David Baxter: When, if ever, will the North look at school starting ages?

What this means in real terms is that children who are considered young for their year can put off starting school until the following school year. This applies to children born between April 1 and July 1.

This legislation will bring us into line with a worldwide opinion on school starting ages, though that, in itself, doesn’t mean to say it’s right or wrong and is only part of the picture, as I will argue later on.

To put it simply, in most of Europe and in many Westernised countries in the world, children do not start school until they are six or seven, while in Northern Ireland, they normally start in September of the school year following the year after their fourth birthday, with the exception of summer births, who start in the September after their fifth birthday.

This makes Northern Ireland one of the places in the world with the lowest school starting age.

Peaches and pears

For many, we are viewed as being out of step with everywhere else, but what those arguments have failed to note is the type and quality of pre-school education that’s available in late starting countries; unless this is done, it’s a bit like comparing peaches and pears.

At face value, the problem with the present system means that some children in P1 could be as young as 4 years and 2 months, and others, older than 5 years old.

At such a young age, that span is often too big, and there is an argument that the very young simply are left behind, and this isn’t helped by the fact that such a wide age range places huge pressures on schools to differentiate work to accommodate them.

It may not seem like much, but having that span of age in one class is a nightmare scenario for a teacher.

So what’s stopping us from moving forward on this whole area? Well, there are three main obstacles.

Firstly, we have one political party who thinks that ‘if it happens in Europe’, it must be right; an opposing political system which thinks the opposite; and finally, an inane and anodyne government and civil service that is obsessed with constant review processes, and cripplingly-slow operational speed.

Going past that quagmire, what do we know of public opinion, not that such details will count for much?

For starters, it’s very difficult to get any empirical evidence that is completely relevant to Northern Ireland.

Those in favour of flexible starting ages will vehemently point out that other countries have up to seven years old as a starting age, forgetting the pyramidal nursery school structure beneath that, often funded from higher taxes.

Opponents will speak of the lack of evidence for leaving it so late. The reality? Both sides are right, and both are wrong.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways of measuring success, but let’s start with the crude number-crunching of assessment results. On this question of attainment, many respected UK studies have looked at age and length of schooling as factors for defining academic progress in school.

From this, it is now taken as read that summer-born children perform less well than their older siblings do.

Before I accidentally start a riot, it is also a held belief that over time, this difference diminishes, though exactly when has yet to be determined.

This has obvious implications for transfer tests, both historic and planned, and it’s surprising that no politician has run with this.

Against that, there are potential behavioural concerns with starting children older, as some studies have found that, in the long term, the more children are ‘held back’ from starting school, the more behavioural problems emerged.

Example

One such example is in the field of Special Needs, as some children in this category may have been misdiagnosed as being immature and, as we know, the earlier the intervention in SEN work, the better.

Research in this field is quite disparate, but in purely academic terms, some major studies concluded that there was no lasting benefit to starting early in terms of mathematical or numeracy attainment, though much of this research has emanated from the USA, which has a vastly different educational system in place.

Literacy research is based on so many language development precedents that it’s almost impossible to draw analogous conclusions.

So where does that leave us? From all the research, there are common facts that make interesting reading.

Firstly, there is no evidence that delaying entry has any strong advantage or disadvantage, and there’s a general lack of conclusive evidence regarding starting ages.

Admittedly, there’s some evidence that introducing a formal curriculum on very young children may have a detrimental effect on their motivation to learn later in life, but this needs further research.

The reason for this is that it’s a formal structure employed too early, but measuring such a curriculum has to take into account the pupils’ own home lives and parental motivations, the quality of their preschool education, and many, many other factors.

Another truism is that, following research from England and Wales, it’s proven that autumn-born children get better results than their younger classmates, but this could be as much to do with age maturity as anything else.

Formalised

Finally, we also know that top-performing countries have a starting age of six, but again, these countries often have quite formalised nursery education which in many cases, are schools in all but name.

For many, this is the simple argument: society sees the starting age and draws a potentially simplistic conclusion, but as we know, not having to look much deeper may mean politicians may have to desert party lines and – perish the thought – agree with those on the opposite benches!

Let’s hope, whatever happens, any such change is legislated on the basis of proven research and practice, not merely done because a bigger country with more BMWs per capita does it.