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ISSUE 173 23 September 2013 EDUCATION JOURNAL 17

P A R L I A M E N T

School star!ng age - summer-born children

Anne"e Brooke (LDP, Mid Dorset and North Poole) introduced a Westminster Hall debate on 4September which followed early-day mo!on 213, which she had tabled in June, on the schoolstar!ng age for summer-born pupils. She pointed out that a child who had been born on 31 August 2009 would most likely be in the same year group as a child who had been born on 1 September 2008.

Ms Brooke cited the robust and consistent evidence from around the world on birth date e!ects, which in England had shown that summer-born children could su!er long-term disadvantages as a result of the inflexible school star"ng age. Ms Brooke explained that a study by the Ins"tute for Fiscal Studies, which had been published in May, had found that children who had been born in August were 6.4 percentage points less likely to achieve five GCSEs or equivalents at A* to C, and about 2 percentage points less likely to go to university at 18 or 19. She argued that although a good nursery or pre-school could help with school- readiness in some respects, certain aspects of an individual child’s development could progress only when that child was ready. She pointed out that while parents had a choice about which term their child started school within the statutory "me span, for many families, a child star"ng full-"me school would reduce the burden of child care costs.

Ms Brookes said that where a parent chose to defer a child’s entry to school, the child remained en"tled to a funded early educa"on place of 15 hours a week for 38 weeks, which she added prompted the ques"on of the cost of any extra child care that would be needed by working parents. She said that while the ques"ons and answers on the DfE website were generally helpful, answer 8 stated that: “Parents who are refused a place at a school for which they have applied have the right of appeal to an independent admission appeal panel. They do not have a right of appeal if they have been o!ered a place and it is not in the year group they would like.” Ms Brooke insisted that there should be a right of appeal and added that while there may be no statutory barrier to a child being admi#ed to a par"cular year group, there was no statutory right. She presumed that in the case of premature births it would be possible to involve health visitors, as well as pre-schools and nurseries, and to use the new advice to secure a place in recep"on for a child aged five. But she stressed that all local authori"es would need to operate within the new advice.

Alok Sharma (Con, Reading West) pointed out that in reply to a le#er, the previous Minister of State for Schools, Mr Gibb, had stated that: “It must be the parent’s choice when their child starts school and the law provides flexibility for parents on this issue.” But Mr Gibb had gone on to explain that parents would have to talk to the school, the governing body and the local authority.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Educa"on, Elizabeth Truss (Con, South West Norfolk) pointed out that the statutory school admissions code allowed for flexibility in school star"ng dates, and that it required school admission authori"es to provide for the admission of children in the September following their fourth birthday, so that the maximum amount of recep"on educa"on would be available to all children. As children did not reach compulsory school age un"l a$er their fi$h birthday, no parent was obliged to send their child to school before then. The minister said that new guidance, which had been released in the summer, made it much clearer to schools and local authori"es about where their responsibili"es lay. But she acknowledged that it would take some "me for the new guidance to filter through and to ensure that all local authori"es and schools understood it.

Mrs Truss explained that the Government wanted to empower parents to be more demanding about their child’s level of development by ensuring that they had the complaints and appeals procedures at their disposal and that the DfE would follow up on those procedures. A working group on admissions was currently monitoring the issue. The Department would also be monitoring any complaints made by parents. But the Department currently had no data on how many parents of summer-born children had requested that their child should be admi#ed to the recep"on class at the age of five, or how many of those requests had been granted. While the Government wanted schools to be responsive to parental needs, only the parents of children born between April and August could lawfully delay entry by a full year.

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