Nursery World - Opinion: To the point

We need a new debate about early education, says Julian Grenier.

The Government's dismissive response to Robin Alexander's Cambridge Primary Review was a mistake: you cannot reject three years of serious research in a three-minute soundbite without sounding ill-mannered and foolish.

But I was troubled by the way the media and the wider public seemed to have such difficulty with the proposal to delay the start of formal schooling until children are six. Beyond general sentiment about childhood being too short, and there being too much pressure on young children, there seemed to be little public support for this aspect of the Review. You could blame this on politicians and media commentators, but I wonder if we can be so sure that parents and other interested adults are so ignorant that they should be kept out of educational policy-making?

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