Blues boss Paul Lambert has discussed the youngsters currently out on loan with academy chiefs Bryan Klug and Lee O’Neill and says he will look at their situations in January.
Midfielder Tristan Nydam, 19, is with St Johnstone in Scotland, where he has hardly feature, while 20-year-old central defender Luke Woolfenden is in League Two with Swindon, right-back Josh Emmanuel, 21, is in League One with Shrewsbury and striker Ben Morris, 19, netted his first senior goal for League Two Forest Green Rovers at the weekend.
Lambert says he is aware of their situations and has talked about them with academy head of coaching and player development Klug and O’Neill, who is continuing as academy director despite having taken on a general football operations role.
"We know everything that’s going on with them,” Lambert said. "We’ve spoken about them, especially with Bryan and Lee and people like that, who in their opinion thought was worth bringing back and it’s something we’ll look at when their loan period is up.”
Nydam's spell in the Scottish Premiership is up in January, while Woolfenden, Emmanuel and Morris are all on season-long loans but with the Blues able to cut their stints short in the winter window.
One man who is already back at Playford Road is 20-year-old striker Aaron Drinan, Vanarama National League Sutton United having ended his spell there early towards the end of last week.
"He’s another loan lad coming back, I don’t know too much about him,” Lambert confessed. "There’s so much work here to get done, not just on the football side, everything here we have to try and reconnect.
"The loan lads are part of it. But you have to build something here and we’ll have a look at him in due course.”
As well as players, Lambert has also had to familiarise himself with the staff already at the club in the month that he has been at Town.
Asked what he has made to them, he joked: "I think my own staff, the lads I’ve brought with me, I think they’re really poor! No, they’ve been brilliant, Stuart [Taylor, his assistant manager], the two Jims [goalkeeping-coach Jimmy Walker and fitness coach Jim Henry] and Gilly [first-team coach Matt Gill] have been brilliant.
"We didn’t know anybody when we came in the door, so it's an open vision you’ve got for it. What I think the club has probably lacked is everybody trying to play the same way.
"We’ve tried to implement that with Chris [Hogg] and Nashy [Gerard Nash, the U23s coaches] and filtered down [to younger academy teams] with Bryan.
"You want everybody to try and play the same way throughout the club so it’s just an easier transition to get into the first team so that when kids do come up they know the moves that I want to do.
"And I’ve got to say, they’ve all been trying it. We’ll have a coaches’ meeting in a few weeks and we’ll show the coaches what we expect at the different age levels.
"I think that’s got to be structured and that’s what I want to do. It takes time but we have to start somewhere, it’s like throwing a seed in the grass, you have to let it grow.”
He says his time playing in Germany with Borussia Dortmund, with whom he won a Champions League winners medal in 1997, has had an impact on his management.
"Playing over there was great, I played with an unbelievable football club,” he reflected. "You can talk about world class players being flippant, but I really played with world class players, they were brilliant.
"I played under a great manager [Ottmar Hitzfeld] with great support behind it, everything about it was incredible. I played against great sides, great Bayern Munich teams, Schalke, I could go through them all.
"I also did my pro licence over there which was a great learning curve. I enjoyed my time over there and it’s well documented that I go over there and pick up different things, different ideas from different managers. That’s a big part of how a try and run a football club.”
More and more British players, youngsters in particular, are moving to the Bundesliga and he says it can be a good move for them.
"I think if you get the right football club,” he added. "I think going abroad, it’s a great experience, it’s an eye-opener.
"I was fortunate, I played for a great, great club. You’ve got to get the right club and first and foremost you have to learn the language, you have to get that language sorted right away from day one if you can.
"It’s a difficult language to learn German, but once you get the basis of it and if you’re at the right club it’s a fantastic country to play in.”