FOUR YEARS BAD. SIX YEARS GOOD. SEVEN YEARS OPTIMAL
Parents across England are confused – and who can blame them? On the one hand, the
Cambridge Review of Primary Education has obliquely recommended raising the school
starting age to six; on the other, the Rose Review of Primary Education wants to lower it
to four. Both claim it will improve children’s chances of educational success.
Perhaps parents could make more sense of this dispute if they knew the provenance of the
two reports. The Cambridge Review is a long-term, carefully-researched, entirely
independent project, overseen by a highly respected academic and deeply critical of
recent government educational policy. The Rose Review was hastily set up by said
government to try and scupper Cambridge’s findings, and given a very limited remit – i.e.
no quibbling with the tests and targets agenda or the now statutory Early Years
Foundation Stage (EYFS).
So politicians dug themselves into a hole, then commissioned a report to explain why it’s
important to keep on digging. But while seasoned education-watchers can sit back and
play ‘spot the spin’, parents are at the mercy of politicians and media. So, tragically, are
English four- and five- year-olds, the innocents trapped in the mess created by our
country’s steady schoolification of early childhood.
Schoolification isn’t working…
English children have always started school at five, earlier than other European countries,
where the starting age is six or seven. But that first ‘reception’ year used to be a settling-
in time, when children learned – as their brains are naturally primed to learn – through
play (sand, water, making things, dressing up, role play), stories, music and art.
Then, in the mid-1980s, fierce political interest in educational standards spawned a
target-driven, test-mediated educational culture that no longer values children’s ‘natural’
impulses. And since literacy standards underpin all other learning, there’s been a steady
push to start literacy teaching ever earlier – in reception, and even in nurseries and
playgroups. In 2007 the EYFS was enshrined in law, with 69 targets children are
expected to achieve by the age of five, including
- use their phonic knowledge to write simple regular words and
make phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words
- write their names and other things such as labels and captions,
and begin to form simple sentences, sometimes using punctuation.
Now we can see why Rose recommended starting school at four – it takes time to force
little children to reach targets their brains and bodies are nowhere near ready to achieve.
As our national culture grew evermore competitive, it was easy to convince parents that
an early start is a good thing. In a dog-eat-dog world, no one wants their beloved child to
be 'left behind' or 'held back'. And some children, of course, have always learned to read
and write early. They tend to come from middle class homes, where adults have chatted,
read to them and unconsciously modelled literate behaviour since they were born.
They’re also very often girls, who don’t need as much active, large-scale, outdoor play as
boys to develop the small-scale motor control and hand-eye coordination required to read
and write.
But even these lucky five year olds may not be ready for formal teaching. All children
need time, opportunities to develop their spoken language and plenty of play to lay the
physical and cognitive foundations upon which literacy is based. If pushed to achieve
skills that are developmentally beyond them, they can be put off education for life. As a
recent BBC report of a teachers’ conference put it:
Tests and league tables have made English children the unhappiest in
western world. Even nursery children were being taught to spell and write,
in readiness for the tests awaiting them at primary school. Very young
children knew exactly what educational levels they had reached, and many
stopped trying because they believed they were ‘dumb’.
Of course, it isn’t just educational policy that’s made our children unhappy – over the last
twenty-five years a cocktail of socio-cultural factors has made childhood in Britain
increasingly ‘toxic’. But one key element – summed up by the drive for an early start on
formal learning – is our lack of respect for the natural course of child development,
especially the social and emotional underpinnings of mental health.
We’ve become a country obsessed with material success (linked in political minds to
performance on educational tests) at the expense of human relationships and trust. And
while the EYFS contains plenty of targets and tick-boxes for aspects of social and
emotional development, they’re less valued and far less easy to measure than
performance on pencil-and-paper so both parents and teachers pay them shorter shrift.
How a kindergarten stage could raise standards
We have to dig ourselves out of this mess, and raising the school starting age to six – or,
better still, seven – is a good way to start. It would signal loud and clear that in the early
years the emphasis should be on supporting children’s all-round natural development,
rather than cracking on with formal teaching strategies.
So from four (or, better still, three), our children should enjoy a ‘kindergarten’ education,
with a completely different ethos from formal schooling. A clear focus on social,
emotional and physical development – encouraging learning through play – would send a
very strong message to parents and the general public of the most important elements in
early education – and the basis of ‘a good childhood’.
Of course, any child who showed interest in reading and writing should be supported and
encouraged, since holding children back is as cruel as forcing them to do something
they’re not ready for. But there should be no targets for literacy achievement to skew
educational practice. And with plenty of music, art, stories, song and spoken language
activities in the kindergarten years, by the age of seven the vast majority of children
should have developed sound foundations for literacy learning, so that formal ‘schooling’
starts on a more level playing field.
We need only look north to Scandinavian countries, which have a school starting age of
seven, to see that a later start to formal education pays off. Finland and Sweden
consistently top the international charts for literacy and the Scandinavians were all well-
placed in the 2007 UNICEF survey of childhood wellbeing (in which the UK shamefully
came bottom). What’s more, there’s far less of a gap between high and low achievement
at secondary school (probably because fewer children have stopped trying because they
think they’re dumb), and therefore between rich and poor throughout society.
There’s no doubt that high standards in literacy are vital, both to individual 21st century
citizens and to society as a whole. But our current early start policy is clearly counter-
productive. To raise literacy standards, we must first of all concentrate on raising bright,
balanced children.
Sue Palmer is an independent literacy specialist. Her books Toxic Childhood and 21st
Century Boys investigate the effects of contemporary culture on child development
and learning.