I need a safe place to grieve and to rage for our summer-born children.

[lingle]

According to the press, Sir Jim Rose has thrown away the Government's suggestion that allowing immature summer-born children to defer their entry into reception for a year should become the norm in England as it is in Scotland.

Although DS2 is now "safe", because I have Bradford LEA's confirmation in writing that we can year-defer and start reception at 5, I am genuinely grief-stricken by this. I have campaigned for this for some time and have become every more convinced that parents need this option.

We have had contact with four health professionals in relation to DS2 now. Whatever I think of them in other respects, all four, plus the two teachers at school, have expressed strong and immediate confirmation that deferring DS2's formal education until he is 5 will fundamentally change his life chances for the better. In my view, this simple act of waiting for the child to be as ready as he can will be more valuable and save the taxpayer more money than any assessment, intervention or therapy.

As if I needed any more confirmation, the specialist early years support teacher who looks after DS2 has confirmed that her pupils consist completely disproportionately of summer-borns.

I suppose the July-August borns with mums who have followed the debate will at least benefit from understanding parents who know it is the system, not the child, that is awry, and who will shield them and remind their teachers of the issue. But the parents who don't know that 4.0 is absurdly early for so many little ones to be sitting concentrating and learning to read, write and add up will be told their child is "behind" or "struggling", if not in reception, where they can soften the blow, then in Year 1 or Year 2. From the statistics about diagnoses of ADHD, etc, it seems that there are many false positive diagnoses in summer-borns.

I feel quite sickened by this wasted opportunity. I feel angry. I feel I should have done more. I need a thread where no one says "Well mine started school at 4.0 and it's wonderful so therefore every child ought to start at 4.0". I feel safer on the SN board.

nursery and reception use the same curriculum. So if you kept your child at nursery they would be doing the same 'work' anyway.

JJ - just wrote you a long thread explaining the huge differences at my school between nursery and reception but then the internet ate it!

I do appreciate I'm really lucky with choice of schools. Where we lived before, in a big town, people spent thousands moving into the best catchments and there were really only a couple of good primary schools. The others really were so bad we'd have been forced to consider going privately if we'd stayed there.

I do strongly believe that an extra year in nursery, which in ds' school is combined with reception, followed by reception at 5.0 would be best for him. However, our county council is totally inflexible and have said no to cases which are probably far more worthy than ours. The next best option is to leave him where he is as we have no transition worries and the classes are tiny.

I think the system used to be more flexible than it is now. I mentioned to my mum the other day that I didn't remember my own reception year, which turns out to be because I only spent 2 weeks there. As I could read and write I was put up a year and missed reception, which probably did me no favours socially. As a shy child I remember feeling completely out of my depth with the older children in my class. I really don't want ds to feel similarly in his class.

btw brief hijack as I know you're on - lingle, tried to contact you the other day via the contact a mumsnetter thing but your options are set not to receive mail (think this happens by default, it had on mine anyway) You can change this at my mumsnet, email options if you want to, or if you prefer not to receive kettlemail I will quite understand!!

lingle, I would hope that nobody, as outraged as they may have seemed, would be asking you to leave this board Let's get a bit of perspective, here. It was one thread title among a hundred gems!

Nobody's asked anyone to leave I don't think, unless I've missed something and I hope I haven't!

FWIW I was contacting lingle about a potential meetup, nothing to do with this thread! Spotted her on here this afternoon which is why I grabbed the chance to pass the message on via this thread.

"By lingle on Tue 09-Dec-08 18:37:54

...so long as no one dares suggest I had dark motives I'd like to stay on this board. There seem to be a few people who find my interminable ramblings helpful so it would be a shame to have to leave..."

Sorry for not being clear, Kettlechip, I was responding to lingle's own post, where she said that it would be a shame to have to leave the board

Anyway.... as we were saying.... school starting age and SEN... now where is that report ..... will find it..... just rummaging.... hold on.......

Here we are chaps. Here's something to get your teeth into....

www.ifs.org.uk/docs/born_matters_report.pdf

If you're in a hurry, do a search for "Special"

now if only I'd started with this link.... I do hope a reasonable number of people are still with us.....

Oh drat the link isn't working.

Right:

Google "When you are born matters" using the UK option and you'll get it.

Stay with me everyone....

See page 34 for instance. I'll quote to ease the pain:

"For this group, SEN status is recorded at age 11 (Key Stage 2). In contrast to the findings for our younger group ... we now observe statistically significant differences between the proportions of August- and September-born pupils who have a statemented or non-statemented SEN status, and suggests that being 11 months younger can significantly increase the likelihood of being classified as having a less severe special educational need by around 70% for girls and 45% for boys".

So for every 100 September-born boys with SEN, there are 145 August-born boys with SEN. There are various possibilities to explain this.

1. children conceived in November are suffering from an environmental impact that affects their development. Hmm. I think we can dismiss that one.

1. Children with special needs born in September are failing to receive the diagnosis and help they need. Hmm, some, probably, but not a statistically significant amount I suspect.

1. Children who just need more time are being diagnosed as having more significant special needs than instead of just being given more time.

1. Doctors are seeing an August child struggle and trying to help by providing a diagnosis because the child needs the diagnosis to access extra support. But really it is the curriculum and peer group that is wrong, and the child's deficiencies are would self-resolve with time given the correct curriculum and peer-group.

So, as the mother of a 6-year-old child whose difficulties self-resolved with time, and of another 3-year-old child whose difficulties are starting to reduce, I ask myself: who is in denial here? Me, or the people who assure us that the curriculum is adapted to the needs of each individual child?

As I was saying earlier on another post .... when are the powers that be going to realise that our 'system' does not suit all and must must must be altered to assist the younger ones. I volunteer in an infant school and all the Summer babies are put on one table. They get a bit of input, but I watch them struggle all the way through the 3 years - rarely progressing to higher groups ... it makes me want to pick them all up and run away with them (not sure where to yet)

Number 3 above makes perfect sense, doesn't it ?

It's all about MONEY

Ooh good let me know what you think of it when you've had time Tclanger. No hurry.

Did you know that until this report came out, the "powers that be" believed that "it all evens out" and that the August birth penalty goes away. Thank goodness we've now got hard evidence (also thank goodness I did statistics A-level - quite hard reading isn't it!).

Oh Brainfreeze.... .....

any explanations gratefully received....my stats A-level was 20 years ago... knew it would come in handy one day though.....

To say it evens out or isnt important is silly . That's the same as saying that there should be no difference between my Dt's capabilities at 7 as opposed to 8 which is the age of some of the children in their class. quite clearly they will be capable of achieving so much more this time next year

it does seem silly in retrospect doesn't it?
But that's what used to be thought until very recently - that over the whole educational career, it would even out. I think Ed Balls even mentioned this in his brief to Jim Rose.

Kettle can you use [email protected] please? I wonder if you can guess my real name! Think I got your first name.

The thing that I can't understand, is that whilst I can get my head round the idea of there being a difference in abilities between a child that is aged 5 and a child that is aged 4 years 1 month at the start of the school year, surely when deciding whether a child has special needs they compare them to other children who are the same age as them, ie other children aged 4 years 1 month.

lingle, will do! My previous nickname was a pretty good clue as to my first name so I'm, sure you're right. And my email address is basically my full name at yahoo which is why I didn't put it on here.. I'm bad enough as it is at this anonymity business

And back to the thread, will have a read of all your links later on, am just watching that Lost for Words documentary which was on a few weeks ago. It's alarming that I'm watching a child who is considered to have a major speech issue which is going to hold him back at school and thinking that compared with ds he seems fairly advanced..

Lingle do not worry so much on behalf of everyone!! because there ARE upsides to starting school at 4 if you DO have a SEN child....My ds was diagnosed with his problems by a trained SEN teacher and hence we realised why his behaviour had always been so strange. If he had not gone to school when he did, we would have had to wait longer to start helping him. I think SEN kids need help asap and delaying it a year in the hope they grow out of it may not be helpful, if they don't...and I would guess numbers wise there are probably more SEN kids that need an early diagnosis than immature ones that don't need one!!!

..lingle I don't understand your previous post. In it you say that SEN status was diagnosed at 11years old. Surely by then the non-SEN/immature kids would have grown out of their immaturity and not be classed as SEN at 11 anyway [confused emicon].

I agree that most children identified as having significant SEN will be identified irrespective of when their birthday falls. However I do think that its possible for less srious problems to be highlighted too early /not noticed on time for children who are both very old and young for their year. A very young child who has immaturities/delayed development or whatever problem could be identified as having more serious issues than say an older child in the same year but with similiar issues for their age. I think in a busy classroom setting as long as children fit in broadly with whats expected in a particular year then problems could no unnoticed in a slightly older child because they fall within the norm for that year group. Similarly the younger child may be immature for his or her age and fall outside the "norm" but with maturity could catch up and concerns may have been premature

Lil, it is confusing. You might find it better to go straight to the report itself so you can draw your own conclusions.

I was actually quite heartened by Bullet's post. The early start date seems better outside mainstream? Dunno, outside my experience.