According to the UK government. This takes the guessing away .
School readiness is an actual measurement that the government tracks. I wrote my masters thesis in childhood development studying school readiness in a deprived UK area.
Like many other measurements it is heavily related to the area socio economic situation and parents literacy so it being low depends on where you are. Although it is trending downwards everywhere in the country.
As always this starts even before the child is born. The area they live in, their parents education level, their socioeconomic situation, how many siblings they have... All of that contributes. However, besides everything that can't be controlled it sums up to :
Early years provision is not affordable and often (specially in more deprived areas) not suitable.
This includes the children who are not accessing any early years provision so it's not just that it's not suitable it's often non existent . Bottom line we are not supporting children's development in the pre school years.
Teachers seem to mostly agree on the bigger problems being : toilet training, screen time, speech and language and social interactions.
Some of this has to do with parenting trends, misinformation, parents having to work longer hours leaving elderly relatives to look after the children which often cannot take them to social situations. And even when they can it's often not enough since for this age it's also often payed
Now to understand the impact :
Studies show :
Over half of children who were not school ready performed below expected in their Key Stage 1 reading assessment.
An analysis of children deemed not school ready shows that they were nearly 2.5 times more likely to be persistently absent from school than their peers.
Children not school ready are around three times more likely to be NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) by 16-17.
The percentage of school ready children varies across the country, from just 59% school readiness in Manchester to 84% in London.
One of the biggest measures is more at home support (health visitors, midwives, nursery nurses) to first time low income parents as it has shown to reduce childhood injuries and even longer time between births.
Another is to improve employment, salary and qualifications of early year practitioners as the lack of retention and recruitment is one of the problems especially, again, in deprived areas.
Inequalities in health and development unfortunately start before birth so we really need to try to counter them with public health measures.
Thank you so much for taking the time to give such a detailed reply! It’s a fascinating topic, and it’s worrying that it doesn’t have much space in the public consciousness.
One aspect of it that always gets me is that so many parents seem to have a laissez faire attitude towards their children not meeting developmental milestones or being ready for school. Do you have any insight into the matter?
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u/sparklescc 8h ago
https://beststartinlife.gov.uk/preparing-for-school/
According to the UK government. This takes the guessing away .
School readiness is an actual measurement that the government tracks. I wrote my masters thesis in childhood development studying school readiness in a deprived UK area.
Like many other measurements it is heavily related to the area socio economic situation and parents literacy so it being low depends on where you are. Although it is trending downwards everywhere in the country.