Articles by Mary
Below are articles I've written for Tots to Teens magazine. Please right click and select "save target as..." to save to your computer.
Help your child to read - December 2010/January 2011
Help your child to read - October/November 2010
Help your child to read - August/September 2010
Help your child to read - June/July 2010
NZ Herald
Is starting school on 5th birthday good for children?
Imagine being chosen for the most important job of your life, the one that will set you on your career path –and then being asked to wait until the induction period is half way through before you are allowed to start. It would not make any sense to either you or your employer.
And yet right now in NZ, this exact scenario is played out daily–with our 5 year olds who begin school randomly on the date of their birthday rather than at the beginning of the term when the introduction to the school system begins. Starting school on your 5th birthday may be a deeply imbedded tradition but that doesn’t mean that it is the most effective.
Do children get over the anxiety that being ‘thrown in the deep end’ causes? Many parents will say that they don’t and that the sense of overwhelm their children experienced continues to show up right through their school lives. As a trainer of teachers in Literacy I have found that in school Learning Support programmes, nearly 90% of those children have birthdates that fall between April and September. The child with a birthday in the last 3 months will return to school the following year as a New Entrant and receive the full introduction-to-school period.
With the introduction of National Standards, and the focus on those failing in literacy, it seems the perfect time to create the greatest advantages possible for our students and there is a very simple system change that is staring us in the face that no-one has thought to change. It is a change that will add significant academic benefits –and it will not cost anything.
I believe the time has come for us in NZ to change the age that children begin school from individual 5th birthdays to a scheduled intake of once a term, rather than arriving in a random and ad hoc manner after the other children have been settled in.
It simply means children would begin school ONLY at the beginning of a term. This would give ALL pupils 10 solid weeks of instruction without the random interruptions of newcomers who need to go back to the beginning, not only for instruction, but also orientation into the completely new world of school.
There is only one question to be asked here. Can anyone find one single advantage for a child to come into the class programme after the other children have already started? ¬
At no other time in a student’s life do we ask them to do this and yet we are asking the most vulnerable students to do this at the most crucial time of their education, when they are the most dependent on the full attention of an adult. At the time when they have the least social skills and independence, we ask them to begin on their own, separated from any friends whose birthdays fall on a different date. In short, we make it as difficult as possible for them to adapt socially and academically. This constant dividing of the teacher’s attention comes at a cost to the students who are already at school and it slows progress.
The PIRLS study (a comparative study of reading achievement in 35 countries) makes special mention of NZ’s unique ‘tail of failure’ phenomenon, and also notes that we are the only country in the study that has a random intake date for children starting school.
Private schools know of this detrimental effect to the New Entrant class, and they are able to create the optimum learning conditions by setting the intake dates of new entrants to their school, usually to two intakes per year.
So why has this not been identified before? As a former school principal I asked myself that question. Teachers and school managers are aware of the difficulties the random intake causes. Many parents question it and they complain about the difficulty their children experience because all the other children ‘already know what to do.’ Yet we just continue to work around it.
So how difficult would it be to change our regulations? There are several ways to approach it, and perhaps the simplest option is that the child starts school the term following their 5 th birthday. There would be an adjustment to funding in the first year of its implementation, but remember that there will be no extra funding, because at some stage in the year all those 5 year olds are going to be starting school anyway. It would provide streamlining, simplicity and efficiency to both Early Childhood Centres and schools, with children moving in groups at the end of each term.
Currently, our current system misses a significant opportunity with parents to engage them as supporters of their child’s education. It would be far easier for parents to belong to the school system if they are all involved together in the orientation period at the beginning of a term, and it is a potent time to build a network of social and educational support for them and their children.
While this proposal is focused on the benefits to the child as a learner, it is relevant to point out that the random intake system creates unnecessary obstacles for the teacher. The New Entrant teacher is a specialist position, as it is the key starting point for a child’s literacy and numeracy skills, and all unnecessary demands such as random intake need to be resolved.
Not many things in education are this clear-cut. The concept of a scheduled intake reaches far beyond arguments about teaching methodologies. I believe it has the power to significantly address the tail of failure in NZ literacy.
If we are serious about raising literacy standards, debate cannot be focussed on the needs of the adults, or systems, or even traditions.
There is only one question to answer –what system is best for the child?
Mary Ashby-Green, former school Principal, now trains teachers in literacy and can be contacted at:
mary@seminarsolutions.co.nz
www.seminarsolutions.co.nz