The Precious Gift of Time: When is the best age for children to start school?

Redwood Center of Excellence offers a nurturing environment with an IB Primary Years Programme, blending Montessori, Reggio Emilia, EYFS, and STEM, ensuring holistic development for children

There remains a great debate amongst professionals and parents on determining the optimal age for children to enter school. There is a growing trend amongst informed parents to delay school entry. A study of more than 100,000 children, published in the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly, found that one in four families delay school entry until their child turns six.

The strong age-development relationship observed in children in their first 6 years of life suggests that each month of maturation counts during this important period. There's strong evidence showing that delaying school by a year provides mental health benefits to children, allowing them to better self-regulate when they do start school. All of these findings align with what many developmental psychologists emphasise about child development: That young children benefit from extended exposure to well-resourced early years environments with higher child: educator ratios, smaller group sizes and quality uninterrupted playbased inquiry time away from rigid school timetables.

One such nurturing early years environment is the Redwood Center of Excellence, which balances extra care with a world-class IB education. After a rigorous process, they were given the authorization to become an IB World school, making them the first and only independent preschool in the UAE to do so. The Redwood COE, for short, is offering the IB Primary Years Programme within the innovative blended curriculum of Montessori, Reggio Emilia, EYFS and STEM, which is not found in any other setting or school.

Their specialised learning rooms allow the PYP to be implemented to its fullest. This includes the Reggio Emilia atelier, the piazza, the sensory room, the botanical garden and the performing arts room. Redwood COE also has the added benefit of flexibility for working parents since it's open until 6 pm all year round and offers reliable bus transportation.

The PYP at Redwood COE is a global passport, with children easily assimilating into any other PYP programme or curriculum at age six. All of their students who stayed until that age were accepted into the schools their parents were aiming for, further affirming the idea of a late school start.

For more details visit www.redwoodcoe.com