Nursery World - A question of age

Children are being deprived of a good nursery education and facing too much academic pressure, says Anne Wiltsher

A veritable storm was whipped up last month about whether too much academic pressure is being put on children too young. As the Pre-school Learning Alliance chief executive Margaret Lochrie warned that pre-school playgroups - which have been losing four-year-olds to schools - may become a thing of the past, the Government trumpeted a tiny survey of 127 parents declaring that 89 per cent of them were happy to send their four-year-olds to reception classes.

Meanwhile one mother declared she was going to the European Court of Human Rights to keep her child out of school, another was considering legal action against her local authority for the same reason and parents complained about the pain of SATs for seven-year-olds. Could this be the start of a national debate about when formal learning should start?

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