One of Australia's leading early childhood educators has warned the federal government's strategy for young children could see them doing worse at school, and not being prepared for later life.

Emeritus Professor Philip Gammage is one of the keynote speakers at Playgroup Australia's Power of Play conference which begins on the Gold Coast on Thursday night.

Professor Gammage says the federal government has recognised that it's important to learn in the early years but had gone off half-cocked and mistakenly implemented curriculum targets for children as young as three.

"Children don't need to be taught curriculum, they need quality relationships, quality attachments and quality boundaries," he said.

"Zero to six-year-olds should be concentrating on play-based learning, drama and aural learning."

Professor Gammage said Australia could learn a lot from the wisdom of a saying in Finland, "talk more, write less".

"The children in Finland don't learn literacy until they are seven but they (are) more initiative and are more adventurous in the later years."

Professor Gammage said Finish children top the International Academic Comparisons by the age of nine.

The chief executives of Playgroups WA, David Zarb, said the conference is a national celebration of the importance of play in children's lives.

"It's about giving lots of different play opportunities to children, parents and families, and highlighting the latest research on the subject," he said.

"We hear a lot from government and in the media about the importance of preparing children for school, and children are enrolling in lots of programs at earlier and earlier ages.

"But what we know about child development is that it's through their early play experiences that children actually learn and how they grow and form critical attachments with their parents and family members.

"Those are not things that can be easily done by formal programs."

Mr Zarb said studies in the US show the amount of free play children are having is declining all the time.

"There's a great quote attributed to Einstein, that play is the highest form of research," he said.