Much has been written about the sustained attempts by successive governments to professionalise the early years sector over the past 20 years in England. A feature of these policy interventions has been to focus on creating a graduate workforce to improve academic outcomes for young children. In this article, the authors draw on data from their recent Froebel Trust-funded project, which involved interviews with 33 early years practitioners, to first explore the challenges facing state-maintained early years settings in contrasting geographical contexts in England, including rural, suburban and urban, as they work towards achieving compliance with the recent policy aim of one graduate in each of their settings. Second, the authors use policy enactment theory to inform their analysis of senior staff members' perceptions of tensions and opportunities created by having a graduate workforce in state-maintained early years settings. Third, the authors tentatively explore how to reconceptualise staff education and training with existing, experienced early years staff that would re-emphasise Froebel-informed approaches to enable practitioners to theorise their practice in a move towards what the authors have termed in this article as 'developmental professionalism'. The data shows that there is uneven access to higher education in contrasting geographical contexts for those professionals seeking to gain graduate status, and the authors examine the implications of this for early years practitioners and managers attempting to access graduate qualifications.