Help! Moving from Ireland to the Uk

[LorCall2]

Hi all,
any advice greatly appreciated. We are planning to move from Republic of Ireland to the UK in the summer holidays with the children starting school in September. They will be 7 and 5 then and should be starting junior infants and first class. From my research so far it looks like Ireland is essentially a year behind the UK in terms of curriculum I’m concerned my children will be very behind the kids their age. Any advice really welcome thank you

When do your children turn 7 and 5?
Where are you moving to? Scotland and England have very different systems.

First work out the year group they'll be in. the cutoff date for England is 31st August. So a child born on 31st August will be youngest in year whereas a child born the day after on 1st Sep will be oldest in the year below. For NI it's 30th June. Other regions have their own cutoffs.
Once you know the year group, google BBC bitesize - it has everything laid out by UK region and year group so you can have a look at what they're expected to have learned the year before.

The biggest problem - depending on their birth dates and where you move - may be getting them both into the same school.

Assuming England, if the 5 year old turns 6 between 1st Sept 2024 and 31st August 2025 then they will be going into Y1, if they turn 5 after 1st Sept 2024 then they will be going into Reception.

The closing date for applications for Reception in September 2024 was the 15th January, so you will be a late application and may find a lot of schools are already full.

For Y1, it will be an in-year admission so you will need to find a school with space, and there are rules on how many children can be in a class for those early years.

Your 7 year old will either be going into Year 2 or into Y3 depending on birthday. If Y2, infant class sizes still apply, if Y3 it might be slightly easier.

Hi, I’m a teacher (now working as a private tutor) and I wouldn't worry too much about either of them being behind at 5 and 7. Assuming they’ve had plenty of play based learning in Ireland, they will quickly catch up and possibly overtake their peers here in England who may have been pushed into formal learning too soon anyway.

The one thing that might throw your children is the English government led absolute focus in schools now to teach reading almost entirely by relying on synthetic phonics. Synthetic phonics are taught rigidly and systematically in most schools here now and children as young as 5 are tested on phonic knowledge regularly. If Ireland doesn’t teach phonics in the same way then your children might struggle with some of the sounds and terminology. For example, most Y1 children here know what a split digraph is so if Irish schools don’t teach like that it might take them a little while to learn these things.

If you think that might be a problem, let me know and I can suggest some books and videos you could start using now to get them up to speed in phonics. Btw, I’m definitely not suggesting I agree with the ‘phonics first and foremost’ stance of the British government - personally I think it puts a lot of children off reading and makes it a laborious exercise with little understanding or enjoyment. Therefore, I’d also suggest you spend the next few months doing whatever you can to encourage a love of reading… read to them daily etc etc.

In one of the schools I worked in, I regularly taught children who arrived at the school midway through with little to no English. It usually took around 6 months for them to catch up in areas of the curriculum they’d not covered before and that was when they were also having to learn a second language.

It’s easy for me to say I know, but try to relax and they’ll be fine. They are young enough to adapt and have plenty of time to catch up if necessary. They will obviously need a bit of time to settle in and, if I were you, I’d focus on helping them make friends and be happy at school first - then the rest will follow.