Guess what? NSW children are starting primary school less academically prepared than they were three years ago. And the Auditor-General, author of a recent report alerting the government to this, is alarmed.
So should we be setting our preschoolers special homework to help them become school ready? Or maybe our four year olds should be sitting special exams to see if they are ‘ready’ start school?
A slight drop
In the graph-heavy report, a key finding was the need to “increase the proportion of children ready for school, as measured by the Best Start literacy and numeracy assessment”.
According to the Best Start Kindergarten Assessment, NSW kids’ literacy and numeracy skills have dropped ever-so-slightly over the last couple of years and this is apparently cause for alarm.
But is it really the “best start”?
For those following at home, the Best Start Kindergarten Assessment purports to gauge the educational needs and shape the curriculum for children who are tested (as detailed here) - and this testing is happening in their first year at big school.
“The Best Start Kindergarten Assessment is designed to provide teachers with information about each student’s abilities so they can plan effective teaching and learning programs during the first year of school. It will also provide you with feedback about how you can support your child during the first year of school,” the fact sheet says.
It seems, however, that it’s also being used as yet another metric to rank our littlest students.
Teaching to the test
The Best Start Kindergarten Assessment is the first of many leaderboards our kids will encounter during their schooling. The first of a myriad of tests that aim to quantify their abilities and boil their progress and talents down to a colourful column on a graph, which may then be compared to other colourful columns around the state.
The Best Start Kindergarten Assessment may also be the first taste kids have of teachers focusing the curriculum on preparing for standardised testing or ‘teaching to the test’.
This constant testing and ranking of students lets everyone down, because it robs students of more important, interesting learning opportunities. Not only that, carrying out a ‘baseline’ assessment at kinder age, well before most children have worked out how to flourish away from their parents, is not going to provide an accurate snapshot of that child’s abilities.
Too much, too soon?
As a parent of three almost-grown-up kids, this all smacks of too much too soon to me. We’re pushing our kids into education earlier and earlier, attempting to comply with a system that seeks to measure and rank our children with the ink barely dry on the enrolment form (probably before they can even tie their own shoelaces!)
While there’s no doubt that many of us want our kids to do well, to ‘succeed’, are we forgetting that success and aptitude are measured in different ways and that children (indeed humans) learn at different rates? I think the rush to enrol kids at school at five years of age (or earlier) may be evidence of that.
What the research says
Research encourages us towards “superior learning and motivation arising from playful, as opposed to instructional, approaches to learning in children”.
A recent New Zealand study found that “the early introduction of formal learning approaches to literacy does not improve children’s reading development, and may be damaging.”
The University of Cambridge reports: “Perhaps most worrying, a number of studies have documented the loss of play opportunities for children over the second half of the 20th century and demonstrated a clear link with increased indicators of stress and mental health problems.”
Younger is not better
Also, it has been noted that in Australia we have one of the youngest school starting ages in the world. Apparently in Finland, Shanghai and Singapore children do not start formal school until they are seven. And in Finland homework doesn’t start until high school. Interestingly, Finland, Shanghai and Singapore have some of the best academic standards in the world.
The increasingly popular preschool tutoring for school shows a push for early academic ‘success’ or readiness. But what race are we really running here? What exactly are we hoping our children will achieve? And where do our kids’ natural talents and tendencies come into play, in this high-pressure, metrics-based plan?
Are we setting some kids up for future difficulties by funnelling them into an education system that assesses in ways that might not suit all students or learning styles at an early age? I think so.
