How England lowered its state school starting age from aged 5 to age 4 without changing the law (and without much noticing). On the state’s unchallenged power to change society’s norms (when it chooses to). But why don’t parents know that starting Reception at 4 was supposed to be a choice? Was this all for children’s benefit: or part of the ever expanding schooliverse? With 15 years of evidence, are younger school starts really working? What does this tell us about plans to expand full time early education further to 9 month old babies? AND FINALLY: Has ‘school readiness’ fallen because today’s school starters are simply… a year younger?
For more than 150 years, the law has said that children in England have had to attend school (or other education) from the school term after they turn 5.
This may be a surprise to those of us coaxing our uniformed 4 year olds into school this Autumn. Almost without exception, children in England now start state school in the September after they turn 4. Some of their classmates may have been aged 3 just days before starting school after their 4th birthday.
But this is a recent norm – and in fact most of those nervously waving Millennial parents will have started their own schooling aged 5, or possibly just a few months before their 5th birthday.1
There is now up to 17 months’ age difference between the youngest 4 year old school starters today, and the oldest 5-and-a-bit year olds starting in their parents’ state school classes.
Although they may appear similar, 4 year olds and 5 year olds are not the same.
British parents are trusting and compliant with society’s parenting norms2 and few will think that there was any real controversy over school starting age. At the start of this century, the countries of the UK had the lowest school starting ages in Europe, if not the world.
Age of Starting School in European Countries in 2002
Undaunted, England decided to go lower still.
So how are today’s 4-year-old school starters doing?
The lowering of school starting age in England is a wildly neglected area of research and interest - a fact which seems to endorse criticism that Westminster does not care about the early years. This week the Department for Education is pushing parents again on school-readiness. Are they right to? Read on.
1. The history: school starts from 5
The 1960s: should children start at 6 or 7?
It was the 1870 Elementary Education Act made it law that education started the term after a child turned 5. Starting school aged 5 had no great science to it: and by the 1960s was thought to be as a ruse to satisfy “Victorian industrial and commercial convenience, so that a pool of cheap female labour would be readily available”3.
By now, the progressive and child-focused position was to increase the school starting age in England. The only question was whether it would be from 5 to 6, or even 7, in line with European neighbours.
The 1967 Plowden Report proposed a school start in the September after a child turned 5. Children of 4 and 5 would instead attend a half day of nursery class, or stay at home. They might even attend school part time until age 6. “The child must come first.”
But instead, some local school authorities - with the power to decide their own school offering - were lowering the starting age of children in their schools.
It is not obvious that this, or much of what happened later, was driven by the needs of children.
The 1970s and 80s: local rules and ‘school’ begins its expansion
Starting school the term after children turned 5 meant administrative pain for schools. Children started school at points throughout the school year: January, Easter, and September. They were between their 5th birthday and age 5 years 5 months when they started4. Some went into a Reception class for a few terms, and started Year 1 the following September.
‘Summer Born’ children (now defined as those born between 1 April and 31 August) would go straight into Year 1 in the September after they turned 5. They’d join older 5 year olds who’d had one or two terms in the Reception class.
Without good data on which children would be joining the school next term, by the 1960s schools were pushing for a standard start date in September to make it easier to plan for teacher numbers.
Summer born children were a pre-occupation then and now - some parents and teachers thought it unfair they missed out on one or two terms of schooling compared to the older children in the same year.
Playgroup mums help toddlers learn: school competes for demand
In the 1970s and 1980s parents - overwhelmingly mothers - ran community playgroups up and down the country. By 1989, 60% of 3-4 year olds attended playgroups.
In a playgroup, parents stayed with their children, a key difference from the day-nurseries which were being set up to care for children so mothers could work. Playgroups provided a community for parents and children, as these 1980s mums say:
Some schools saw an opportunity to compete for demand from parents - and offered under-fives education. This was either through Nursery classes - overwhelmingly half days in either the morning or afternoon - or through admission of 4 year olds (and some 3 year olds) into Reception classes.
This meant spending and this was reined in frequently. In 1975, Westminster’s Department of the Environment ordered schools to stop educating children who were out of school age (5-16). One Birmingham mum was outraged: she’d given up a job to take her 4 year old to school.
But by the 1980s schools again had space to fill: the mini 1970s baby boom had tailed off, schools had room, and bills to meet. Offering education to the under fives was a way to fill the gaps.
Increasingly, funding from central government narrowed ‘choices’ available to parents. In Sandwell in the Midlands in the mid-1980s, schools offered places in September to 4 year olds and it was the norm for parents to take up this offer. But the Whitehall-funding for local groups for the ‘under-fives’ was withdrawn, leaving the Birmingham local authority looking to close play groups. In 1988 Westminster gave schools the power to set their own budgets, giving a very strong incentive to bring in younger children.
1980s and 1990s: the ‘rising fives’ join part time
“it is open to LEAs and schools, if parents wish, to admit their children to primary school earlier in the year in which they become 5. Policies on early admission vary between, and within, authorities. It has been relatively commonplace for children to be admitted at the start of the term in which they become 5, when they are known as ‘rising fives’, but the trend is towards once-yearly admission. This brings in younger 4 year olds.” The Rumbold Report, 1990
Millennials might remember starting school aged 4 as a ‘rising 5’ - at the start of the term where they turned 5. These children were aged 4 years 9 months at least, and would still arrive in different terms throughout the year. It wasn’t a new idea: in one sample of the 1966 National Child Development survey of parents, nearly half the children starting school as ‘rising fives’.
Crucially, 1980s school admissions authorities would often expect these nearly-5-year-old children to attend school part time before they reached Compulsory School Age (the start of the term after they had turned 5).
In Leicestershire, including Birstall Riverside Primary School which was the setting for the Ahlbergs’ classic Starting School, schools welcomed 5 year olds and the ‘rising 5s’5. In Starting School, new pupils “Gavin can read already. Errol brings his tooth to show the teacher. It came out in the night”. Both are much more likely if Gavin and Errol are 5, or nearly 5.
The drift towards early school starts accelerated when national tests in Key Stage 1 for Year 2 pupils were introduced in the 1990s.
Many schools viewed these tests (now ‘SATS’) as a test of their worth. ‘School Readiness’ became an urgent focus: in 1991 schools in North Yorkshire were funded by Government to run pre-school sessions as they found ‘four and five year olds cannot talk properly, do not know how to use a knife and fork or eat at the table” and crucially “that reduces the time they have to follow the National Curriculum before facing their first national tests at age 6 or 7”.
The 1990s: Westminster wrests control of the ship.
Pre-school vouchers for all, playgroups dashed on the rocks
Westminster had been giving local authorities responsibility for under fives education for years. But in the late 1990s the Tory government introduced nursery vouchers, for parents to use to pay for sessions in pre-schools. This scheme seemed almost designed to push younger 4 year olds into school.
In Scarborough, no one in this report much liked the new voucher idea.The council said “the structure of the nursery voucher system” forced schools into once a year admissions of pre-schoolers in September (i.e. aged 4) so they could recoup voucher money for the autumn term, and keep staff on. Playgroups worried that schools would pull in children too early and set them up to fail. The Department for Education even warned parents that if they didn’t take up a school place at age 4, “there may not be any places left in your first choice school when your child reaches five”.
“You will be teaching failure by taking children too young” Scarborough headteacher on young 4-year olds being taken into schools, 1997
This Tory voucher scheme tried to create a market for pre-school. It brought the beginning of the end for mum-run playgroups. In addition to local authorities and schools pushing for early entry of young 4 year olds, playgroups were to be given only half the money that day nurseries and schools were.
New Labour win: Preschool for all
Every four year old in the country will have access to pre-school in a nursery, playgroup or school by the start of the new school year. ‘Pre-School for all this year’, The Observer, 1998
New Labour made the first big promise of a universal offer for 4 year olds, with a promise to create places in pre-school (nursery, playgroup, or school) for all. It was schools who sought to take over this expanded new market.
The Guardian nowadays champions childcare for all infants, but at the time it gave airtime to mothers and other critics of the push to get younger children into education: reporting on the “dangers” of the expansion of schools. One local authority was typical in “hoovering up all the four year olds it can to maximise voucher income”. It would be “too much too soon” for some pre-schoolers.
Instead of pre-school, English 4-year olds were to be offered mostly school. Playgroups closed in their thousands. SureStart - which helped parents to parent - was replaced by a new model of day nurseries so that mothers could be encouraged into paid work.
The 2000s: Political Class Dismissal - “a redundant argument”
SW1 was not keen to understand this significant shift in childhood. Early years has never been of much interest to Westminster. To some extent, the question of school admission age was still a local issue for local admissions authorities.
Private schools already offered school - even boarding - from age 4 or younger
Private schooling already had early start norms: many independent schools in the 1980s and 1990s offered paying parents choice of school places from 4-years old, or even 3. Schools offering boarding for 4- or 5-year olds - there were even some 2- and 3-year olds boarding - in the 2000s. So among the privately educated political class, a lowering of the effective state school starting age might not have triggered any alarm.
Westminster interventions were by now pushing many children into school before age 5. In 2001, the Education Committee heard from the Playschool Association that there was an effective lowering of school starting age “without recourse to either public or parliamentary debate and without evidence to support the efficacy of such a change”.
But Margaret Hodge, then Under Secretary of State and normally a champion of the under-fives, dismissed this saying “the argument over the school starting age was redundant”. It would not stay this way.
2. 21st Century Westminster Delivers A New Norm: School in September at 4
Thanks to Conservative and Labour interventions in the market for pre-school, byt the late 2000s, most - not all - English children were starting school earlier than the law required. In 2008, less than two thirds of admissions authorities had shifted to a single September start date for 4 year olds, meaning that children in more than a third of areas were still starting school aged 5 or as ‘rising 5s’.
Then in 2009, Ed Balls made a change to the School Admissions Code, which would make it the norm for all children in England to start school age 4.
This change - which got barely a flicker of attention from parliament - implemented the Rose Review which said Summer Born children should be able to get as many months of education as their peers. This equality of ‘sameness’ now predominates our politics.
Sir Jim Rose, Ofsted Inspection Director, shaped much of the early schooling we see now, with early Reception starts for all, and phonics for 4 year olds. He did this by drawing conclusions from a major government study which seemed to show that pre-school would change school outcomes for children.
Effective preschool better than home? Look again…
The evidence which Rose pointed to in support of both phonics and school at 4 was the Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) research, funded by the Department for Education6. This study followed children from pre-school to A-levels, and explored differences in outcomes between children who were already attending pre-schools (playgroups, day nurseries, school nurseries, the new ‘Surestart’ integrated centres) and those ‘home’ children whose parents kept them at home before school at 5.
The EPPE researchers reported that half days of high quality pre-school were better than low quality childcare - but full days of pre-school were not better than half days. It found that high quality preschool attendance seemed to drive better literacy at age 5, better GCSE attainment, better conduct, and more. ‘Home’ children who did not attend pre-school had “poorer cognitive attainment, sociability and concentration when they started primary school”. A full 48% of ‘home’ children were ‘at risk’ of Special Educational Need at school entry
The EPPE study seemed to confirm what school experts would have suspected: that children needed to be taught by professionals rather than kept at home with their mothers til 5.
But there remained a major flaw in using EPPE for this purpose - one the researchers were fairly clear about. The ‘pre-school’ children had “very different” backgrounds to those kept at ‘home’.
It was hard, in the late 1990s, to find children whose mums didn’t even take them to the local playgroup - playgroups counted as ‘preschool’ for the study - and seeking 500 ‘home’ participants, EPPE researchers could only find 314 children: overwhelmingly from deprived backgrounds. 168 were White British children and 127 children from Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrant communities, mainly in the Midlands, North East and East Anglia7. On almost every measure, the children selected to be ‘home’ children already faced extraordinary and multiple deprivations compared to their peers in the ‘pre-school’ part of the study.
The ‘home’ children’s mothers mostly had no qualifications - 57% had not even O-levels, compared to 18% of mums of ‘pre-school’ children - and only 3.9% had a degree (16.9% of the preschool mums had a degree or above). Of the ‘home’ children: “far more were of minority ethnic backgrounds and spoke English as an additional language, the proportion in receipt of free school meals was also significantly higher.” They had “significantly lower scores” on the ‘Home Learning Environment’ - a measure of whether their parents did things like sing nursery rhymes and read to them, or take them to the library - and the Home Learning Environment was later found by EPPE to be even more impactful than pre-school on children’s outcomes.
The EPPE researchers did try to control the findings for these multiple deprivations faced by the families they selected to be the ‘home’ sample, but I can’t imagine how you could do this accurately given the challenges faced by these children on almost every metric. The EPPE researchers even warned against concluding that pre-school caused the difference in outcomes - at least early in the study.
Nonetheless, the challenges of the EPPE home children changed childhood for all thanks to the study’s influence on Ofsted’s Sir Jim Rose. The EPPE finding that ‘home’ children (those of unusually deprived backgrounds) had a much higher rate of SEN flagged at age 7 lead Sir Jim to propose phonics for Reception children in 2006. Two years later, the apparently outsize school performance of EPPE’s ‘pre-school’ children compared to the ‘home’ children drove Rose to recommended a new norm of September school starts aged 4.
Notably, one of the key EPPE research findings - that pre-school boosted later cognitive outcomes - were not replicated when the Government rolled out a large pilot of 7.5 hours a week of early education in 2013, although high quality settings seemed to do better.
But back in the 2000s, EPPE evidence did point to half days of high quality play-based pre-school boosting outcomes for disadvantaged children. The ratios in these pre-schools were 1 staff member to 8 children, not 1 to 15, or 1 to 30 as in school. What EPPE did not measure at all was the impact of full days of school - which is what Jim Rose prescribed as the tonic for all 4 year olds.
Parents’ “choice”
Now the norm would be for all children to start school between the age of 4 years and 1 day and their 5th birthday. However, the Rose Review was clear that parental choice should be respected and parents should be ‘well informed’ to make a choice on their 4 year old starting school. The law that children must be in school (or other education) the term after they turned 5 did not change.
Most of today’s parents will be surprised by the choice they didn’t know they had. Only 25% of parents think that ‘school’ starts at Year 1, rather than Reception. It’s hard to think of an ‘option’ given by government that has such high take up.
At the time though, the Daily Mail thundered on the effect of schooling at FOUR. Were they right?
3. Get Ready for School
‘School Readiness’ is reported to have collapsed in recent decades, with teachers reporting children less likely to have the independent skills needed to function in a school setting. Early education experts say Reception teachers now spend 2.5 hours (40%) of the daily teaching time dealing with children who are not ‘school ready’ - meaning children are essentially only getting half days of teacher time. But why is this?
“I am sick and tired of stories about 4-year olds arriving in Reception, some reading quite well, some virtually in nappies” Prime Minister Keir Starmer
Westminster wrestles with possible causes for this disaster in school readiness: advances in nappy technology, the trend to delay potty training til age 3, deindustrialisation, insufficient time in nursery (but 93% of 3-4 year olds now attend an early years setting), too much time in nursery (as before), absent fathers, and my own hobbyhorses: the demand that both parents spend time in paid employment instead of looking after infants; and screen-time.
The true cause remains a mystery. The Labour Government has put school readiness at the heart of their new Opportunity Mission. Younger children are to be coached in the skills required: parents of 3 year olds receive the government-backed ‘Starting Reception’ checklist to practice, and state funded childcare has been rolled out for babies of 9 months and up, with the ‘school ready’ skills included in the curriculum.
In 1988, school starters in Leicestershire could take off their hats and coats, go to the loos, and sit on the mat with the rest of the class.
Concern about school-readiness is not new: in the 1980s professionals warned that children starting school weren’t able to dress themselves, go to the loo, or use a pencil or cutlery. In West Sussex in 1988, children were entering primary school at 5 “unable or unwilling to speak”8. In Liverpool children only ‘most’ children could eat with a knife or fork when starting school. Parents were encouraged to make sure children could dress themselves, otherwise going to the toilet could be stressful (the teacher had 20 pupils to help). The same cry in Derbyshire in 1989:
But the schoolchildren who weren’t ‘school ready’ in the 1980s were aged 5, or “4 and 5” in the 1990s. We should give weight to the idea that we now expect a just-4 year old to be as ‘school ready’ as a 5-and-a-bit year old was for their parents’ generation. There is up to 17 months’ age difference between youngest 4-year old school starters this autumn, and the oldest 5-year old children in their parents’ classes.
This must surely accelerate the impact of modern deprivations of childhood.
A year, even 17 months, is a very long time in early child development.
The Ages and Stages Questionnaires are used throughout early childhood in the UK. Not all 4 year old children will have consistently achieved all the skills tested in these, which include: using a crayon or pencil to make shapes, dressing or undressing himself with a little help.
It’s only in the ‘Ages and Stages’ questionnaire for 5 year olds that children are measured on whether she “can use the toilet by herself”.
Actually, does the Government even think school readiness getting worse?
Unhelpfully, the civil service (and the Government Opportunity Mission) use a different definition of school-readiness to that set out by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Department for Education in their push for ‘school readiness’ this week.
Rather than 4 year olds turning up at Reception, the Department for Education focus on children just before they join Year 1: i.e. when they actually start ‘school’. This measure of ‘school readiness’ tests ‘a good level of development’ via ‘Early Learning Goals’ and comes at age 5, after a year of Reception.
The Department for Education revises the test every few years, meaning there is no clear way to know what’s happened long term. The DfE comment that the upwards trend in 2012-2015 and 2022-2024 is in part due to “practitioners having greater familiarisation with the new assessment framework”, i.e. teachers getting better at testing.
4. So maybe all children aren’t ready for school at age 4. But surely Reception is more like pre-school than school?
Reception class follows a ‘play based learning’ curriculum, so children should spend much of the day in play with short bursts of instructional learning. Reception teachers have large classes of 4 year olds of mixed ability and need and - for the record - I know these women9 are warm and dedicated professionals who work extremely hard for the children in their care.
But this is School: compulsory start time, uniform, homework (maybe daily), full days, 30 children per teacher, attendance reminders, no staying at home if you don’t feel up to it, no dolly for comfort10, no going home if you miss your mum and dad. Now school - not parents - is the new authority for most of children’s weekday waking hours.
Although the modern offer of Reception for 4 year olds was based on an optional pre-school, parents who do not send their children full time may have a phone call from The Truant Officer - “a colleague from the Welfare and Attendance Hub” - asking why their child is not in school.
Double English
Ofsted has championed this expansion of schooling: even 25 years ago Ofsted would mark schools on the progress made by under fives in their care towards the ‘Early Learning Goals’ that make up the curriculum for young children11. In 2017, Ofsted went further and decreed “that the teaching of reading, including systematic synthetic phonics, is the core purpose of the Reception Year”. Some headteachers complained to them that newly qualified Reception teachers’ teaching “downplayed the importance of reading, writing and mathematics for the under-fives in favour of play-based pedagogy and child-initiated learning. This prevented effective progression into Year 1”. Play based learning, aye.
In addition to the push for Reception children to deliver achievement of the goals in the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum, the hardcore modern National Curriculum of Year 1 and Year 2 looms backwards into Reception, with Phonics and Maths SATs, a Phonics Screening Test to prepare for. This double or treble load of curriculums for Reception pupils and teachers is school.
Pressure is now likely to increase again on 4 year olds and Reception teachers: Labour’s Opportunity Mission will target the test of ‘school readiness’ that children sit in school at the end of the Reception year. Now 75% of children will be expected to have ‘good’ level of development at age 5, and Reception year will be key to driving that.
We will ensure that the Reception year sets children up for success in the rest of primary school, by rolling out schools’ access to evidence-based programmes that boost early literacy and numeracy skills. Government Opportunity Mission 2025
What really works for school readiness? Play with them!
The late Dr David Whitebread at Cambridge was one of many still campaigning in the 2010s for an increased school starting age of 6. Here he is on why late school starts are generally better and the best predictor of school readiness is to have fun with your children:
“Play with them! One item predicted children’s readiness to do well in school more than any other by a long way. And the item was “this child talks about having fun at home with his or her parents. So play with your children, have fun with them, read to them.” Dr David Whitebread
5. The evidence: how are today’s children doing after starting school 4?
Well, there are plenty of reasons for alarm. Otherwise this question seems to have dropped off the agenda. I’d love to hear if I’ve missed any current research on this.
Signals of distress among today’s young school starters
Parents will agree that school at 4 is certainly a challenge for some children: parents take to online forums to find it is normal for their toilet-trained child to have accidents all through Reception year, or to be extremely distressed before and after school, or even be watching tv throughout the school day as staff work to meet the needs of thirty 4-year olds. Parents are sometimes told that although normal, they should ask for a ‘SEN’ referral for their child just in case.
There are also distress signals which also preoccupy SW1:
There is a significant increase in Special Educational Needs referrals among children which is little understood - according to 2021 research, English children who start school younger in the year are more likely to be ‘unfairly’ flagged for SEN.
Behaviour of children in schools is in decline - EPPE and a 2020 longitudinal study found that antisocial behaviour was increased in primary school children who had attended pre-school, particularly formal and low quality settings in day nurseries before the age of 2. There is no comparable research on the impact and quality of school at age 4, rather than pre-school.
Mental health of children is ‘in crisis’ - formal schooling takes up time for children to play and play is thought to be needed for secure mental health in children. 2015 research found that later school starts improved ‘self regulation’ in children.
“Reading enjoyment” among 11-16 year olds has fallen to its lowest level in two decades, drawing fears we’re in a post-literate society. These are the children who were taught to read aged 4. Evidence from New Zealand found that teaching children reading at age 5 rather than 7 reduced “positive attitudes to reading” by the time they were 11 (and didn’t make them better at reading). The fall in British reading enjoyment is pronounced in boys.
We worry about boys falling further behind girls overall - it is boys who struggle most with starting school early at entry to Reception and at aged 5.
School Readiness on starting Reception at 4 has collapsed, especially in boys.
I can’t say shifting the effective school starting age from 5 to 4 is a primary cause of any of these major issues - but it’s baffling that it is missing from the debate.
Summer born children’s attainment gap after a year of reception has not closed
A tragedy is that younger school starts were supposed to correct the gap between younger ‘summer born’ children and their classmates: but summer born children still do ‘worse’ than Autumn born at the end of Reception. Parents of boys born in Spring or Summer should take note.
This validates this UCL research from 2015 which found that it was the age at test which mattered for the difference in performance between older and younger children in the Key Stage 1 tests, and “the combination of the age of starting school, length of schooling and relative age effects does not have a significant effect on cognitive development”. The researchers proposed changing the age at which tests are taken. This 2015 study found that summer born children are less able to cope with formal schooling as they are…younger, and should be given a more relaxed curriculum. Obviously neither of these child-centred proposals has been taken forward.
Even if early starts don’t help summer-borns and there were downsides for all or most children, there is one goal which means Government might accept those negatives.
Do early school starts reduce the attainment gap between children of disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers at the start of primary school?
These children stay behind from the age of 5. Evidence from Norway indicates earlier school starts (from age 7 to age 6) did not reduce “socioeconomic achievement gaps or immigrant-native differentials [for those children who spoke another language at home]”. In 2024 parliamentary POST research found that “educational attainment gaps are widening for disadvantaged children” in both the secondary and early years.
Whatever we’ve done, it isn’t working.
6. The dream of choice. What do parents need to know about when, how and if to send their 4 year old to school?
Before children reach Compulsory School Age (the start of the term after they turn 5), parents do still have choice about when, how and if their child starts school:
Parents can opt to send their children part time to Reception (e.g. half days or few days per week), or to send them later in the school year. In reality, some schools make this difficult for parents (who are no doubt anxious to get off on a good foot with the headteacher).
Summer born children (1st April to 31st August birthdays) can be deferred for a year. They may then go straight into Year 1, or start Reception at aged 5. However, the local authority must agree to the latter, and they don’t always. Lambeth in London refuses two-thirds of deferral requests.
Children who are not yet attending school can have funding instead for a nursery or pre-school setting. This requires action from the local authority, which may mean parents have to battle with bureaucracy.
The 2009 Rose Review that introduced younger school starts promised informed choice for parents:
“It is down to parents to make the decisions about when their child starts school.”
“We know that not every four-year-old is going to be ready for reception at the same time - so it is important families have the choice when to start full-time or part-time classes or have free early years provision if they want it. Sir Jim Rose announces the option of September starts for all 4 year olds in 2009
Parents are in fact unlikely to know they have choices: these are not mentioned in the government-backed Starting Reception guide. There’s nothing in the BBC’s Starting Primary School pages, not even in the Worried your child might not be ready for school? guide (instead it tells parents to work on their ‘Goodbye Rituals’). The Minister for School introduces this 40-page School Ready magazine but no mention of parent’s choices. Elsewhere the BBC tell parents that summer borns can defer but warn “it’s generally agreed that it’s best for children to be educated in their normal age group” and is only allowed “in limited circumstances - for example, where there is professional evidence in support of the request.” Parents are told that they have a right to choose in the sourly discouraging DfE pages on starting school and ‘Summer Born’ guidance, but I think most parents will follow the normal school starting process in their local authority.
Any parent making the choice not to send their 4 year old to reception full time in the September will feel like they are doing something well outside the social norm.
And of course, parent may not even have the luxury of choice: our economy is designed to drive parents into work and school provides childcare while they do it12.
More information for parents: In the absence of good government information for parents on approaches to school starting, grassroots support groups set up by mums - like Flexischooling Families - fill the gap. The University of Bristol School of Education has a good blog to help parents decide whether to defer a summer born child.
7. Conclusion: Look both ways
The last Labour Government wanted to deliver better outcomes for disadvantaged children by giving parents of 4 year olds the choice of high quality pre-school. The Conservatives before them wanted to create a parent powered market in early education. Unthinkingly, SW1 delivered instead more school for all, and killed off mum-run playgroups on the way.
Westminster is prone to ‘large organisation’ problems like mission creep and delivery failure. There is an especially strong desire never to look back and assess if we got the promised outcome.
A universal norm of starting school in September at age 4 seems not to have closed the attainment gap between younger ‘summer born’ children and their classmates at age 5. Nor has the gap closed between children on Free School Meals and their peers. Today’s 4 year old school starters are less ready to cope with school by inevitable fact of being a year or so younger than in our day, even before the deprivations imposed by modern childhood. The Labour Government is now determined to drive up the performance of children in Reception - less play and more school.
But before expanding the schooliverse further - breakfast clubs and after-school clubs meaning an 8am-6pm day in school, 30 hours a week in funded childcare for 9 month babies and up, coaching toddlers in ‘school-ready skills’, day nurseries attached to schools so parents can work more hours, schools to correct all social and moral problems - we should take stock of whether more school delivers what young children and their families actually need to thrive.
One ignored finding from that Department for Education EPPE study in the 2000s was the strength of impact of the ‘Home Learning Environment’, much more likely to drive better outcomes at A-Level than pre-school: “what parents do is more important than who parents are”. Having fun with parents is the key predictor of ‘school readiness’. Those underfunded mum-run playgroups, and later-cancelled local Surestart centres had remarkably good outcomes for children13 - better on some measures than nursery classes. The difference? They involved parents and children being together.
Maybe children will succeed if we value parenting and give parents real choice, more time to play, and more support to parent.
Fiona Mackenzie, The Other Half
PS: Germaine Greer predicted all this
“a good deal of women’s effort is not even recognized as work. Time spent with the children is not classified as work, although the mother does not use it to read the paper while the kid crawls between her legs, but to teach her child to speak, to advance its social skills, to answer its questions, to deal with its preoccupations, to prepare it for school activities.
A woman who bears a child does so knowing that any leisure time she might have had in the past is effectively cancelled for the next sixteen years yet, if she is not earning pay of any kind, she will appear in statistics as idle, economically inactive. Conventional economic analyses, being based upon the ‘gross national product’ or ‘gross domestic product’, can take account only of activities that involve cash flow.” The Whole Woman, 1999
Not all Millenials! Some of you will have started Reception before your 5th birthday. There’s little coherent national data on this.
In 1967, only 7% of under 5s were in nursery or school classes. Earlier starts were more common in the North and Midlands of England, where mothers had to work. By 1989, maybe 40% of under 5s were in Reception classes of schools: this does include those aged 3 and aged 4. Those that were aged 4, were generally at least 4 years and 9 months: admitted as ‘rising fives’ in the term before they turned 5.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, trends to early entry continued but even by 2008, less than two-thirds of local authority school admissions expected children to start in September aged 4, the now standard approach “which takes in younger 4 year olds”.
For instance the widespread adoption of ‘Gentle Parenting’ by everyone, most who haven’t read the books. The way mums will now talk about taking ‘the full year’ with a new baby, their time with infants decided by SW1 maternity policy. I assume this trust is how babies survive: exhausted new parents place outsize faith that their community has done the thinking and learning for them.
Union of Headmasters 1960. The Department for Education in 2013 presented an alternative view: that school at 5 was for “child protection issues, such as avoiding exploitation at home and unhealthy street conditions”
Hopefully simply: If children this year still went to school at the “start of the term after 5”, then rather than starting school on 1st September 2025 aged between 4 years and 1 day and their 5th birthday:
Children born between 1st September and 31st December 2020 would go to school in January 2026, aged 5 years and 1 day to 5 yrs 4 months
Those born between 1st January and 31st March 2021 would go in April 2026, between 5 years and 1 day and 5 years 3 months
Those born 1st April to 31st August 2021 would go in September 2026, aged 5 years and 1 day to 5 years and 5 months.
I think May rather than April was a cut-off pre 2000 so 5 years 4 months might be a realistic maximum for oldest new starters. But 1967 Plowden Report has some new starters age 5 years and 6 months. I’ve used 5 years 5 months as the maximum age for this model.
In 1999 the Leicestershire primary school setting for The Ahlberg’s Starting School was still admitting children as ‘rising 5s’ where their parents chose to send them: “The children enter the reception classes at the beginning of the term in which they will be five…Admission arrangements currently follow the local education authority guidelines, this means that some pupils spend only one term in reception classes before moving into a year 1 class” 1999 Ofsted
Originally the Department for Schools, Children and Families. The research (later called EPPSE once Secondary school education was included) is online in archives like https://web.archive.org/web/20070717164115/http://www.ioe.ac.uk/schools/ecpe/eppe/index.htm
Characteristics of the hard-to-find ‘home’ children with no pre-school (not even playgroup) exposure in the EPPE Pre-school project. The EPPE EYTSEN Technical paper. This blog is good on the EPPE ‘control’ design failings (and how it was glossed over in later publications)
Councillor Brenda Dick called for nursery school provision for under fives “Some members say that mum should be at home looking after her four-year-old, and in an ideal world this would happen. But it isn’t an ideal world”. Crawley Observer 24th February 1988.
95-98% of Early Years professionals (which includes Reception teachers) are women.
BBC CBeebies has a radio show for toddlers about starting school. It’s quite bleak and begins “We don’t want be late, “We don’t want to BE LATE”. It tells the story of Yasmin who takes Lily the dolly everywhere, including to nursery. But when it’s time for Big School, Yasmin’s “lovely dolly Lily” is not allowed to go to school with her.
You can pick any random 2000’s school inspection report on the Ofsted website to see how seriously Ofsted took enforcing schools and school nurseries to be accountable for the early learning goal progress of the children in their care. Here’s a 2004 one from Darlington school which unusually admitted children just after their 4th birthdays. “Through the Reception classes children achieve satisfactorily. By the time they transfer to Year 1, the majority of them have met the goals expected in communication, language and literacy; in mathematics; in their knowledge and understanding of the world; and in their physical and creative development. A few have exceeded these goals and a few have fallen short. However, achievement in personal, social and emotional development is good, enabling almost all children to reach the national goals and a large minority to exceed them.”
It’s interesting that in the news reporting of the 1980s and 1990s - despite it being a preoccupation of modern SW1 - I couldn’t find many mums demanding expanded schooling so they could work. It seemed to be only a few dads that wrote letters pushing for their children to be given equality (i.e. the same offer of September schooling) as others. What do mums really want from the early years? It’s not less time with young children, as we found last year.
Playgroups were given half the money that other settings were. In the EPPE study, playgroups settings had commendable benefits for children who attended them - although the effect on parents through benefits to ‘home learning’ or community was not measured.
In Wales as far as I'm aware all of the local authorities routinely deny all requests to delay school start for summer borns and let though almost no people who appeal/query this. You are told clearly that you child will be disadvantaged if you start them a CSA without using reception.
Thank you for this detailed article. I tried to find out about the trend for earlier school starts when I was looking into whether to defer my child and it was hard to find information. We’ve just deferred our 4 year old boy until next September. This article makes me feel so relieved that I went with my instincts! It was very easy to do in our area (Gloucestershire). Not liking the sound of Labour’s plans for reception though. Do they not have child psychologists to explain brain development to them? The other offensive thing is the bloody ‘smart screen’ in the class. No more lovely morning registration moment of connection and hearing everyone’s names - they just press the screen! My little boy was watching Number Blocks and playing games on the screen on day 3 of reception! I applied to defer him in the last week of September after he had been attending mornings for the month.