Parents of new reception starters: you do not have to start your child part-time or later in the term, no matter what the school says

[The3]

If your child is starting in reception at a state school, they are entitled to full-time education from the beginning of the Autumn term.

You can choose to send them part-time before they reach compulsory school age, but the school cannot insist that you do. Many schools present parents with transition arrangements which may be a later start, weeks of alternating mornings and afternoons, or gradual attendance building up to half term. Schools tend not to inform parents that these are optional, leaving lots of working families in the lurch when it comes to children who’ve left full-time nursery or other childcare, and plenty of people take unpaid leave or use up large chunks of their annual leave allowance dealing with the consequences of part-time or late starts.

If this is the case, for you, you can insist that your child begins school full time from day one. Your child has a right to this, if they are at a state school, and there is some very clear guidance from the Office of the Schools’ Adjudicator to explain this.

I’m posting this as my dc’s school had a six-week transition period, which would have meant I had to take all of my annual leave allowance to cover it, as I’d be able to attend work for less than an hour a day. I insisted on my dc’s right to full-time education, and it was fine, and many other parents sent their children in over the next few days, so more than half were full-time way before the end of the school’s transition period. Dc thrived at school, and transition from full-time nursery to full-time school was pretty straightforward all-in-all.

Where do you expect them to go during that time? The teachers are all doing other work (at ours they are doing assessments), so your child will either end up sitting in the office by themselves, or stuck into another class. Hardly an ideal start to school.

I can't understand the push to start children in school so early
It's so much pressure on the child and their parents
In my children's school many want to start their dc as soon as they've turned four but thats because they can't afford childcare
Although the children seem to have so many days off during the year I don't know how most working parents manage
I'm in Ireland and most schools don't have reception and more recently a lot of children don't start school until they are 5

@catherinedevalois the school admissions code does not specify the start of September. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator makes clear in the 2014 report that this is the intent of the code: children are entitled to attend school full-time from the start of the autumn term of the academic year in which they turn five. The OSA removed this exact ambiguity as schools were using it to justify “settling in” arrangements which denied children this right.

As to concern about what the child will be doing if they start, full-time, ahead of others: schools couldn’t get away with leaving a child in the office for that time, as a PP has suggested. In my case, dc was either grouped with Y1 children or did activities with a TA. Within a couple of days, she wasn’t on her own with the TA as other children joined her once parents twigged it was an option. She actually had a lovely start to school, making lots of Y1 friends as well as receptions, and having a boost to her early literacy from all the additional reading and phonics sessions.