The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
School at seven?
flexibility of the current system in Scotland, which allows parents to defer their child’s school start by one year, or repeat a year.
But says she would be against a blanket rule delaying the starting age to seven for all children.
Jonathan Marshall, 39, from Brechin, disagrees and says that not all children are ready to learn in a structured environment at the age of five.
Dad-of-two Jonathan said: “My son, Nils, is nine now and I think he’s the sort of child who would have benefited from an intermediate stage between nursery and primary school.
“He’s very much a learning-from-doing-stuff type and is good at activities, but if he is asked to do a workbook, then he struggles.
“They sort of try to do it in P1 but there’s still this formal aspect to it.”
Jonathan’s mum was brought up in Norway where children do have a kindergarten-type intermediate phase, followed by a school starting age of six or seven.
While he is in support of that type of education structure, Jonathan recognises the challenges it could present here.
He said: “There will always be some parents who want to push their child forward and there would have to be a structure that would support those children.
“Equally there would be some children whose parents do not have the time or the inclination to do that and we would have to make sure that was not to the child’s disadvantage.
“For most children it would provide a less pressured way of learning. A way in which they do not have to sit down and formally do stuff and behave a certain way.”
Jonathan thinks an intermediate stage would help children understand authority in more accessible way, particularly children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
He said: “It would help them learn how to establish relationships and bonds with teachers in a safe place where they could focus on the boundaries of an authoritative figure, without the other restraints of a formal classroom.”
Sue Palmer, a literacy specialist and former primary school head teacher, developed Upstart’s campaign five years ago, inspired by a visit to Finland where she was “desperately impressed” with their kindergarten.
She claims that despite not starting to read or write until seven, by the age of 10 youngsters in Finland match literacy levels of our 10-year-olds who started much earlier.
Finland’s reading performance was recently rated as the third best out of all participating countries in PISA – an international programme which tests 15-year-olds.
But critics of the Upstart campaign say huge differences between Scotland and Finland make the two countries incomparable.
Literacy consultant Anne Glennie said: “Finland doesn’t have the big poverty gap that Scotland does, and the significant differences between disadvantaged children and their most advantaged peers.
“There are many socioeconomic factors which makes the two countries entirely different and we cannot compare the two in this way.
“The biggest difference, however, is the language.
“Children in Finland are reading Finnish, which is the easiest alphabetic language in the world.
“It’s one letter, one sound – whereas English is so complex that it can be up to two and a half times longer to learn.”
While the government has said there are no plans to raise the school starting age, it has commissioned an OECD report to assess the implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence.