date of birth and education

[ja06le07]

Hi, i was just wondering if any one would share their opinion on this bit of information? Do you have two or more children, are you in agreement?

Children born in the summer achieve lower grades than those born in the autumn.

Thank you!

I have 2 daughters both born in May. The eldest is in Yr1 on the G&T register. The youngest is in Reception and has her own differentiated homework/spellings that are the same as many of the Yr1 children.

So in a nutshell I disagree with the general statement.

A quick search on MN should reveal that teachers here report that month of birth isn't an effective predictor of achievement and the idea that TAs teach low ability groups might happen in a few "bad" (IMHO) schools but isn't good practice ... (even if I had a TA )

August baby here. I was always in top sets in school and got exceedingly good exam results.

Ds is also an august baby so I will be very interested to see if he takes it in his stride or not too.

The thing to remember, is that if your summer baby really excels at school, would they have excelled even more if they had been born a few months later, in the autumn? Obviously some DC are more academically able than others and when they are born has no effect on this. All it means is that they are in competition with others who may be equally academically able, but 10 months older than them.

The problem is whatever the cut off date there will always be the eldest and youngest in a class.

Yes, we can't all plan to have our DC in Sept! How would maternity services cope?

Well I've got 6DC. Three are summer born boys and they have struggled with literacy. I know that proves nothing other than three of my DS struggled to learn to read and are poor spellers!

Even if you ignore the school side of thing they are still at disadvantage. They are the last in their school year to learn to drive, get a job, etc. They can't even join in when all their friends celebrate their A level results. They all went out but the late summer borns who were still 17 couldn't even get into the venue let alone buy a drink.

If I had my time again I would avoid summer birthdays.

If the cut off was January or April or October there would still be the same issue it would just move it.

My summer born is actually doing v well academically, but as someone else mentioned that would be even more true if she were nearly a year older. She has really struggled socially though. A combination of being one of the youngest and perhaps being a bit behind socially anyway (quite common with bright children) hasn't really helped.

What I would be interested to know is how much of it has been down to staggered starts. In some schools the youngest children had a double disadvantage IMO in both being the youngest, and then only starting school in the last term of reception. The older children had the advantage of 2 terms of schooling before the youngest even started. That has surely got to have quite a big impact. Luckily DD's school started them all the same in the September.

If your young summer born only has one or two terms in reception and their older counterparts have 3 of course it is going to make a difference

My PILs are retired teachers and say this is bollocks.

They always say it depends on the child more than the month they were born.

It depends. I think for some summer borns it takes a while to catch up. But I know quite a few boys that were born right at the end of August who have achieved highly in everything and a couple got into Oxford and cambridge, one of which ended up with the highest degree in his class year. I know one thing they all complain about is that at primary school many of the teachers wrote them off completely as they were the youngest so put them on the 'low tables' so they felt unchallenged.
The girls I grew up with that were summer born generally caught up a lot quicker than boys.
So I have seen a lot of good results despite the stats.

How can it be bollocks?it is a statistical fact. Unless your pils have worked at schools in all locations in the uk and in all age ranges, they are unlikely to be able to judge this issue based on ther own personal experience.

Please ignore spelling I'm on an iPad

The statistics look at one factor - month of birth when there are many factors that influence future academic success

IMO primary school teachers were more than willing to use the excuse of immaturity to leave the summer born boys in the care of the TA while they got on with teaching the rest. All my summer borns are well past this stage but I had to pay for private tuition to get mine ready for secondary school/even pre GCSE. They have all coped well with A levels.

It depends on the DC. DS with August birthday always struggled. DH with August birthday won a scholarship to a fee paying, selective school at 11 yrs (without hot housing, tutors etc)

Perhaps you need to read all the threads on MN - my child isn't ready for school to see that the problem /excuse is much more widespread.

Not sure my DS2's teacher even knows he is the youngest in the year... He is doing really well... And I actually think if he had been born those few days later he would have been bored rigid at home with me/ at preschool... He was in a hurry to be born and has been in a hurry ever since to learn...
Meanwhile my Jan born DS1 is average...
It is like any statistic it may be true generally but it is not a forgone conclusion for a particular child.

www.mumsnet.com/SearchArch?mustmatch=summer+born&dontmatch=&nickname=mrz&src_displ_option=s_m_d_m&fromDate=&toDate=&topicmode=All&availtops=-1

Absolutely agree mrz
There are groups of children who are identified as being at a disadvantage in uk schools based on statistical evidence. For these children being summer born can be a further disadvantage

I understand on average there is a difference but that is averaging out a very wide and overlapping spread of abilities in both groups. It is not the same as saying all summer born children do worse than all autumn born children. There are a lot of other factors affecting educational achievement including how well the school handle the range of maturity/development in the year group.

But what is there to do about it? Life deals you lots of advantages and disadvantages, your date of birth is one you can't go back and change!

I have two children but they are so different in temperament/motivation it's hard to say whether their birth date is affecting their achievement.

They've worked in loads of places across England and Wales. FIL secondary school and MIL primary school. In state schools in run down areas and in posh private schools.

Both of DPs godparents are teachers as was his grandma. They all say it's to do with the individual child.

More of a disadvantage if they want to be a defender in professional football apparently!!!

In my dcs classes, some of the brightest are summer born & back in the day when getting a level 3 in writing at KS1 was really rare it was a summer born who achieved it!!!!

As a school governor I look at the school stats. And it's broken down over a dozen ways so we can check that no group is under performing.

It's broken out by gender, race, FSM, SEN etc.

It's interesting that it's not broken down by birthdate. ( this is a junior school).

It's reasonable to expect that if summer births were doing significantly worse than other groups they would have a group for them in the stats.

Doing statistically worse, does not mean significantly worse. I'm on my phone do can't look it up - but isn't the difference very small? 3% or something?

Ie almost every other factor (gender, race, parental income, postcode) has more importance than birthdate.

You can't even say that your bright summer baby would have done even better if they'd been born in Sep. they might have. Or they might have found the early years of school easy and not worked so hard and therefore not fulfilled their potential......