The focus of this small scale research was grounded in my experience of teaching and assessing the Early Years Professional Status Graduate Entry Pathway. This pathway is a full time one year route to graduate leadership in the Early Years with children aged birth to five. However, students taking this route will have had limited professional practice experience prior to commencing their training. This research explored the student experience whilst studying at University and takes into consideration their diverse backgrounds and limited professional practice experience. It consisted of 12 participants, 7 of these took part in semi-structured interviews and 5 completed written narratives. The resultant data was analysed using a constant comparative methods (Thomas, 2013) which allowed for the construction of key themes arising from the data. There were four overarching themes emerging from the data which supported students to develop their professional identity. These being the attending weekly university lectures which had space for group discussions, the tutor’s role in promoting critical reflection, the development of formal and informal communities of practice to support reflection on critical incidents and the transition to employment post accreditation. The aim of the research was to ascertain whether transformative learning could support professional identity formation and the work of Mezirow (2006, 2009), Freire (1996, 2004, 2007) and Lave and Wenger (1991) were used to conceptualise the analysis. There is a body of work which already considers the impact of communities of practice on the experience of Early Years practitioners (Sachs, 2001; McGillivray, 2011; Payler and Locke, 2013) and this research will provide an additional lens with which to view student experiences and communities of practice.