PRESS RELEASE
STRICTLY EMBARGOED UNTIL 6 A.M. ON WEDNESDAY 16 MAY 2012
ENGLAND’S SCHOOL STARTING AGE:
HEAD-START, EARLY FINISH?...
<< New research shows that inappropriate early education can
lead to life-long ill-health, and even premature death >>
…says leading child psychologist
Issued by Dr Richard House, C.Psychol.
Early Childhood Action (ECA); and
Research Centre for Therapeutic Education
University of Roehampton, London
Contacts for Press and Media Inquiries:
(1) Dr Richard House: mobile – 07949 376 518; work – 0208 392 3650; email –
r.house@roehampton.ac.uk or richardahouse@hotmail.com
(2) Professor Howard S. Friedman: email – howard.Friedman@ucr.edu
(3) Sue Palmer (member of ECA): mobile – 07770 772 014; email – sue@suepalmer.co.uk
(4) Marie Charlton (member of ECA): mobile – 0773 481 2733; email –
shadinsky1@yahoo.co.uk
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SUMMARY
Speaking to the prestigious Westminster Education Forum Keynote Seminar on “The Next
Steps for Early Years and Childcare Provision in England” on Wednesday 16 May, child
psychologist and campaigner Dr Richard House of the University of Roehampton will issue
a public challenge to the Prime Minister and the Department for Education on England’s
unconscionably early school starting age and its associated Early Years Foundation Stage
(EYFS) “curriculum”.
In his provocative address, “School Starting – Head-start, Early Finish?...”, Dr House will
argue that after years of accumulating professional, clinical and anecdotal concern about
the harmful effects on children’s well-being of an unduly early start to quasi-formal learning
and schooling, compelling empirical evidence now exists that premature institutional
education for intelligent, “normal” young children can be bad for their health, with negative
health effects being measurable right across the life-span, including premature mortality.
This shocking longitudinal evidence seems likely to generate a major crisis in England’s early
education policy-making circles.
Following Prime Minister David Cameron’s welcome recent involvement in challenging the
availability to children of online pornography, Dr House will urge the Prime Minister to
involve himself directly in the issue of England’s school starting age and its compulsory
early-years “curriculum”; for if it is left in the hands of the Department for Education,
nothing will change, and our children will continue to suffer – and as we now know from this
new empirical evidence, quite possibly for a lifetime.
But some early-years professionals are now taking matters into their own hands, in
launching a direct challenge to the government’s statutory, “schoolifying” EYFS
“curriculum”, with the latter’s quite explicit remit of preparing England’s children for school
at 4 years of age. Specifically, the independent campaigning organisation Early Childhood
Action (ECA) is currently drawing up its own early-years framework document, authored by
a richly diverse committee of prominent practitioners, trainer-consultants and academics,
who share a vision of early childhood experience and professional practice which carefully
avoids the developmental inappropriateness and “too much too soon” ideology of the EYFS.
The alternative document will be published in the next few months; for more details about
ECA, see: www.earlychildhoodaction.com
THE STORY IN DETAIL
Speaking to a Westminster conference on Early Childhood on Wednesday 16 May, child
psychologist and educational campaigner Dr Richard House of the University of
Roehampton will issue a public challenge to the Department for Education and the coalition
government on England’s unconscionably early school starting age and its associated Early
Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) “curriculum”. The conference in question is the prestigious
Westminster Education Forum Keynote Seminar on “The next steps for Early Years and
childcare provision in England”.
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In his provocative address, “School Starting – Head-start, Early Finish?...”, Dr House will
argue that after years of accumulating professional, clinical and anecdotal concern about
the harmful effects on children’s well-being of England’s unduly early start to quasi-formal
learning and schooling, there is now compelling, statistically robust empirical evidence that
premature institutional education for intelligent, “normal” young children can be bad for
their health, with negative health effects being measurable right across the life-span. This
shocking longitudinal evidence could well precipitate a public scandal, and a major crisis in
England’s early education policy-making circles. At the very least, an informed and
thorough-going public debate on England’s controversial school starting age can be
expected to ensue.
New Research Evidence: The Longevity Project
The new evidence comes from an unlikely source – an extraordinary longitudinal research
study based on a group of over 1,000 Californian children born early last century, and whose
development was tracked from early childhood throughout their lives, until they died. More
specifically, the Terman Life Cycle Study was initiated in 1922 by Lewis M. Terman as a
study of gifted children in California. Participants were followed throughout their lives, with
evaluations occurring every five to ten years. The research team of the resultant Longevity
Project, led by Professor Howard S. Friedman of University of California in Riverside,
supplemented this information with the collection of death certificates and the construction
and validation of new psychosocial indices, including measures of personality, alcohol use
and mental adjustment. The Terman data therefore offer a unique opportunity to look at
the possible lifelong consequences of early educational milestones. Professor Friedman and
his researchers used data from this sample to examine lifelong outcomes associated with
ages at first reading and school entry.
Based on a review of the literature, the researchers hypothesised that entering school at a
relatively early age would be associated with lower academic performance and worse
psychosocial adjustment across the lifespan, including increased mortality risk. They also
examined educational achievement, midlife health and mental adjustment, and alcohol use
as potential mediators of these relations.
Professor Howard S. Friedman speaks…
In response to this Press Release, the lead researcher of the Longevity Project, Dr Howard S.
Friedman, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California in Riverside
(howard.Friedman@ucr.edu), said:
“In our work on The Longevity Project, an 8-decade study of healthy aging, we were
amazed to discover that starting formal schooling too early often led to problems
throughout life, and shockingly was a predictor of dying at a younger age. This was
true even though the children in The Longevity Project were intelligent and good
learners. I'm very glad that I did not push to have my own children start formal
schooling at too young an age, even though they were early readers. Most children
under age six need lots of time to play, and to develop social skills, and to learn to
control their impulses. An over-emphasis on formal classroom instruction-- that is,
studies instead of buddies, or ‘staying in’ instead of ‘playing out’ -- can have serious
effects that might not be apparent until years later.”
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Their findings, then, are unambiguous and dramatic: to quote the researchers’ 2009 paper
from the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, “Early school entry was associated
with less educational attainment, worse midlife adjustment, and most importantly,
increased mortality risk”.
Commentary on the Findings
These research findings are somewhat counter-intuitive, in that the sampled children were
actually of above-average intelligence. This has considerable implications for how we, as a
society, respond educationally to bright children. The conventional wisdom is that naturally
intelligent children should have their intellect “fed” and “stimulated” at a young age, so they
are not “held back”, as conventional thinking has it. Yet these new empirical findings
strongly suggest that exactly the opposite may well be the case, and that young children’s
“run-away” intellect actually needs to be slowed down in the early years, if they are not to
risk growing up in an intellectually unbalanced way, with possible life-long negative health
effects.
Whilst it is always important to treat “positivistic” research of this kind with caution and not
generalise uncritically or recklessly from it, what is so compelling about these new research
findings is that they add robust empirical corroboration to the arguments that have been
made by a host of authorities from education and psychology over many decades –
including Donald Winnicott, Maria Montesssori, Rudolf Steiner, Professors David Elkind,
Lilian Katz and Neil Postman, and the Ypsilanti High/Scope Project – that an introduction to
early, overly formal institutional schooling has negative health effects on young children
that can be life-long in impact. There are of course some children from very deprived
backgrounds who on balance would, and certainly do, gain a net benefit from such early
interventions; but the evidence is now quite overwhelming that such an early introduction
to institutional learning is not only quite unnecessary for the vast majority of children, but
can actually cause major developmental harm, and at worst a shortened life-span.
These findings should also be seen in the context of wider cultural concerns about children
growing up too quickly in modern technological and commercial culture; and on this view, it
becomes incumbent upon government to do all it can to help slow down the premature
“adultification” of children – and one of the most obvious places it can start is in early
childhood, and early educational policy-making.
Quotable Commentary
Dr House said: “It is extraordinary that no-one seems to have even noticed this dramatically
damning evidence, which has been in the public sphere for several years now; and this
failure is itself symptomatic of the cultural and political denial and expediency that exist in
policy-making circles about England’s unacceptably early, Treasury-driven school starting
age.
More anecdotally, I am myself a living example of the virtues of “later is better”. Coming
from a working-class background, I was allowed to repeat my first year at primary school
when I first started school in 1958, as I was very young in the class – and I went on to obtain
a first-class degree at Oxford University and a PhD. I doubt this would have happened if the
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system hadn’t had the flexibility in 1959 to allow me to repeat my first year at primary
school – and from the evidence, I would also have been more likely to have had life-long
negative health effects and, quite possibly, an earlier death too.”
Policy Implications
The policy implications are obvious and dramatic. At the very least, a strict precautionary
principle should immediately be adopted by the British government, by:

making England’s EYFS “curriculum” voluntary rather than statutory;

extending the EYFS to the end of the 6th year;

considering (e.g. via an independent inquiry) raising the statutory school starting age
to 6 (perhaps in a phased way, over several years); and

allowing schools the flexibility to allow children to repeat a year, if teachers and
parents deem that children are being inappropriately rushed in their early
development and learning.
The government only has to look to Wales or to Scandinavia for models of how such a
transition to a more enlightened, evidence-informed early-years framework can be
managed and delivered.
Early Child Action (ECA)
Early Childhood Action is an unprecedented grass-roots, sector-wide initiative with
hundreds of supporters, that is drawing up, and formally publishing, its own early childhood
“development and learning framework” – one that will be genuinely rooted in the most
progressive, leading-edge thinking in the field. ECA is a new cultural initiative that is
fundamentally challenging the right of governments to impose statutory practices on to
professionals, when those same professionals believe those compulsory practices to be
harmful to their clientele – in this case, to very young children.
ECA’s learning and development framework is drawing upon the expertise and experience
of a group of six leading practitioners and academics from across the early years field (our
Drafting Committee), and will be informed by a long list of specialist experts (national and
international) who have agreed to act as consultants to the drafting process. In this way, the
process is open, democratic, and reflexive, and genuinely rooted in the most progressive
practice in the sector, in that all ECA supporters will be given the opportunity to feed back
on the first draft of the framework, before the final published version is released in
spring/summer 2012.
When practitioners set our new framework alongside the government’s revised EYFS
“curriculum”, we confidently predict that there will be little argument as to which they will
prefer – and which is more likely to be in the best interests of young children’s wellbeing
and long-term healthy development.
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“Evidence-based” Policy-making?...
If the government fails to implement such changes, or at the very least instigate a full
independent inquiry into England’s school starting age, its policies will likely be
condemning large numbers of our children to worse life-long health and a shorter life-span
than would otherwise be the case in a saner approach to school starting that coheres with
the general approach observable in the rest of Europe. And in an age where such credence
is rightly given by government to “evidence-based” policy-making, for government not to
respond to this new evidence would be flagrantly to ignore their own policy-making
nostrum, which they claim – at least in their oft-repeated rhetoric – to be following.
Implications for Childcare Professionals
These dramatic research findings should also empower early-childhood practitioners to
make their own informed decisions about what is, and what is not, appropriate for the
children in their care. The solemn injunction to “Do no harm”, to which all responsible
professionals necessarily subscribe, means that if practitioners and teachers are to
discharge their professional responsibilities ethically and responsibly, they must feel able to
refuse to work with children in ways that the evidence suggests may lead to life-long harm –
no matter what the government is instructing them to do through its imposed statutory
“curriculum”, with its 225 “musts” in just 26 pages of text.
A Call to Political Action
In conclusion, this is merely the latest episode in a series of major media reports on the
“erosion of childhood” theme, with Prime Minister David Cameron himself expressing
concern about the speed at which our children are being forced to grow up in the modern
world. Politicians and others are constantly seeking the “root cause” of England’s
educational failures – but they continue to look anywhere but in the “too-much-too-soon”
mentality that dominates our early-years policy-making process. It is as if policy-makers are
forever blind and deaf to the compelling evidence before them – with the “demands of the
economy” and employment agendas criminally overriding the developmental needs of our
youngest children. These priorities must now be reversed – and with the political will and
commitment, there is no reason why this cannot be done. Anything less will be conclusive
evidence that government rhetoric about “evidence-based policy-making” needing to
foreground children’s well-being is little more than a hollow sham – or “It’s ‘the economy’,
not children’s wellbeing, stupid!”….
Following David Cameron’s welcome recent involvement in challenging the availability to
children of online pornography, I urge the Prime Minister to involve himself directly in the
issue of England’s school starting age and its compulsory early-years “curriculum” – for
history shows that if it is left in the hands of the Department for Education, nothing will
change, and our children will continue to suffer – and as we now know from this new
empirical evidence, quite possibly for a lifetime.
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APPENDIX
I.
England’s School Starting Age: Some Background
One of the longest-standing controversies in British early education is that of “school readiness” and
England’s school starting age. In the Daily Telegraph of 20th April 2008, for example, the then chair
of the Education Select Committee Barry Sheerman MP was calling for “a radical shift towards a
structure whereby pre-school education would last much longer”. Some years earlier, on 2nd
September 2004, education journalist Hilary Wilce was asking in The Independent, “Boys do worse at
school than girls; is our early school-starting age responsible for this trend?”. She quoted Professor
Greg Brooks, a Sheffield University literacy expert as saying, “What we need to see is the age range
three to six being treated as one developmental stage…” (italics added).
In July 2003, OFSTED itself raised its own doubts, in a comparative study of England, Denmark and
Finland, concluding that six-year-olds might be better served if schools didn’t have to attach such
importance to what they know and can do. In Finland and Denmark, the focus was on children’s
social, physical, interpersonal and moral development, with encouragement to acquire selfconfidence, positive learning dispositions and constructive relating. No national performance targets
were present, and teachers had considerable autonomy. Nor were parents concerned if their
children didn’t encounter letters and numbers until they were seven. In stark contrast, in England
children were (and are) required to begin school far earlier, with everything being much more
centralised, prescribed and monitored, the report said (to reiterate, this in 2003, before the
statutory EYFS was even introduced), with teachers expressing anxiety about lack of time for
creativity and play. The outcomes of the two systems also differed: six-year-olds in England were
generally well ahead of those in Denmark and Finland in terms of “the Three Rs”; yet by age 15,
Finnish children out-performed all others in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy.
The Department for Education’s recent ominous-sounding yet ill-defined pronouncements about
“school readiness” in relation to the EYFS “curriculum” review are of major concern. In late 2007, the
minister then responsible for early years, Beverley Hughes, the chief ministerial driver behind the
then-pending EYFS, wrote to the Open EYE campaign that the EYFS’s six areas of development “are
equally important” – thereby assuming that literacy, problem-solving, reasoning and numeracy are
“equally as important” for young children as physical, social and emotional development. To the
contrary, diverse evidence strongly suggests that for children under six, certain kinds of
development (e.g. physical and socio-emotional development) are far more important than are
others (e.g. cognitive development). On this view, the compulsory EYFS learning-goals framework is
likely to be significantly compromising of young children’s well-being – as it is based upon a quite
erroneous view of child development, and without any evidence to support its early-learning
priorities. It is therefore essential that this flawed thinking lying at the heart of the existing EYFS
“curriculum” is at the forefront of any government consideration of “school readiness” and EYFS
reform.
In the public policy sphere, we urgently need to shift from a discourse of “readiness for school” to
one of “readiness for life” – including an open, courageous public debate on England’s school
starting age. Professor Robin Alexander’s Cambridge Review of Primary Education, it should be
remembered, boldly recommended that England’s school starting age be raised to age 6. As that
doyenne of childcare wisdom Dr Penelope Leach has so aptly put it, “In the earliest years, valuable
though the input of teachers may be, children are not pupils, but apprentices in the business of
growing up as human beings”.
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II.
School Starting Age – a hierarchy of mounting evidence
1. ANECDOTAL: Parents’ and citizens’ experience – e.g. perception of the impact on young children of
early school-starting.
2. PHILOSOPHICAL/SPIRITUAL: Notions of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty, Goddard Blythe) and balanced
development in relation to the child’s changing consciousness (Steiner).
3. CLINICAL: Psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott – the negative psychological and
bodily impact on health of the precocious, inappropriate early development of the young
child’s mind into an “object” (Corrigan and Gordon, 1995).
4. PROFESSIONAL: Early childhood practitioners’ and academics’ experience from a wide range of
approaches – Montessori, Reggio Emilia, Steiner Waldorf, Forest Schools…; see also the
experience of Scandinavia, and the many contributors to the book Too Much, Too Soon?
(House, 2011); see also Joan Almon and Edward Miller, ‘The Crisis in Early Education: A
research-based case for more play and less pressure’, Alliance for Childhood, New York,
November 2011; available at:
http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/crisis_in_early
_ed.pdf (retrieved 13 May 2012)
5. EMPIRICAL:
The Longevity Project (Professor Howard S. Friedman; see references, below);
Curtis, P. (2008) ‘Early-years writing lessons “do no good” – Research runs counter to ministers'
curriculum plan’, The Guardian, 14 July; see:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2290715,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=8
(retrieved 13 May 2012)
Suggate, S.P. (2009) ‘School entry age and reading achievement in the 2006 Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA)’, International Journal of Educational Research, 48
(3):
Other Empirical corroborations:
Brenitz, Z., & Teltsch, T. (1989) ‘The effect of school entrance age on academic achievement and
social–emotional adjustment of children: Follow-up study of fourth graders’, Psychology in
the Schools, 26: 62−8
Carter, L. B. (1956) ‘The effect of early school entrance on the scholastic achievement of elementary
school children in the Austin public schools’, Journal of Educational Research, 50(2): 91−103
Crossner, S. L. (1991) ‘Summer birth date children: Kindergarten entrance age and academic
achievement’, Journal of Educational Research, 84(3): 140−6
Dickinson, D. J. (1963) ‘The effects of chronological age in months on school achievement’, Journal of
Educational Research, 56(9): 492−3
Hallwell, J. W., & Stein, B. W. (1964) ‘A comparison of the achievement of early and late school
starters in reading related and non-reading related areas in fourth and fifth grades’,
Elementary English, 41: 631−9
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Jones, M. M., & Mandeville, G. K. (1990) ‘The effect of age of school entry on reading achievement
scores among South Carolina students’, RASE: Remedial & Special Education, 11(2): 56−62
Kavkler, M., Tancig, S., Magajna, L. and Aubrey, C. (2000) ‘Getting it right from the start? The
influence of early school entry on later achievements in mathematics’, European Early
Childhood Education Research Journal, 8, 1: 75–93
Maddux, C. D., Stacy, D., & Scott, M. (1981) ‘School entry age in a group of gifted children’, Gifted
Child Quarterly, 25(4): 180−4
Schweinhart, L.J. and Weikart, D.P. (1998) ‘Why curriculum matters in early childhood education’,
Educational Leadership, 55, 6: 57–60
Schweinhart, L.J., Barnes, H.V. and Weikart, D.P. (1993) Significant Benefits: The High/Scope Perry
Preschool Study Through Age 27, High/Scope Press, Ypsilanti, MI
Sharp, C. (2002) ‘School starting age: European policy and recent research’, Paper presented at the
LGA Seminar ‘When Should Our Children Start School?’, LGA Conference Centre, Smith
Square, London, 1 November (downloadable online)
Sweetland, J. D. and De Simone, P. A. (1987) ‘Age of entry, sex, and academic achievement in
elementary school children’, Psychology in the School, 24: 406−12
III.
Biographical details
RICHARD HOUSE Ph.D., C.Psychol. is Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy and Counselling, Department of
Psychology (RCTE), University of Roehampton, London. His books on education include Too Much,
Too Soon? – Early Learning and the Erosion of Childhood (editor, Hawthorn Press, 2011) and
Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos (Karnac, 2009; co-ed. Del Loewenthal). His therapy
books include In, Against and Beyond Therapy (PCCS, 2010), Therapy Beyond Modernity (Karnac,
2003), Critically Engaging CBT (Open University Press, 2010; co-ed. Del Loewenthal) and Against and
For CBT (PCCS, 2008; co-ed. Del Loewenthal). Richard is a founder-member of the Open EYE
Campaign for open early education, Early Childhood Action, the Alliance for Counselling and
Psychotherapy, and the Independent Practitioners Network. He contributes regularly to a range of
professional education publications, and to the peer-reviewed and professional psychotherapy
literature. A trained Kindergarten and class Steiner/Waldorf teacher and education campaigner, he
organised the three Daily Telegraph Open Letters on the state of modern childhood in 2006, 2007
(both with Sue Palmer) and in 2011. He is Editor of the journal Self and Society: International Journal
for Humanistic Psychology, Theory Editor of the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling,
and Associate Editor of Psychotherapy and Politics International.
Key Resources
Friedman, H.S. and Martin, L.R. (2011) The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for
Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, Hay House, London
(see especially Chapter 6, ‘Childhood and School Days: Head Start, Early Finish’, pp.
67–77
Kern, M.L. and Friedman, (2009) ‘Early educational milestones as predictors of lifelong
academic achievement, midlife adjustment, and longevity’, Journal of Applied
Developmental Psychology, 30, pp. 419–30
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House, R. (ed.) (2011) Too Much, Too Soon? Early Learning and the Erosion of Childhood,
Hawthorn Press, Stroud
Almon, J. and Miller, E. (2011) ‘The Crisis in Early Education: A research-based case for more play and
less pressure’, Alliance for Childhood, New York, November; available at:
http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/crisis_in_early
_ed.pdf (retrieved 13 May 2012)
Corrigan, E.G. and Gordon, P.E. (eds) (1995) The Mind Object: Precocity and Pathological
Self-sufficiency, Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ
House, R. (2009) ‘The mind object and “dream consciousness”: a Winnicottian and a
Steinerean rationale for challenging the premature “adultisation” of children’, in R.
House and D. Loewenthal (eds), Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos,
Karnac Books, London, pp. 155–69
House, R. (2011) ‘Plus ça change… – On ‘school readiness’, yet again’, Early Years Educator,
13 (6), p. 6
House, R. (2011) ‘Too much. Too soon’, Every Child Journal, 2 (5), pp. 60–4
House, R., Osgood, J. and Simpson, K. (2012) ‘The revised EYFS: Still too much too young’,
Early Years Educator, 14 (2), June, pp. 18–20
Other Relevant Reading
Elkind, D. (1987) Mis-education: Pre-schoolers at Risk, A.A. Knopf, New York
Elkind, D. (2007) The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, 25th anniversary edition, De Capo
Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Elkind, D. (1990) ‘Academic pressures – too much too soon: the demise of play’, in E. Klugman and S.
Smilansky (eds), Children’s Play and Learning: Perspectives and Policy Implications, Teachers
College Press, Columbia University, New York 1990, pp. 3–17
Elkind, D. and Whitehurst, G.J. (2001) ‘Young Einsteins. Much too early: much too late’, Education
Matters, 1 (2): 8–21
Medved, D. and Medved, M. (1998) Saving Childhood: Protecting Our Children from the National
Assault on Innocence, Harper Collins, Zondervan
Mills, C. and Mills, D. (1997) Britain’s Early Years Disaster: Part 1 – The Findings, Channel 4 TV,
London
Moore, D.N. and. Moore, R.S. (1975) Better Late than Early: A New Approach to Your Child’s
Education, Readers Digest Press (Dutton), New York
Oldfield, L. (2012) Free to Learn: Introducing Steiner Waldorf Early Childhood Education, 2nd edition,
Hawthorn Press, Stroud (see especially the Chapter ‘When Are Children Ready for School?’)
Postman, N. (1994) The Disappearance of Childhood, Vintage Books, New York
Rawson, M. (ed.) (2001) Guidelines to School Readiness, Pedagogical Section, Steiner Schools
Fellowship Publications, Forest Row
Rose, M. and Rawson, M. (2006) Ready to Learn: From Birth to School Readiness, 2nd edn, Hawthorn
Press, Stroud 2002 (see especially their Appendix 1: School Readiness)
Sylva, K. and Nabuco, M. (1996) ‘Research on quality in the curriculum’, International Journal of Early
Childhood, 28 (2): 1–6
***** END
OF PRESS RELEASE *****
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