Keir Starmer "sick and tired" of hearing about children who aren't school-ready

[Kirova]

I get the point he's trying to make, of course, but it seems like a stick to beat parents with (and particularly mothers, of course). There's no sense in saying you want all children to be in the same place when they start school. Apart from anything else, some are nearly a year younger than others in their cohort, so clearly they are not going to be in the same place.

My youngest daughter was born premature, has a significant hearing impairment and various other difficulties. She will soon be two, and while she's doing brilliantly, I doubt she'll be "school-ready" by the government's current definition when she is four.

Not sure what my point is exactly, it just seems like another absurd over-simplification on the theme of failing our children, state of the country, etc.

SS initially focused on the 20% most deprived areas and was made up of lots of different services, so could be HV, parenting and nutrition support, playgroups, therapies etc. Also childcare. So it's not about 'who went' or not- you can be MC and need nutritionist support, it's just that your LA would have put it all in one place and made it easier to access and signpost to a range of other services.

@Wyksister Why do you think these “not ready for school” dc go to child care? Or nursery? Frequently they don’t. They are dc often looked after by extended family or have parents with many dc and their home life is chaotic. It’s something that should be monitored at progress checks, but it’s not.

Not sure what has happened in the UK over the last 15 years but this wasn’t ever an issue when my DC started school.

@StepawayfromtheLindors When I was an Education Officer 30 years ago, we had pockets of this. In areas of higher deprivation and too many chaotic families. I remember an infant school head very concerned because 10 out of 60 YR starters were not potty trained. That was very high even for that school. In other areas, a not loo trained dc at age 4 would be unusual. Parents have always differed in ability and what they think is important.

We now have more parents who are not teaching dc to get dressed and undressed, how to ask to go to the toilet, how to listen to a story or instructions, how to play with others, how to control emotions and not hit or kick, how to eat with cutlery - the list is endless. Too many parents don’t bother or think dc should not have to learn “until they are ready”. Which is code for “cannot be bothered!” It’s sad for these dc.

I am one of the ‘wrong’ parents who used SS. I actually live 5 minutes away from their main hub locally and it was attached to my DDs primary.
Where I live is the nicer area which butts against an area of social deprivation separated by a main road.

The case worker we saw and dealt with said she actually wanted parents of all backgrounds attending as it was easier to get some parents to do things if they saw others doing it and not making a big deal of it. That she wanted them to see there were parents who worked part time and still did these things with their DC.
A few of us ended up managing the stay and play sessions when funding was cut and staff were too busy.
we did have an issue when they tried to exclude me and DD from certain events for having ‘the wrong postcode’. This is just before they started to close down anyway, DD went to school nursery and it seemed like too much effort when they didn’t want us there. So the stay and play ended anyway.

😂

I think the biggest mistake is allowing this to happen and continue. Teachers should not be having to change nappies. Perhaps the time has come to delay these children starting and telling parents they need to to get their child ready and/ir come into school if the child is not toilet trained.

My children were assessed to within an inch of their lives at preschool with all targets etc so children attending these settings can be assessed by professionals in these settings. Where children aren’t attending these settings then parents need to be told that they must attend pre school assessment and delay the child starting if necessary.

We seem to be moving rapidly towards some parents doing practically nothing but having responsibility for their children and it’s not sustainable, affordable or acceptable to a modern society.

There are many 10yos who don’t wash their hands. They may be very capable of doing it but they don’t actually do it!

This is precisely why we used to have a norm of different school starting points - because a child who is 4yrs 0m is not in the same place as one who is 4yrs 11m, very naturally and very obviously.

There's too much pressure on the natural development process now - parents without time, school starting earlier and professional childcare not taking on what parents used to do.

Since 2010 we've had fifteen years of cuts for every single service and a steep fall in wages (in real terms). Every piece of our society is feeling it.

There was a lot of almost Victorian style poverty in the 1960's when I grew up. Many people shared outside toilets for example and it was quite common to wash in a tin bath in front of the coal fire. But I didn't got to school with a single child who at 4 or 5 was still in nappies or who ate with their hands.

How does this affect parents teaching their children how to use the toilet? @ginasevern makes a valid point. I wonder if some parents nowadays just can’t be bothered.

Quite agree. There was grinding poverty in the era I grew up in and precious little to nothing in the way of services. I fully expect people to tell me that children were brought up by a "village" in those days. They weren't. If anything parents get considerably more help from grandparents these days. If you were lucky your mum or MIL might help out for a few days with a new baby but that was it. After that you were expected to get on with it.

Poster is extremely paranoid no one cares what sport your husband watches, I've been to baby groups where some mum's are foreign and can barely speak English seriously no one cares if you mispronounced one letter.
Now I had my first really young and used to go to baby groups at 16 looking even younger because I was a short ass now that was awkward, but he has no cousins and had no siblings at the time so needed the socialising, can't let awkwardness get in the way of living your life.

As for the non potty trained school children I think it's exaggerated when my eldest started school a couple years ago there was only one child out of 30 in nappies and she was autistic and couldn't talk.

@verycloakanddaggers”services” don’t replace parents and parental responsibility. We have dc not having vaccination - that service is still available. Dc are screened by the nhs. Thats available. As is paid for nursery hours. People don’t use the services that are there! It’s not up to the state to bring up dc.

I agree.
Last year, a third of our pan who got offered a place rejected it as they wanted to defer (small school so not as many as it sounds) - never known that before unless the child has severe needs

One of the reasons children start school still in nappies is because they can. Right up to the late 90s if you wanted your child to go to playgroup age 3 they had to be out of nappies. Not once did i have a child not able to start because they weren't "dry". Mums made sure their child was potty trained so they could start. Then we were told were discriminating against children that weren't ready. What then happened is mums realised they had a ready made excuse for not having their child ready to start.
If it was announced tomorrow that if your child is still not toilet trained by the time they start school a parent must be on call to change them, all NT children would be out of nappies because parents would no longer have an excuse.

Toilet paper is cheaper than nappies so all the more reason to train em up!

Surely, as an adult, you realise that he’s not making that comment about you? You’re looking to be offended by something that wasn’t directed at you.

there are children starting school who haven’t been toilet trained. There was a slot on BBC breakfast several months ago (possibly last year) which compared the % of children who started school untrained in the 1940s and 50s and the amount who are now starting school still in nappies and it’s shot through the roof. We are going backwards as a society when it comes to parenting. My friend works in a school in a major UK city and of the 38 children starting school, 10 were still in nappies. This isn’t normal. That’s more than a quarter of the class. Granted it’s in a poor area of the city but it’s ALWAYS been a poor area and children were always toilet trained in the past. It’s sad indictment of today’s attitudes to parenting.

That's quite the insulting/inaccurate generalisation you just made about working-class people there.

I just looked at the actual interview and the point he is making is that he wants to make sure all kids have access to the free pre-school childcare they are entitled to, so the mothers are not alone in getting them school-ready.

I'm not really "looking to be offended" and considering my older two were both school-ready (presumably...they could play nicely with other children, dress themselves in slightly erratic colour combinations, they could follow instructions and were both toilet-trained) I'm not particularly worried that the state is going to judge me an inept parent if DD3 isn't. However, if your child is born prematurely, you may already feel like you failed as a mother. In my case, I also feel like I failed because I was in intensive care for her first three days, because I couldn't breastfeed and because I had to have emergency surgery a few weeks later when she was still a vulnerable preemie. It might be illogical and I know that all these things most likely were not my fault, but I still have to fight really hard not to feel a bit responsible for the difficulties she has now and may have in the future.

Feeling that your child is going to have some "not school-ready" label stamped on them at 4 makes you more worried about those things, not less. And while I know he's not really thinking about kids like my daughter, I still think the words he used weren't very thoughtful or kind. There are other ways - better ways - to make the point than using the words he did.

And maybe that's soft and oversensitive, but I think he should care because he has a habit of using the wrong words. And it is making it harder for him to deliver his programme, not easier.

But we’re at a point where softly softly isn’t working. He isn’t talking about you or your child who (possibly) has additional needs. He’s talking about and to the parents of the swathes of underparented children or children who haven’t been parented at all.

I really don’t think Starmer is referring to children with additional needs. He’s referring to most children and saying that these children need to have a level of independence when they start school that even a few years ago nobody quibbled about.

Teachers don’t want to change nappies or brush teeth; that’s not why they entered mainstream primary teaching. Otherwise they’d be in nurseries or special schools.

OP.
he doesn’t mean children like yours.
He means children who could have been supported to manage but haven’t.
If more parents of NT. children did their proper job teachers would have more time to focus on those who need more support.