Jayne Dowle: Inflexible system stacks up the odds against August babies like my son

But still, my son Jack is a monster, a monster otherwise known as “an August boy”. I remember a friend’s mother peering into his pram when he was just a few weeks old and shuddering. “Eeugh! An August boy,” she exclaimed. “You’re going to have trouble with him.”

It’s not really the sort of comment to give a new mum hope. We had tried for years to conceive, and when it finally happened, we were so overjoyed, we didn’t care when the baby came as long as it arrived safely. In the event, Jack arrived two weeks early. His birthday should have been August 31st. An uber-August boy.

Anyway, this outspoken lady was some kind of volunteer youth worker in the Midlands. I think she thought this gave her the right to say exactly what she wanted. When you have a baby you get used to people saying inappropriate things to you, and so besotted was I with my adorable first-born, I brushed off her comments. But they come back to haunt me at every school parents’ evening, and in every competitive child-rearing conversation I find myself trapped in.

All children are special, but as a new – and very serious – report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies concurs, August children are very special indeed. Boys, being generally more wayward, are especially special. This report suggests that they are more likely to binge-drink, smoke, take cannabis, suffer from bullying, do badly in exams, duck out of university, and instead, leave school at 16 to learn a trade because they are born so late in the school year, they never catch up with the others.

Well, personally, I don’t much care if our Jack doesn’t go to university, because knowing and loving him as I do, and teaching in such an institution myself, I’m not sure if it would be the best place for him. If he doesn’t make it as a professional goalkeeper – and like his fellow August boy, former England ‘keeper David James – this is a serious ambition, he wants to run a pub. Or possibly, be a roofer. And anyway, his sister Lizzie, a bright October-child who at six, is already a full school year ahead of herself, will definitely carry on the higher education trajectory in this family. “I’d like to go to university,” she announced only last week. “I don’t mind where, or what I learn, as long I go.”

I am proud of her resolution. At six, my ambition stretched as unrealistically far as being a ballerina. But really, does it matter where our children end up, as long as they are happy? The thing that really struck me about this very interesting report was how it makes us question just how we measure their achievements. So much of it is about how they fit in at school. Within the tight framework of the academic year, children who are not even five before they break up for their first long summer holidays are bound to suffer.

Of course, there will always be the naturally clever kids, who will shine whenever they are born. My own niece, right on the cusp, with her birthday on July 31, is a year younger than Jack, but licks him on everything academic. He looks on in awe as she demonstrates her joined-up handwriting. He is about a year behind in literacy and just about approaching national average for maths.

A while back, I toyed with the idea of asking the school to hold him back a year. Flexibility over school entrance and progression through the various “key stage” levels are suggestions the report makes that could help August kids catch up. But it seemed counter-productive to pull him away from his friends and make him feel even more awkward. Being singled out as different is guaranteed to either send a child spiralling into anti-social behaviour or make them the target for bullies. And anyway, Jack is almost five foot tall. What he lacks in academic ability, he makes up for in physical prowess. He already looks as if he should be at secondary school. He would terrify the little girls in Year Four simply by towering over them.

So, with the help of several teachers sensitive to his needs, and plenty of encouragement at home, he is staying where he is. What I will say though, if we had our time again, I would definitely push for staggered individualised entry to full-time schooling for children like Jack. Whether this is possible in an education system so besotted with dates, order and targets, is quite another matter.

I just want him to have confidence in himself, so for that I encourage him to look beyond the school gate to what he can achieve in sport and at the youth club he has recently joined. And I remind myself that my lad belongs to a very elite club. Its members include Barack Obama, Neil Armstrong and Madonna, all August babies who didn’t just change the odds, but changed the world. There is hope for my monster yet.