Dr Richard House, a co-founder of the Open Eye and Early Childhood Action movements, said that there is now sufficient evidence that an early school starting age is bad for children.
He is calling for the revised EYFS to be made voluntary and for the school starting age to be raised.
Speaking at the Westminster Education Forum in London today, Dr House will argue that research proves that formal learning at too early an age, rather than leading to children doing well at school, actually leads to lower academic performance and can even contribute to dying early.
Dr House will cite specific evidence from an American longitudinal study, which followed the lives of more than 1,000 Californian children from 1922 over 80 years.
Participants in the Terman Life Cycle Study were followed throughout their lives with follow-ups every five to ten years.
The sample of children taking part were considered ‘gifted children’ and were selected if they had an IQ of 135 or above.
The Longevity Project which gathered follow-up data from the study found that early school starting age was associated with doing less well at school in the long-term, midlife crises, and an increased mortality risk.
Howard S.Friedman, professor of psychology at the University of California in Riverside and the lead researcher of the Longevity Project, which looked at healthy ageing over eight decades, said, ‘We were amazed to discover that starting formal schooling too early often led to problems throughout life, and shockingly was a predictor of dying at a younger age.
‘This was true even though the children in The Longevity Project were intelligent and good learners.
‘Most children under age six need lots of time to play, and to develop social skills, and to learn to control their impulses.
He added, ‘An over-emphasis on formal classroom instruction - that is, studies instead of buddies, or "staying in" instead of "playing out" - can have serious effects that might not be apparent until years later.’
Dr House said that the study’s findings go against the conventional wisdom that naturally intelligent children should be ‘stimulated’ intellectually from a young age, so that they are not ‘held back’.
‘It is extraordinary that no-one seems to have even noticed this dramatically damning evidence, which has been in the public sphere for several years now. This failure is itself symptomatic of the cultural and political denial and expediency that exist in policy-making circles about England’s unacceptably early, Treasury-driven school starting age,’ he said.
The research was originally published in 2009, in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
He said that the research findings add robust empirical corroboration to the arguments made by many education and psychology experts, including Donald Winnicott, Rudolf Steiner, Professors David Elkind, Lilian Katz and Neil Postman, and the Ypsilanti High/Scope Project , ‘that an introduction to early, overly formal institutional schooling has negative health effects on young children that can be life-long in impact.’
While some children from very deprived backgrounds gain a benefit from early interventions, ‘the evidence is now quite overwhelming that such an early introduction to institutional learning is not only quite unnecessary for the vast majority of children, but can actually cause major developmental harm, and at worst a shortened life-span,’ he said.
Dr House said, ‘Politicians and others are constantly seeking the "root cause" of England’s educational failures – but they continue to look anywhere but in the "too much, too soon" mentality that dominates early years policy-making process.’
However, Nancy Stewart, an early years trainer and consultant, said, 'I would be very cautious about trumpeting this research as evidence. It is based on identified 'gifted' children in California growing up nearly 100 years before young children today, and it is dangerous to draw conclusions from non-comparable situations.
'What kind of early school experiences did these children have in the 1920s? Were they pushed into sitting at desks, reciting in unison and writing on slates? We know that practice in UK schools and settings, even with room for improvement, is a far cry from that.'
Dr House is calling for the following changes to Government early years policy:
- make the EYFS voluntary rather than statutory;
- extending the EYFS to the end of the sixth year;
- considering, via an independent inquiry, raising the statutory school starting age to six (perhaps in a phased way, over several years);
- allow schools the flexibility to allow children to repeat a year, if teachers and parents deem that children are being inappropriately rushed in their early learning and development.
Early Childhood Action – a group of early years practitioners, academics and experts - is drawing up an ‘alternative’ EYFS, which will be published in the next few months.
Dr House said, ‘When practitioners set our new framework alongside the Government’s revised EYFS "curriculum", we confidently predict that there will be little argument as to which they will prefer – and which is more likely to be in the interests of young children’s well-being and long-term healthy development.’
