Recent study of children joining reception class

It defines not toilet trained as having occasional (not frequent) accidents though. Not specifically wearing a nappy.

I've worked in an infant school for over a decade and few younger chikdren have always got caught short on occassion. A lot are quite scared of the toilets, or scared to ask to go in the first term. Some are also fine until they get a heavy cold.

This survey suggests that's happening more than 5 years ago there are more complex sen chikdren in mainstream too but I do think the headline wording is misleading.

Are they? Some are, but some have nannies..or childminders.

I have just read this survey and I can't see anywhere where is says that a quarter of children are starting school in nappies. The closest I could see was that 91% of teachers reported having at least one child in the reception class not toilet trained. Where did it say 25% of children, maybe I missed it?
I would also add that this is a qualitative study (asking questions rather than using recorded data), where 1000 teachers answered questions on a combination of a yougov survey and an open online survey. As a statistician I would take it with a large pinch of salt. I get very tired of newspapers misrepresenting studies. There has been a lot of this sort of stuff about poor parenting since covid and it generally turns out to be anecdotal but people love to get up in arms about it. I remember one a couple of years ago making a big hoo-ha about children not being able to use a knife and fork because of lockdown and when I looked into it it was based on one teacher saying she saw one child struggling to use her cutlery.

When our eldest started pre-school nursery at 3, we were told that if she wasn’t potty trained in time, she wouldn’t be able to attend her full funded hours and they would slowly build it up while she potty trained. She actually was potty trained so it was fine but I remembered this info a few years later when we sent our next daughter to the exact same nursery.

except.. the policy had changed. Too many parents had complained for years about it being discriminatory and demanding their children be accepted. It’s a council/school nursery so they were forced to change this requirement.

in my first daughters intake. Out of sixty children, every single child was potty trained. Because it was a requirement. They did have one wee boy in nappies, but he had additional needs and obviously would be exempt from that rule.

but this year, when we sent my youngest to the EXACT same nursery, with a three year difference, they’d been forced to stop saying this was a requirement or expectation. When j mentioned it I was told ‘we can’t tell people that anymore, local authorities have been really clear that parents were kicking off every year about it so now we actually have to tell you that potty training isn’t at all necessary before they start’

ANYWAY. Out of sixty children, they had only seven children start who were not still fully in nappies. Those seven were not necessarily potty trained either (my wee girl was still prone to accidents and I wouldn’t have called that potty trained but they said she was counted as such).

So in a four year gap, out of sixty new starts you go from 1 child in nappies because he has additional needs , to this year there being 53 children still in nappies. And the only difference is that the nursery were no longer allowed to insist that parents potty trained their child before they started.

Honestly I’m usually not a judgemental parent but I thought that said it all really :(. And it was so detrimental to the nursery. Staff were so clearly struggling to manage. They had to have two staff every day whose sole assignment was changing kids nappies. Staff didn’t have the same time to engage as they had before because they were just run off their feet. I know how hard it is to change just one three year old out of wet clothes and find them new ones, or how long it takes to change a toddlers nappy. And I don’t have to wear full PPE to do it on top.

but I just felt like, it’s sad that if you aren’t ALLOWED to insist people do these things for their own children, and you aren’t allowed to make it inconvenient for them to not bother , by saying you won’t get to use nursery funded hours, then it’s like everyone just didn’t bother.

i have a child in reception and I do not believe a quarter of children are starting reception in nappies. Not sure where you have got this information from. The school my children go to won’t accept children into the school nursery who aren’t potty trained, let alone a quarter in reception.

I work in childcare, and I don't understand where this is all coming from. I have never met a child yet who has gone to school in nappies. With the exception of children who are send.

I agree. Children should experience boredom and learn how to cope with boredom.

P.S. I'm not sure why your friend told you that. DD was an enthusiastic participant in twice weekly Rhyme Time at the local library, attended Story Time at the local second hand book shop every Sunday rain or shine, and went to 3 different church playgroups over the years, although we're not religious. I'm not sure if you mean "play in the park" as an organised thing? But she did go to play in the park every day I didn't go to work, and still goes after school if it's sunny.

But recognising their name isn't the same as trying to teach them to read.

It's one word that they should see everywhere from babyhood.

I didn't "teach" DD anything before primary school, we did lots of activities together, talked about everything, read LOTS of stories, and I answered any questions she asked. She recognised her name and most of her letters and numbers, knew her colours, 2D and 3D shapes (the basics like rectangles, cylinders, spheres and cubes, not dodecahedrons and hexagonal prisms 😂) and that sort of thing just from living in the world and being involved. She immediately picked up reading as soon as they started to teach phonics in a structured approach.

I work in several schools and this is a trend across a lot of them and it is getting worse. One of the thought relates to a lack of a dining table as well, that children aren’t taught to sit up at the table and skills and muscles used for those fine motor skills aren’t being developed from those gross motor skills. It’s sad really sad. Some of the children in some of the classes literally cannot sit on the floor without “lounging”.

Discouraging parents for forcing too much academics on children at too young an age leading to them starting school already disengaged from learning, or seeing learning as an activity they do to get approval from adults rather than a self-led process.
@MrsSunshine2b
I'm not sure I agree with this, I have a friend who works in a reception class and she said that so much time is being wasted in class by having to teach children things that previous generations were expected to learn before school age, example... Can you all hang your coat and bag by your name in the cloakroom. Resulting in lots of children not being able to do this because they can't recognise their name.
Perhaps I was lucky that I had a toddler who enjoyed learning and I agree that stressing an uninterested three year old out doesn't benefit anybody but a gentle nudge to learn the basics is a good thing.
Also I was talking to a friend about this thread earlier who recently had a baby to get her views and was surprised to hear that many of the services I used twenty years ago have disappeared from my area (children's library, Library story time/singing playgroups, play in the park, church playgroups that arranged visits by coach to zoos and museums. A real shame in my opinion I would have been so lonely without them being a single parent.

Yes, this was a major contributing factor as to why they were closed - the ‘wrong’ people were using them.

The children furthest behind are the ones who DIDN'T go to nursery. Why do you think the govt offers 15 free hours to 2 year olds whose parents don't even work?

But that makes no sense? We have nursery/creche settings that are in many ways closer to an educational setting / school yet children are less ready when school does begin? I don’t think it’s about an educationally focussed setting it’s about bonds between families, children and parents or children and other closely tied individuals. And is it a gentle rise in two parents working? I think twenty years is not a long enough period to consider to be honest and even then I would be shocked if it was only a 10% increase in children who are at nursery. I suspect it’s far far more than that. I don’t think ofsted or the regulatory bodies etc have any relevance to this debate because i think it’s about fundamental human development in those really early stages between families.

I taught my summer born ND child to read because nothing I could do would have stopped her being small, clumsier than her peers, wobbly at drawing and writing, unreliable at toileting and generally immature. But it was in my power to give her the self confidence that comes from knowing that you excel at at least one thing.

Obviously if she hadn't been ready to learn to read then I'd have got nowhere and I'd have given up.

DM taught me to read as a toddler just because she was very very bored due to personal circumstances. I assume that she'd also have given up if she was getting nowhere though.

I hate this. We're not a screen free house by any means, but it gets my goat when I see little ones being pushed around the supermarket with a phone in front of their nose, or even worse, a baby being pushed in a pram, gazing up at their parent - who has their eyes glued to a phone. Bloody talk to your kids.

I have a colleague on social media who has a gorgeous little toddler, but in every single photo that she posts of him, he has a phone in his hand or tablet on his lap. Depressing.

The very gentle rise in the number of families with two full time working parents (less than 10%) over the last 20 years does not account in any way for major differences noticed across a whole cohort.

We do not have "daycare" in the UK. We have early education settings, regulated closely by OFSTED and bound by the EYFS curriculum, which includes all the milestones which equate to school readiness.

Agree with the pp who said it’s interesting that now most children are in daycare settings and not predominantly raised by their parents, that there is a decline in readiness for school. This will be hugely unpopular in this day & age but my personal belief is that it’s better for children to be - on the whole - raised mostly by a parent/family/someone in ‘the village’. I wonder if our modern day approach where working / money is the priority that it’s having a detrimental effect on attachment or on psychological development. It just seems odd to me that we favour a way of child rearing that is unnatural.. I’m not very good at articulating what I mean but it seems to be against what we ‘as animals’ instinctively have done. I can’t believe that having two parents working and being raised mostly in a different setting from ‘home’ as very young children has no effect on humans generally across a population level.

Maybe because they are so thin and absorbent now, they don't feel at all uncomfortable? Dunno....mine are older too.

From memories of my kids nappy-wearing era (which admittedly is a long time ago) how are people keeping nappies on their older children? Mine would peel their own nappies off from the age of about nine months (mine all potty trained, dry day and night by two), and putting and keeping nappies on them was almost a full time job! So how come all these three and four year olds aren't yanking their nappies off at every opportunity?

In my day (mid 80s), we were taught the names of the letters. We certainly weren’t taught the current method of calling them by the sounds they made, being careful, for example, to say ‘t’ not ‘tee’ or ‘tuh’, or ‘mm’ not ‘em’ or ‘muh’.

AHH yeah that makes sense thank you

Discouraging parents for forcing too much academics on children at too young an age leading to them starting school already disengaged from learning, or seeing learning as an activity they do to get approval from adults rather than a self-led process.

Because I'm a school governor, and the head raised it as a concern at a recent governors meeting, around the impact of this on staff wellbeing and support and progression for children, she was really worried, and in 4 years it's the first time I have seen her really stressed, she knows they need to support these children but feels the other children are being let down because of it