Article: Ban kids from starting school until they turn five to ensure they don't fall

[Trillian]

But what happens to the kids who are not ready, despite the fact that they turned 5 in November? And the kid who turns 5 on January 2nd, they cannot start school, whether they are ready or not?

Nickle, that already happens anyway when you have kids that are 5, but are still not ready for school but because they are turning 6 the following year, by law they have to be at school. What usually happens is that they have to start school and more often than not, they repeat either kindergarten (NSW) or year 1 if they were struggling that badly. And again, that's already the case with cut off dates, in those states where the cut off is in April for example, then kids born May 1 are still going to miss out. But there has to be a date to work from as a starting point. If you can somewhat limit the spread of chronological ages in a cohort, then you have a better chance of limiting the spread of academic ability. I totally agree that there is still always going to be the chance that you are going to have a wide spread of ability at some point as they progress, but the average is still pretty tight and the ones that are still quite low level learners are *usually* the ones who do have dx learning problems and ASD's etc (and being honest, some kids just don't have any hope, I know that's cruel, but that's the reality unfortunately). But you throw a kid in there who is too young, you could have the potential for up to a 4 year gap in ability if that young child is also a low level learner.

Any teacher should strive for differentiating for the needs of their students, but there is a point where it just becomes detrimental to the child. What's the point of a child being in a particular year group when they have always needed to work at the stage below because they weren't ready to start school when they did? It's not fair on them and you run the risk of creating a situation where the child ends up with self esteem and confidence issues because everything they do is a struggle at school. Now the catch22 of all that is sometimes you just can't tell what is going to happen until they do start school and sometimes that can also happen to kids who were 'old enough' to start school but problems didn't emerge till they got to school but more often than not it's the youngest kids.