Unfair to defer summer borns

[ifyoudont]

Dd was born late august, is the youngest in her year but instead of rest of her class being just under a year older than her , there’s 4 children who are nearly a year and a half older because they were born April -august the year above and deferred.

Somebody has to be the youngest and somebody the oldest but surely the fairest way is to keep the age difference within a year.

Dd is doing well academically and socially and only really struggling during playtime and PE as she is smaller. A boy in her class has early May birthday but because he was deferred instead of being 3+ months older than her is 15+ months older and the biggest and strongest in the class leading to several incidents where he has injured her.

A family member has a baby due in June and is already mentioned deferring them without knowing how advanced or behind they are going to be.

I definitely do think there are a few exceptions where it can be necessary but it seems to to be often done just because it can. Maybe there should be be stricter guidelines and some sort of test required?

AIBU? If so what am I missing?
I don’t hear people share this opinion often and haven’t shared it with family member

My anecdotes are from my real life. You may find it ridiculous but I am friends with teachers who have made the same observations. You accuse me of a lack of critical thinking but you come across as narrow minded and unable to accept alternative experiences and opinion. Believe it or not, you are not definitively right!

We are not taking a few days or weeks older. We are talking about someone that has had 33% more life experience than their class mate. This isn't insignificant at the ages we are talking about and it will impact maturity and approaches to play.

Your attempt to mock me simply proves you can't actually have a sensible debate about this. You simply want to shut down discussion and insult anyone that disagrees with you.

I absolutely would do it for a perceived advantage. If you have the opportunity and the resources to give your child an advantage in life why ON EARTH wouldn't you???

All the bleeding hearts on here that are of course 'only thinking about the other children' and would actively see their child disadvantaged just so as not to upset other people can say what they like online but faced with the same opportunity I'm sure they would take it too. Otherwise, I'd invite anyone who's child has any other type of advantage (engaged parents, extra curricular activities, own bedroom, nice area, parents with higher education, only children blah blah blah) to actively remove those things from their children so as to level the playing field fairly. Off you go...

Honestly don’t worry about ‘judgements’ from other people. Do the best you can for your own child and leave those judging to make their own decisions for their own kids.

As somebody who deferred two kids, I have never come across any disadvantage to doing so.

My anecdotes are from my real life. You may find it ridiculous but I am friends with teachers who have made the same observations.

How bizarre, in 20 years of working in primary schools (primarily in early intervention going into different schools within the LAs) I've never once had a teacher make that observation to me, nor encountered it myself.

How many teachers are you talking about here and across how many schools?

That’s really sad 😞

My friend also sent her son because the husband was dead against it.

I always took comfort from the fact that by deferring my son he could always jump up to the cohort he “should” have been in at any point during his schooling, so our decision was reversible if need be.

However I was told that if I didn’t defer him and he struggled then it would be very, very difficult to get permission for him to have him moved down a school year when he was already in education.

This level of flexibility with that comes with deferring made me feel a lot more reassured.

33% more life experience? So if the summer born is 9 there are 12 year olds in the class? Your anecdotes must be very narrow as if that doesn’t happen never it happens nearly never.

"Friends with teachers" 😂

Any experienced KS1 teacher will tell you that "young" classes (where a larger than usual proportion of the children are summer born) are very tricky to manage.

The same goes for "boy heavy" classes as boys tend to mature more slowly.

This isn't just an issue for the teachers but also all the children including the autumn borns as they are held back by disruptions.

What am I talking about? Wow, the rudeness of the debate on the anti deferral side highlights just how entitled you lot feel to not having any older kids in the class. As IF they are the ones causing problems. Laughable.

I don’t think any child should start school at 4. It’s a hang over from industrialisation. Deferring isn’t and shouldn’t be a middle class thing - especially as most mums in my area aren’t employed in any other work. It’s just the middle classes have researched the benefits and I’m sure more people will follow suit. Anyone against it just doesn’t get it or is passive aggressively worried their child they didn’t defer is at some sort of disadvantage. Which ironically they probably are, but not because there’s slightly older kids in the class 🙄

I'm talking about at Reception age quite obviously.

You realise the arguments you are making are also the exact case FOR delaying a summer born’s start? As they are having to socialise and learn alongside children with 25% more life experience as them; which you appear to agree would set them at a disadvantage?

There is a difference between challenging someone who only uses anecdotes and hearsay from others to inform their opinion and narrow mindedness. Of course I am not ‘definitively right’, all children are different and none of us have a crystal ball; which is why parents are forced instead to rely on studies and statistics and their own assessment of their child’s needs to make a decision about school start. But you are asserting that older children in the class cause problems for younger children and I am asking you for the evidence to support this as it is directly counter to what the studies and research suggests. You appear comfortable with regurgitating opinions and anecdotes of others to inform yourself and don’t seem much up for reflecting on any challenge to this.

Oh right so these issues only become apparent in KS1 and not in Reception then? Don't try to lecture me and presume my level of experience in the education sector.

Having a young or boy heavy class may be difficult but that doesn't mean that having a year with a large range of ages isn't difficult too. The concepts are not mutually exclusive.

I haven't made that assumption but in the same way that September born kids have been proven to have an advantage academically,

That’s interesting. I’m mid September born and started school on my 5th birthday, in year 1. I was always the youngest in the class.

I have made a successful career in academia.

I should have said KS1 and Reception for clarity, but if you really had such experience of education you would know that teachers tend to either teach Reception- Y2 or Y3-Y6 and Reception and KS1 tend to be categorised together for a lot of activities.

I don't need to make an presumptions about your experience in the education sector as it's patently obvious from your posts that you have none.

You can't have it all ways. If the argument is valid then why would you allow deferral and allow the disadvantage to be exacerbated for those who choose to stay with their peer group? If 25% additional life experience is too much then why is 33% better? There has to be a cut off somewhere so the youngest will always be detrimented. Even in a world where all summer borns defer than the February born children will be lacking life experience and the disadvantage will move to them.

No, the science simply doesn't back up your arguments. There are no studies that prove that summer born children that don't defer aren't disadvantaged by summer born children that do defer.

Trying to put aside the 'top of the class' nonsense, why can't this be about a summer born child simply having an extra year of being a little kid before they start school? Something that their September and October peers have been granted automatically.

I imagine that would be my first and overriding reason to defer - that very young 4 years olds are actually losing a whole year of their early childhood - they are in school everyday, and all that that entails - while children born just weeks later than them have a whole extra year to play, have naps, charge around all day, direct their own learning etc. Schooling comes soon enough, why not let them play if you are able to?

If it's because you think they'll be bored then surely your grievance is with the setting they're in, not the principle of delaying itself.

The playing field is never equal or anywhere near it. Kids have vastly different abilities, rates of development, parental resources and support.

Not only is there nothing wrong with parents acting in what they believe is the best interests of their child (for whatever reasons they consider valid), but it is absolutely the right thing for them to do.

If you believe that deferring should not be possible, then you should direct your complaints to the government rather than to parents who take this route as they are perfectly entitled to do.

Yup my DD has a huge advantage as deferred after she was born a month early on the last day of August. She was non verbal and not toilet trained when she should have started school and was on the SEN register at her nursery.
her advantage now is that she has caught up with her peers - which happen to be in the school year below.
I am so relieved that she was born after 2014 and there was some scope for flexibility.

I home educated my kids in the primary school years, apart from the youngest. So that's the perspective I come from. And the question of me is always "is this particular child ready and able to benefit from this educational program or curriculum?"

It would be crazy to me to take a child who is just not developmentally ready to learn to read, for example, and put them in a class where they were going to insist he learn to read, put him in special programs when all that is really necessary is a bit more time, or worse, use shortcuts to get him reading in a way that would be detrimental down the line. (Which, when I was working in a school as a literacy tutor, was something I saw a lot with 10 year old boys in particular.)

If schools aren't going to be flexible in their expectations for children at that age, then they need to accept that developmental readiness is important when they start. One of my children who was a very late talker and was still doing speech therapy would clearly not have been ready even though he was not young for year, he just needed more time to get his sounds down before starting reading. Other people have mentioned children not reliably toilet trained at 4, or I have known children still really needing a nap at that age - good sign they might not be ready for a full day at school.

Schools used to be a little less academically pushy in the first year or so. In fact where I live, kids were 6 months older when they began and it was only a half day. If we keep pushing expectations down for academic work there will be more children who aren't ready to meet those expectations.

It's not about "advantage". It's about delivering developmentally appropriate education to individual children.

If that were true then any child could be deferred based on proven need irrespective of the month they were born in. Also children that wouldn't benefit from being deferred and would actually thrive starting with their peers would not be allowed to defer. The system absolutely doesn't work like this and it is currently all determined by the desire of the parent.

If that were true then any child could be deferred based on proven need irrespective of the month they were born in.

Maybe that should be the way it happens. That might benefit a great number of children.

Indeed. What is the point of putting a child who is not ready for school in school? Do these people think it's a good use of the teacher's/TA's time to be managing unhappy, anxious little children who can't meet the academic or behavioural demands of school? Is it fair for a child to be set up for failure?

in Ireland, kids can start between 4 and 6, so there can be an almost 2 year age range

@harrietm87

Realistically though, no one starts a child at 4 now in Ireland. If they’ll turn 5 before Christmas they’ll probably start in Sept, though there’s a question mark over Nov/Dec kids these days as the starting age is going up.
In any case the age range is about a year, not two.

Yes, agreed but the law permits children to start between 4 and 6 so, as I said, it is theoretically possible to have an almost 2 year age range in a class.

A much better system imo.

‘There are no studies’ is very different to ‘you have read no studies’. All you need to do is a quick google to show that there are….

It doesn’t seem to matter how many times people explain that it’s not about being the youngest; it’s about starting school too young, missing a year of early years that your peers automatically get if born a couple of days or weeks later.