119. Don't send them if they are born in the summer

119. Don’t send them if they are born in the summer


Statistics regarding summer-born children indicate that they have a tough time at school. August-born children are 25% less likely to reach age 11 targets and are 20% less likely to go to university. (20/8/08 BBC Radio 4 news) At school, and in sport, children are less successful if they are born in the summer. The Children’s Plan in 2007 cited this as an issue.

The rigidity of our school system and the rigidity of moving on from one class to the next, from primary to secondary, disadvantages those who are not ready. If you start year one of school just after your fifth birthday in August, you are in a class with some children who are almost a year older than you. A year is a huge amount at such a young age. Teachers consider the children ‘immature‘. Well, they are less mature, because they are younger. A teacher, cited on BBC News, said “the summer born are less confident than their peers. Generally they lag behind in their work and lack maturity” (kttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7178969.stm)

There is evidence that summer-born children (June, July and August) are over-represented in special needs. Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, published in October 2007 shows that at age 11 August born girls are 0.4 percentage points (25%) more likely to have a statemented special need and 72% more likely to have a non-statemented special need than September born. Boys born in August are 14% more likely to have a statement of SEN and 46% more likely to have a non-statemented SEN. (www.ifs.org.uk/docs/born_matters_reort.pdf “When you are born matters: the impact of date of birth on child cognitive outcomes in England” by Claire Crawford, Lorraine Dearden and Costas Meghir)

Their normal and natural behind-ness, due to their youth, is seen as a problem and a disease to be labelled. Although it would seem that the difference makes less difference as school progresses it seems the shaky start has effects that last to GCSEs, A-levels and beyond. Being labelled a failure, and compared to children much older than you from an early age seems to have long-term damaging effects.

In the Institute of Fiscal Studies study mentioned above they concluded that: “The main results indicate that there is evidence of a significant August birth penalty in all outcomes, and at every age for children in English state schools”. The document points out that it is not a feature of teacher training and said teachers don’t realise the impact on test scores. If you go to the website and look at the graphs in the executive summary, they are striking. They show test results at key stages for groups of children plotted according to date of birth. They all show a line going down from September to August, with the red ‘girl’ line above the ‘blue’ boy line for all sets of data displayed. It seems astonishing that test results are so obviously dependent on gender and date of birth that it could be argued that all the test results show is gender, date of birth and social class. So we could save a lot of money by scrapping SATs altogether and feeding data on family income, place of residence, date of birth, and gender in to predict what results would be expected.
119. summer-born p2