation Stage exactly”.

While the broad principles underpinning the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) can be argued to cohere with the Montessori approach, the compulsory nature of the EYFS’s programmatic goals are in no way consistent with a curriculum that honours the natural developmental unfolding of each individual child in an unhurried way.

Dr Richard House, Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University.