To not understand why children start school so young in the UK

[Alisvolatpropiis]

Just that really. In lots of countries children don't start school properly until 6 or 7 whereas in the UK it is 4 or 5, depending on where in the school year their birthday falls. I know some in the SW Valleys area who have started school (not nursery) at 3.

Britain doesn't appear to be topping education charts from what I can tell so what is the benefit?

the UK calls it "school"
other countries call it "nursery"
either way, as soon as its state funded, the parents pile the kids in

and if its not state funded the rich parents still pile their kids in, exacerbating inequality

Your school sounds really lovely delilah especially the outside aspect given it's city location.

I have a much younger sibling and her school did very odd things like they only ever had art or music each term, so she would regularly have terms with no art from about the age of 6, so so sad :(

The other issue was school uniform, it just isn't practical to play outside in the winter in the the uk in school shoes and school uniform.

That particular school had fabulous sats results but it was apparent they were compromising other areas of the curriculum to gain the amazing results.

DS has just started reception. They have a great outdoor area each child has to have wellies and they provide all in one coats for them to wear.

The whole childcare and working parents stuff needs to be on par with the countries where children start school later.
Which it isn't.

I was glad for them to go to school because I no longer had to pay childcare.

I make no apologies for that.

I need to work, and the children need to be looked after and safe whike I do.Thats life.

Personally I'd have loved to home school.

Because state education in the UK was set up to ensure that children had a basic level of numeracy and literacy and became used to a hierarchical power system that made them into compliant and useful factory fodder. And to keep them off the street while their parents worked, after the law changed to prevent child labour.

Because the age at which the state wanted to establish control over family life via children has crept ever downward and became 'normal' and unquestioned. Adults must be employed to keep the system functioning; early school-age entry solves the problem of child-care and ensures that social manipulation to benefit the top of the hierarchy above those below, continues ad infinitum.

(only slightly tongue-in-cheek)

I'm in the UK. At 4.5 my very serious and fairly academic dd was very ready for school and bored at nursery. She took to it like a duck to water. Dtds were due end of Sept but we're born August 30. They will be the youngest in their year next September but the school headteacher has said I can delay a year or if they start and get too tired I can keep them on half days... They will be flexible as to what suits the dc. Reception is informal and all about play and year 1 gets a bit more serious then at year 2 they stop having carpet time and free time to play in lessons and have their own desks.
I actually think the flexibility is there if you ask. This is state school btw.

My DD was 4.1 when she started school, shes 7 now and despite her autism and confidence issues, she doing very well.

My DN is 4.1 and has just started and she just got on with it, she wasnt bothered.

They take 3 weeks to start on full days at my DN's school, like they did at DD school to get them used to the transition.

In some parts of the United States, there is K4, which is for children who will turn 4 by the end of the calendar year. This means that it is quite possible they are starting into formal schooling at 3y7 (as the school year begins in August).

This hasn't been my experience of schooling in the US.

There are classes called 'PK3' and 'PK4', meaning pre kindergarten for 3 or 4 yos. They are not compulsory. Often PK classes only run three or four days a week, and only for a maximum of three hours per 'school' day. They are attractive to sahps.

In practice, most children go to Kindergarten and a lot of children will spend time in a daycare centre from infancy; a lot of daycare providers have a similar programme to private preK classes, with circle time, reading to the group, art, etc. Most public school districts do not provide preK classes. Private schools tend to, and many also offer all-day care with children brought from a daycare room to their classroom in teh same building for a few hours every day.

In addition to private school offerings and what is available in the YMCA or Park Districts in urban and suburban communities, the federal Headstart Program aims to prepare disadvantaged children for formal school by providing a play-based learning environment, exposure to books and story telling, exposure to normal classroom behaviour expectations, and exposure to the sort of writing and art and science materials they will find in a Kindergarten classroom. The aim is to make up for deficiencies at home that guarantee many children arrive in school with limited vocabulary, no idea what books are for, and behaviour that makes transition to school difficult. Headstart falls short in many ways. Some children have no hope of catching up, and availability of places in Headstart programmes is often limited.

Kindergarten attendance is for children who will have turned 5 by the cutoff date. Most school districts and virtually all private schools provide Kindergarten classes even though very few states mandate attendance in school until First Grade (age 6, and a lot of states only mandate school attendance for children 7 and up).

Up to first grade, what happens in school is very much play based, with each child progressing towards reading at his or her own pace through play, exposure to writing practice, art, singing, being read to, exposure to reading materials, a little phonics and little or no pressure to achieve any set standard. There is a lot of emphasis on the social and emotional aspects of adjustment to school co-operation with peers, and strong encouragement of self-care -- no helping with coats, shoes, lace tying, etc. First grade (age 6 turning 7) is really the start of 'formal' education. Children sit at desks and those who have not yet learned to read will all learn to read at this point, most of the time via phonics plus dolch list (sight word) methods.

And when my DCs went to Kdg their day was 2.45 hours long, five days a week.

"Children sit at desks and those who have not yet learned to read will all learn to read at this point, most of the time via phonics plus dolch list (sight word) methods." which is proven to be the least effective method of learning to read.

Reception children in my experience do not sit still at desks all day. I am also surprised if "carpet time" finishes at year 2, at my DCs school it finished at year 6, having gradually reduced, but did happen every day.

I agree it's to do with too much state involvement in family life. Parents are not trusted to raise children (by politicians who were raised in boarding schools ) . Isn't this why the 'assigned state guardian' attempts are under consideration.

Hours of schooling isn't necessarily the thing, though, it's hours that they're away from home in a setting where they're having to adhere to social norms, follow rules, etc. I know that reception isn't too structured in terms of learning but it's still a lot for them to cope with, you can see it at the end of the week with little ones.

What twinkledust said.

Not tongue in cheek.

Compliant workers to keep the economy going.

My DS will be starting school full time next year and I'm dreading it. He will be 4 years 1 month.

IMO that's far too young.

In some parts of Canada they are also starting them too young imo. We are in Ontario here Junior Kindergarten starts the year you turn 4 (December cut-off) so there are plenty who start at age three. It is a play-based curriculum but it is the long days 8.45-3.15, five days a week which is too much for the little ones.

Also they have two teachers per class (one teacher and one early years educator) but could have as many as 28 kids in one class (usually a mixed age group of Junior Kinder & Senior Kinder). But the care and attention 3/4 year olds need far exceeds what the teachers are able to give. The teachers try their best but it is not a very nurturing environment for young children.

Here it is their answer to subsidised childcare. Prior to school parents only get minimal help from the government with childcare cost ($100 per month per child).

In other parts of Canada they do not start until five (or nearly 5) which is a better system.

That would be children in First Grade, aged 6 to 7, sitting at their desks. Come to think of it, they had a discussion of the date, the weather, and the season and since it was a RC school usually some discussion of the saint of the day, and some other chit chat at carpet time daily, but this was phased out as the year progressed. The desks were sometimes rearranged for group work.

I disagree with the assertion that phonics plus dolch words has been 'proven' to be the least effective method of learning to read. No such conclusions have been reached.

There is a lot of zealotry surrounding the usefulness of pure synthetic phonics that is not warranted by its results. Ironically, synthetic phonics was imported wholesale into Britain based on American academic research that was conducted on children older than the British children who are now having something of an unknown theory tried out on them en masse, Clackmannanshire and the Rose Report notwithstanding. Pure SP has never been used on a wide scale in the US and certainly never on children aged 4.

SP continues to show poor results at the end of the primary cycle when comprehension is measured among underprivileged children. In fact, the Clacknannanshire Report drew attention to the need for further research when it came to SP and comprehension but that recommendation was glossed over in the rush to find some sort of sticking plaster for the woes of the education system that would be attractive to voters, but would not do anything to tackle the real causes of poor educational outcome -- as any such effort would most likely not be attractive to voters. The adoption of phonics as an allegedly research-based and classroom-situated panacea was a terrific example of politicians and civil servants meddling in an area they had little or no expertise in, for political reasons.

No single method has ever proven itself a match in the long term (i.e. where it matters) for the relative verbal deprivation that underprivileged children experience from birth. Even the West Donbartonshire experiment in SP that was very successful was part of a multi-pronged effort that was not confined to the classroom. It took into account and tackled cultural issues as well as practical issues that were affecting the teaching of reading. In general (there will always be exceptions) in order to learn to read effectively, children need to be exposed to a wide vocabulary and a good standard of spoken English (in terms of grammar) and above all they need to read a lot throughout childhood. Otherwise you end up with people writing about their 'chester draws', which is undeniably phonetic depending on your accent, but very wide of the mark. Or people who find it hard to figure out the meaning of what they are reading because of confusion due to inability to distinguish between homonyms (for instance 'there', 'their', 'they're'), difficulty identifying verbs and nouns in sentences because of unfamiliar vocabulary that slows a student down either to the point of complete discouragement or complete bafflement. Functional illiteracy is still a major issue in British education. That outcome does not occur in a vacuum, and teaching of reading that assumes the classroom is a sort of vacuum or bubble not connected to the outside world is doomed to fail.

Thanks to the vagaries of the English language, what most students end up doing is actually learning words by sight even in synthetic phonics programmes with no sight words involved in formal instruction and no acknowledgement that learning sight words/analytic phonics/repeated exposure to whole word methods might be part of the process of learning to read that takes place outside of the classroom.

Anecdotally, the phonics plus dolch words method has served the school my DCs attended extremely well. One advantage it offers is that children have the chance of trying their phonics skills out using exciting and engaging reading material instead of being stuck with boring graded reading schemes that suck all the joy out of reading. Mastery of the dolch lists means a child can tackle about 75% of the words in the average book pitched at children aged 5 to 8. This means they do not get slowed down or discouraged, or forced to stick to the literary equivalent of gruel when there is much heartier fare available. When students find reading rewarding they tend to read more and reading more makes their reading more fluent. It's the opposite of a vicious circle.

I suspect the creeping push to make 4 yos learn a quantifiable skill such as decoding is based on the notion that since they are in school they should be justifying the expense, because otherwise what the government is doing is providing free daycare, which is unthinkable.

My son was literally just 4 when he started school his birthday is 26/08. He does enjoy school and had really excelled but in hind sight he probably wasn't ready emotionally when he started last September. He just looked tiny. His best friend and my god daughter is in the same year but is close to a whole year older than him.

Dino my DD is the 27th! She is in year 6 now and also has excelled...top groups for all but maths and even that she has done well with despite it not coming naturally to her.

It's taken her until the end of last year to really excell socially though....she struggled a bit in years 3 and 4. She's great now though....nice wide social circle and that was the thing which worried me most...more than the academics...I wanted her to have friends. She does now so it just shows that they sometimes take time to settle.

Because I work full time both my children went to nursery for 10 hours a day 5 days a week from the age of 1.

DD was 4yrs10 months when she started Reception. She basically left Nursery on a Tuesday and started Reception on the Wednesday. She knew her alphabet by the time she was 2, was utterly bored with nursery and was more than ready for school. We had tried to teach her to read for months, no success. By Xmas she was reading fluently. I was amazed by the progress she made in just 3 months. When I discussed it with the teacher she said they very much play it by ear according to the children's maturity, no two years are the same in terms of what they achieve.

DS1 has just started Reception at 4 years 2 months and is one of the youngest. He also went to Nursery full time and the transition has been smooth and so far so good. I can't imagine him reading by Xmas but you never know.

Our school is big but very caring and I don't think they push the children beyond their limits. And yet, they achieve things I would not have thought possible. So far and for us, I think the system works

I don't mind it, in fact it suits ds very much. He's ready now for school.

If you think that school is not good for them, what would you prefer?

Keeping them at home with you full time not an affordable option for most
Making family members look after them while you work?
Child minders who will teach them nursery stuff
Nurseries who will start them learning

seriously .... in deprived areas you get kids starting year 1 having only been with uneducated parents .... those kids never ever reach their full potential or catch up

MrsW and Dino, I completely understand your pov, but for my DS, whose bday is 8th Sep, so 4 days after the cut-off, that whole extra year is a LONG time. Imagine not starting school until 8 years old! He's just started FS1 last week, and was champing at the bit for something more interesting than private nursery. I am supremely happy that he has the chance to start now, and I've delayed his start from January when he was first offered the place as I did not want him staying in the same class for 5 terms while watching his classmates move up this September.

I have had one child start at 4 full time (UK system) and two start at 5 doing half days for the first year (US system).

Much happier with the later start.