The development of standards in early childhood is associated with governments wanting to assert their influence on what young children should know and be able to do before they enter formal schooling. In South Africa the National Early Learning and Development Standards (NELDS), released in 2009, attempts to assert influence in the context of social transformation of South African society through the lives of children from birth to four years. To date there has been little critical engagement with the standards. The aim of this article is to interrogate the NELDS document and to foreground the silences in the light of the transformatory ideal. In so doing, this article contributes to the debates on facilitation of processes for policy development, knowledge transfer from the minority world and the knowledge production for early care and education in the majority world. (author abstract)