By Jordan Baker
A quarter of NSW children are starting school a year later than they are eligible, and the delay is helping them fare better in kindergarten than their younger peers, a landmark study has found.
Affluent parents are more likely than disadvantaged or migrant parents to keep their child home for an extra year, with rates of school delay varying from 25 per cent to 35 per cent in wealthy suburbs to less than 15 per cent in low-income areas of Sydney.
Education experts say the study provides further proof that the high cost of child care is forcing many parents to send children to school before they are ready, and have called for investment in free, universal early childhood education.
The University of NSW-led study of 100,000 children is the largest to look at kindergarten starting age in NSW, which has the highest rates of school delay in the country, and the first to compare it with developmental data.
The children scored better on developmental milestones for each extra month of age, raising questions about equity, said Ben Edwards, associate professor of child and youth development and longitudinal studies from the study's partner institution, the Australian National University.
Affluent parents were taking advantage of this "gift of time" for their children, while disadvantaged and migrant parents were not, Dr Edwards said. Delaying school often requires another year of expensive childcare or reduced workforce participation.
"This whole delayed entrance at this extreme end is a very NSW phenomenon," he said.
"Many parents want to maximise their children's education opportunities, and this is a way that more advantaged parents can do that. There's a question there for the NSW community. The implications are quite marked for some kids."
In NSW, children can start a public school aged four-and-a-half (if they turn five by July 31 of that year), but must start school in the year they turn six. Many worry that the discrepancy is leading to age gaps of up to 18 months in classrooms.
The study looked at student data from 2009 and 2012. It found that if parents were able to choose whether to send or delay - if their child turned five between January and July - half decided to delay.
Those "held back" a year were most likely to be boys, born closer to the cut-off date, who live in areas where others were being delayed, and come from relatively advantaged backgrounds, said study director Kathleen Falster, senior research fellow at UNSW’s Centre for Big Data Research in Health and the Australian National University.
“This might be because parents and teachers believe that boys and younger children are often less school-ready,” she said.
In NSW, an average of 25 per cent of children had a delayed start to school, well ahead of Victoria, at 10 per cent. The highest rates of delay were in parts of regional NSW; between 45 and 55 per cent delayed their child's start to school in Coonamble, Cowra and Gloucester.
Hugo Cullen will begin school in February 2020 and turn six a few weeks laterCredit: Jessica Hromas
In Sydney, the highest rates - between 25 and 35 per cent - were found in affluent suburbs in the north, east and south. The lowest - 0 to 15 per cent - were found in areas such as Fairfield, Liverpool and Blacktown.
The highest rate was 57 per cent, and the lowest was seven.
The researchers linked the school age data with the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC), finding each month of maturity corresponded to an increase of about three per cent in the probability of scoring above the 25th percentile in five early development domains.
From month to month those differences were small but over a full year, "these differences add up, and unsurprisingly there is quite a large development gap between four-and-a-half-year-olds and six-year-olds,” said study lead Dr Mark Hanly from UNSW.
The study, published in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly, did not examine whether this continued in later years.
Dr Edwards said the high rate of delay in NSW could not be explained by the young cut-off date. Western Australia used to have a similarly young cut-off age, but its rates of kindergarten delay were not nearly as high.
It posed questions for policy-makers, he said. "It's real social patterning," he said. "The parents who are not delaying their kids are Indigenous, kids who haven't gone to pre-school before, whose mothers were born in Asia and the Middle East.
"Migrants tend not to delay their kids. Parents with lower levels of education tend to also not be delaying their kids. It's really an affluence phenomenon. Advantaged parents, in the more advantaged suburbs of Sydney, are the ones more likely to delay kids' entrance to school.
"Then we've found that there is that gift of time, that having more time to develop outside of school means that they are more school ready on lots of different indicators."
Henry Rajendra from the NSW Teachers Federation said the study highlighted the need for pre-school education to be free, and for pre-schools to be built next to schools.
"Any barriers [to early education] should be removed," he said.
Former NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli, now director of the Gonski Institute for Education at UNSW, said cost would not be a factor in families' decisions if early childhood education was universal and free for the two years before school.
"That would be in the better interests of children," he said.
Val Cullen lives in the Sutherland Shire, one of the areas with the highest rate of kindergarten delay in Sydney. She did not think twice about delaying her son Hugo's start to kindergarten. He will start school in February 2020, and turn six a few weeks later.
"My older kids, an April and May baby, both went later, and I've seen the advantages of sending them later," she said. "I've seen the difference in maturity. I've heard people say, 'gee I wish I'd held them back', I never heard anyone say 'gee I wish I'd sent them'."
The map data was originally published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly
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