A third of children are turning up to reception not ready for school with teachers wasting two and a half hours every day doing things like toilet training, grim research shows
A third of children are turning up to reception not ready for school with teachers wasting two and a half hours every day doing things like toilet training, grim research shows.
Teachers say a quarter (25%) of children are not toilet trained and more than a third (36%) of the class struggle to play or share with other kids, according to a survey published on Thursday by early years charity Kindred.
Parents are also misunderstanding the role of teachers, the study showed, with almost half of them (48%) unconcerned if teachers are spending time on toilet training instead of teaching.
And there is confusion among what parents think school-ready means. A huge 90% of parents think their kids are ready when they start reception – yet teachers say one in three kids are not, the poll found.
Both teachers and parents say they fear the impacts of kids being increasingly on electronic devices. Around half of teachers (54%) and parents (49%) suggested the amount of screentime pre-school children are exposed to is a reason why they aren’t school-ready.
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In December Keir Starmer set a target for 75% of five-year-olds to be school-ready when starting reception by 2028 – up from the current 67.7%. Labour will measure progress on this milestone by looking at how many kids reach a “good” level of development in the Early Years Foundation Stage assessment.
Felicity Gillespie, Kindred’s director, said: “We welcome the government’s pledge to get more children ‘school ready’ but our report suggests that too many parents are failing to support the development of their children, in spite of – we know – having their best interests at heart. The role of parents and carers as their child’s first educator really is crucial to their later life chances and the success of our society and economy.”
Early Education Minister Stephen Morgan said: “We have made no bones about the scale of the challenge to deliver on our Plan for Change so tens of thousands more children, a record proportion, are school-ready at age 5. Our plan is ambitious, and rightly so. Children arriving at school not ready for the classroom takes teachers’ focus away from doing what they do best, which is why we have already started work to extend early language support, deliver thousands of school-based nurseries, and strengthen and join up family services through continued investment in the Family Hubs and Start for Life programmes.”
Kindred’s findings are based on focus groups and surveys with more than 1,000 teachers and 1,000 parents of Reception-aged children in England and Wales.
