Recent study of children joining reception class

[Liveandletlive18]

A recent study by kindred2 of a 1000 teachers resulted in finding a quarter of children today joined reception class when still in nappies. Many children are unable to climb a staircase or sit properly on the floor due to lack of exercise & muscle tone. The children used expressions more common in America such as trash & vacation due to excessive screen time. Teachers stated covid is no longer an excuse. They say a lot of this is due to busy parents working & having less time to interact with children & teach them basic skills. Is this a worrying trend.

OP has exaggerated. Sadly, a quarter of children lacking adequate toilet training is accurate but stuff like being unable to sit up due to lack of muscle tone etc is about two children, it's not a widespread phenomenon. Read the report.

It will be a child with a medical condition probably undiagnosed if the teacher surveyed felt necessary to comment on it.

My daughter has has hypotonia and I have only just managed to teach her to crawl up stairs at 30 months. She never wanted to climb anything. She is still a way off being able to walk up without leaning backwards.

I didn't agree with the VAT bit either just the nappy part but I think its not unreasonable to expect the majority of children to be able to read something, even if its just their name.

Recognising their name isn’t reading, plus multi-lingual kids often progress slower than single language kids.

Well all my siblings, cousins and kids/grandkids were toilet trained before school and could read basic stuff and some could write.

Cool.

Doesn’t mean it should be required of all children starting school.

(Toilet trained, I agree with)

I've not often heard people saying children should be able to read before staring school. I thought the general consensus was that kids in the UK are reading too early and the Scandinavian approach is better.

Congrats to all your cousins etc though obviously.

DC primary school recomended that parents don't try and actively teach their DC to read (apart from recognise their name) before starting Reception, as most parents weren't taught using phonics and that's the approach schools have to teach.

I agree that an entire day with a very small child is absolutely relentless and I certainly don’t think the issues discussed here come about after half an hour of kid’s programs a day on a tablet.

I think it’s more that so many kids seem to be constantly glued to them - even while out and about when there are other things they could be focussed on.

Someone else said about giving kid’s a screen so they won’t be disruptive while out and about - but then how will they learn how to behave?

Ive never let DS watch a screen when we have eaten out, for example. I hate seeing it and I think it’s unnecessary and he has always behaved very well without one. I also allow him to be bored on as many occasions as I can - he can easily do a 2 hour car journey without needing to watch anything. It’s all about moderation.

Same at our school - where the kids are all (as far as I can see) absolutely thriving.

I'm surprised at this, I taught my son (23) to recognise letters, sounds of letters and to read a bit by the time he started school. Surely this can only benefit the child, how can you teach a child to read without using phonics?

This is a fib that teachers tell parents, that you shouldn't teach them before school because it will confuse them when they try to teach phonics. It's not true. The real reason you shouldn't teach your pre-school child to read is because there is no benefit to trying to speed up the age they learn to read and you are distracting them from their real work, which is play, and the things they really need to learn. The vast majority of 3-4 year olds are also not ready to learn to read and write and trying to make them learn it is arduous, appears to them to be pointless, and gives them negative associations with reading. But parents won't believe you if you say that.

Being school ready means being independent, confident and sociable, everything else can be taught by teachers and will be quickly picked up by a child who is ready to learn it.

If they know a few letters, numbers and shapes before starting, that's nice, but it makes very little difference to how successful they will be at reading.

Why do the teachers fib about that? What's in it for them?

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

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.

AHH yeah that makes sense thank you

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’.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?