More interesting posts - thanks.
Littleladyloulou, I hear what you are saying: is this workload an issue if both children and parents are happy with it?
While not having the workload at school that you did, I didn't struggle with reading or word tins at all. But I think that several key things set this situation with DS (and clearly lots of other reception children) apart, a generation on:
(1) With the scrapping of rising fives, children are going to school earlier. I started a month before my fifth birthday, and was a bright girl who wanted to sit still, be good and learn school-style. Despite the legal requirement being for full-time education to begin in the term following a child's fifth birthday, pretty much all children now start the term after their fourth birthday. My parents went to school a whole year later than DS at five - today's starting age has crept earlier, with the attendant problems of children being less developmentally and emotionally ready for the rigours of school. There's a boy in DS's class who turned four on 31st August.
(2) DS is a boy, and from my understanding, boys are about a year behind girls developmentally and separate less easily from their primary carer. DS is a bright child and he is enjoying learning to read, but he hates separating from me in the mornings and even a half-term in, this is still a real wrench and upsetting for both of us. He, like his male class mates, is also interested in leaping about and being lively, not sitting still and being "good" and using a pencil to draw fiddly letters: this age is all about gross motor skills for most boys. So arguably, with boys especially - and particularly at age four instead of five - the school system is expecting a level of maturity of them that many are not able to deliver yet. There is one autumn-born boy in DS's class, whose mum is a primary school teacher. She planned her pregnancy so her son would be autumn-born (!), as she suspected he wouldn't be ready for school as a young four-year-old.
(3) There is little indication of early pressure to read and write achieving longterm literacy gains, and it can turn off some enthusiastic children later on. In fact, research into home education - where home ed kids often learn at their own pace with minimal pressure, and learn to read later - shows it to provide a comparable-to-better education than school. Our literacy levels in the UK are poorer than many other countries whose formal education systems don't kick in until six or seven. So is early really best?
(4) Birth to seven (ish) has been argued to be the age of emotional development, with reason and intellect dominating after that. OK, so this is a bit black-and-white, but it makes sense to me (big softie that I am) that with children so young, the focus should be on nurture, emotional security, expressing and managing feelings, etc - not bloody phonics!
So why, in view of all this, am I sending DS to school?! No alternative at the moment, unfortunately. But I do so wish the system was more geared towards children's natural developmental patterns, giving them a bit more of a free childhood and a bit less formal learning; in fact, perhaps naively, I expected this.
In practice, we do DS's reading books and word practice because he likes this; he isn't interested in forming the letters yet, so that homework just doesn't get done. I'd rather him do it later when he's ready.
Rant over.
Thank you all for posting.