Reception children in Year 1

[Azzie]

A friend's dd will be starting school this September. The school have told my friend that because the intake is large this year, they intend putting her dd and 4-5 other Reception children into Year 1. She is worried what effect this will have on her dd, both educationally and socially. Anybody got any experience of this, or any advice?

My experience (as a governor) is that mixed age classes are becoming more and more common, although to be fair I hadn't heard of mixing Year 1, with new intake.

Where "my"school mixed classes, we tried to ensure that additional support in the form of teaching assistants went into these classes, so that the "new group" would have dedicated support.

My advice would be to contact the school and arrange to meet the relevant teacher as soon as possible. That way your friend can raise any questions she has and hopefully the teacher can give some reassurance that your friend's dd will not be thrown in at the deep end.

PS (Usually the problems we have with mixing ages is that parents feel their child is being "held back" by not going in with the older children - although I appreciate that its different if you have a tiny just starting school).

Good luck

I think this is rather strange because Reception and Year 1 do such different things. Reception still do a lot of play whilst year 1 have to do much more work. Our school has much smaller reception classes because each intake (September and January) is only half a year group so they are always together, only a few of the previous intake will be forced to move up to the next class to make room but never the 'newies'. I don't think this will hold a child back unless they have problems in settling in. I have the opposite problem that my 6 yr old DS won't fit in the Year 2 class who will be doing SATS next summer so he has been left with the Year 1 group which has caused me some concern. Having spoken to other parents with experience of his new teacher, I have been told that she is excellent at bringing on underachievers and this might actually work better for him. I suppose I will just have to wait and see.

When I went to a large infant school we had four classes which were all mixed reception/year one (and three year two classes). So they must have thought this was an advantage. Maybe other children to show them the ropes, more attention to the new ones etc. OK this was 25 years ago

Thirty-odd years ago I started school at a village school which had mixed age classes right from day one, so it's nothing new. In fact I think in some ways I probably benefited from it as there wasn't any artificial restriction on what was expected in one particular year, so if you were capable of more you could do more. I know that when we moved to a different area when I was 10 I was repeating things I'd already done for the next 18 months, so based on that I wouldn't worry too much about being in a mixed age class with older children.

Mostly this is because of numbers, and government regulations on class sizes, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as the teachers are geared up for it. Check what extra help is around. In particular it would be inappropriate IMO for reception children to be with year one children for the literacy and numeracy hour.

In our local primary there are two classes of mixed ages, taking children from 5 to 7, (reception, Yr 1 + Yr 2). But they split up into the three year groups for literacy and numeracy. The teachers think it is a good thing for children to be in mixed groups, it encourages teamwork, and helps behaviour, as the majority of the class know what they are supposed to be doing.