If you’ve ever wanted to detonate a wave of anxiety among a group of young parents, consider asking at what age their child will start kindergarten. Going early might stimulate academic development. Starting late may promote social and emotional readiness.
And that is where people like Michelle Tamaro come in. For the past 12 years, she has been running school readiness program Smart Start Education.
Smart Start’s Michelle Tamaro practises the alphabet with Gabriella Ndaira, 4.Credit: Kate Geraghty
“I think part of my role here is actually supporting parents,” she says.
Her business in Ermington is among a range of school readiness programs to proliferate across Sydney in recent years, ranging from multiple campus centres – such as Ready! Set! School! – to tutoring centres, to programs run by private primary schools.
Smart Start Education has grown from a handful of students in 2013 to enrolling more than 200 this year, mostly four-year-olds. Tamaro says the program helps bridge the gap between the comparably relaxed environment of daycare or preschool and the academic and behavioural demands of kindergarten. Teachers coach children in how to learn, manage their emotions and engage in structured learning activities.
Tamaro says the demand for school readiness programs is driven, in part, by a perception that kindergarten will be academically challenging, alongside parents’ anxiety about sending children to school.
“What we’re seeing around the world is that parents struggle to allow their children to fail. Parents perhaps do not want their children to feel insecure, unhappy, unloved, anxious – but those feelings are just as human as feeling happy,” she says.
“Often, we remind parents of the importance for children to complete some tasks independently with the possibility that they may not succeed.”
Her educators are qualified primary school teachers. Students attend throughout the week from 9.30am to 2.30pm and learn letter sounds, how to pack and unpack their bag, as well as how to express their emotions.
“We spend as much time teaching letters of the alphabet as we do teaching how to respond in a situation that may not be working in their favour,” Tamaro says.
Lisa Rizk was a primary school teacher for 20 years before starting kindergarten readiness program Ready! Set! School!. It began with seven students in 2022 and three years later, she has 60 children enrolled in three locations in Sydney’s Hills district. Her programs also run out of a handful of daycare centres.
“I just felt like there was a bit of a mismatch between what some early learning centres were offering and then kindergarten,” she says.
A typical day is a mixture of play and more structured activities. Rizk notes NSW is unique because it allows parents significant choice when it comes to a child’s school starting age – sometimes creating developmental gaps of 18 months between students in a single class.
“A lot of these children look the same but developmentally, it is a huge gap, and it can be challenging … teachers are well-equipped and experienced to handle that gap, but it’s still a big gap.”
North Shore Coaching College and Alchemy Tuition both offer pre-kindergarten tutoring courses. Brain Food Education in the inner west says its course helps with the basics, which may include how to work independently, simple addition and subtraction, punctuation and sentence structure, pencil grip and understanding simple fractions.
School preparation courses vary, but typically have a bigger focus on letters and numbers than a preschool might, with students attending one or more days a week. Providers say it is not a substitute for daycare, but merely prepare children better for the routines of school in the year or so before they start kindergarten.
But Charles Sturt University early childhood education lecturer Dr Lysa Dealtry, who researches the transition to formal schooling, said additional academic environments were not necessarily best for a child’s development.
“Our concern is that the play-based curriculum that we value in early childhood setting is being undermined,” she said.
“Some students are very ready for that kind of learning but if it takes a more school-based pedagogy approach where they’re sat down to learn letters and numbers … there are some concerning elements about that.”
Like many parents, Amanda Ndaira worried about whether to send her eldest child to school at an early age or wait.
“It took me through a lot of angst, leading up to the cut-off date when the contract was viewed and the enrolment form was due,” she said.
Amanda Ndaira with her children Gabriella, 4, Milad, 5, Grace, 6, and Georgia, 1, with Smart Start education director Michelle Tamaro (second from right).Credit: Kate Geraghty
Before her subsequent children go to school, she enrolled them in Smart Start, which she said made them more ready for school.
“The problem is that at daycare, and even at home … we don’t enable our kids to deal with certain difficult situations really well, because we want to try and protect them.”
She said the program helped her children manage things on their own.
“For example, my children have learnt how to express their feelings in a healthy way, like, instead of getting frustrated and just shutting down, which they would usually do at home, they’ve learnt to say, like, I’m upset because X, Y, Z, [and can ask for] help.”
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