Education, Education, Education

There have been lots of stories in the UK papers today about a new review of early years education which has concluded that children should not start formal education until they are six years old. I've read quite a bit about this recently and am starting to come round to the idea, although of course it's too late for Isabel now since she's already been sucked into the system. And the rate at which changes in education are made is so slow that it's probably too late to affect Emily too.

The problem, as with many other issues, is that you could argue both sides pretty effectively, and I think that in many cases it depends on the attitude and aptitude of the child. And even for one child you could argue the case either way. In Isabel's case, she's been quite enjoying the formal learning aspect - her reading is excellent and I love to see her enjoying reading simple books to herself. Her maths is pretty good too - she often challenges us to minor maths quizzes and was delighted the other day to have counted to 300. Husbandio and I were less delighted since it took about half an hour, and I felt like my brain had been sucked out slowly through my ears by the time she'd finished. But I kept on smiling! She's even quite enjoyed doing her maths homework once a week, although revising for a weekly spelling test is less fun (for all of us!).

Ironically, for Isabel at least, it's been less the formal learning and more the social aspect that she's struggled with. She's the youngest in the year and before she started school was always much more comfortable with adults than with children. At her nursery she always seemed to spend much more time on her own or interacting with the staff than with the kids, and while she has made friends at school, she's probably behind most of the other kids in this aspect of social skills. She's now in a position of having made one very good friend, but recently this friend has been trying to play with other children as well (quite understandably!) and Isabel is struggling to understand this. I told her she should play with some of the other kids too, and she occasionally does, but has recently been saying "but I don't want to play with anyone else". This is the stuff that just rips at your heart as a parent, because it's so difficult to help them with issues like this, other than offering advice and providing a shoulder to cry on.

So, if starting formal education later provides more time to help children develop social skills then I'm all for it. But learning to read provides so much enjoyment too - should we be delaying this for kids who are ready to read? Tricky. Whatever happened to personalised learning anyway? Shouldn't today's multimedia classroom be able to manage this?!