Jayne Dowle: Minister must learn lesson over starting school

My son, who is now eight, is almost the youngest child in his year, and in his case, everything that is muttered (usually by teachers) about “August boys” is true. Sweet, funny and kind, but desperately lacking in concentration and listening skills, Jack wasn’t ready for school when he trotted up the path in his little uniform; he didn’t even blow out five candles until almost the end of the summer holidays.

If we had our time again, I would seriously consider letting him spend an extra few months in nursery and starting proper school a year later. That said, I know from other parents who have attempted it what a big deal schools can turn this kind of request into.

It is only now, as he approaches the end of his fifth year in formal education, that Jack is beginning to catch up. It has been a slow and frustrating process for him, for us, his parents, and for the teachers and teaching assistants who have supported him. I don’t want, or expect, my son to be a child genius, and frankly he’s not naturally academic.

What upsets me is the loss of confidence that he has suffered from never getting a thorough grounding in the basics. He feels he is a failure before he even has a try. That’s not what any parent wants for their child.

And, if we had our time again, I’d make some serious noise about the way that he was taught in his foundation year. I was naïve to the ways of schools then, but now it is obvious to me, and to the Ofsted inspectors who eventually came in and threatened the foundation unit with special measures, that it was inadequate.

The school has certainly improved on the back of that particular inspection. And I say all power to the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove. It isn’t often that I find something to agree with him on, but I hope that his plans to make it easier to sack bad teachers are successful.

All too often, damning Ofsted inspection or not, failing teachers hang on to a school for dear life, or are shunted off quietly to another post where they carry on as if nothing had happened.

Whether you agree with him politically or not, you have to admit that Gove is brave to take on the education system. As I know, most of the time, the argument about “too young for school” centres around this system and how effectively it is geared up to support the huge range of skills and abilities five-year-olds can demonstrate.

But now Sally Goddard Blythe, a child development expert, has added her voice to the clamour over the age at which children are ready for school. She argues that parents are failing children before they even get there.

Many pre-schoolers, she says, are not developing vital physical and communication skills because parents are too busy to play with them, read to them or even teach them how to get dressed. Her latest research argues that some 48 per cent of five-year-olds starting school only have the motor skills of young babies.

Too often, she argues, modern parents rely on electronic toys and automatic baby walkers or rocking chairs to keep toddlers amused. The result? Children are growing up unable to fend for themselves, let alone follow simple commands from the teacher or use a knife and fork when it’s time for school dinners.

I have been as guilty as the next parent of using the television as a babysitter. And I don’t think there is a parent alive – with an electricity supply at least – who can’t put their hands up to the same crime. But there is clearly a difference between half-an-hour in front of In The Night Garden while mummy gets the dinner ready, and baby constantly propped up in a chair that rocks him automatically to sleep without anybody having to be faffed to actually pick him and give him a cuddle.

You can only begin to imagine what kind of five-year-olds these babies turn into. And you can only imagine how the education system attempts to cope with them and how teachers begin to even contemplate how they are going to teach them. For all my failings as a parent, I know that our Jack didn’t start school like that. He was just, literally, too young.

The danger, in our “one-size-fits- all” education system and its obsession with tests and measurement, is that every child who is not ready for school will end up in the same sinking boat.

If this Government really wants to give each child the best chance possible, then ministers must go back to school themselves, and imagine what it must be like to be a five-year-old in modern Britain.

Listening to some of them at Prime Minister’s Question Time, this particular challenge might not be as daft as it sounds.