When Surrey-based Reception teacher Sarah Jones (not her real name) received her list of new pupils for the coming year, there was one group that senior leadership gave her the heads-up about: children who were born in the summertime, and were to turn 4 just before beginning full-time school. These pupils were nearly a full year younger than those who had turned 4 the previous September or October, after the official cut-off of 1 September.

Jones, along with the rest of her colleagues, knew that the youngest often struggled with separating from caregivers; had a harder time adjusting to the social demands of formal schooling, such as sharing and sitting still; and had fewer academic skills. After all, just a few weeks before arriving, they were 3 years old. 

Several years into her teaching career, Jones had children of her own: a girl born in November and a boy born in August. This year, when it came time to begin the process of applying for her son to attend Reception, Jones says that something in her resisted. Her instinct as a parent and her professional assessment as an educator told her he just wasn’t ready. She wrote to five local schools - a mixture of maintained, independent and free schools - to request a one-year deferment to starting Reception, which would give her son a little more time.

While two schools replied they’d be happy to consider the request, three schools, including the one Jones’ daughter attends, refused. If she kept her son out for a year, the schools told her, when he turned 5 he would be placed in Year 1.

The request denial followed a pattern some UK parents say they are now familiar with: at many schools, parents aren’t allowed to choose when their child begins. The schools’ reasoning for denying her request, Jones says, after a frustrating back-and-forth, is unclear. “No one’s given us an exact reason why,” she says. “They all said something like, ‘It’s in the best interest of the child to be educated alongside their chronological age group.’”

Summer-born children denied school deferral

But the 1 September age cut-off feels arbitrary, not only to Jones but to a growing chorus of British parents who say their summer-born children are at a disadvantage in school that may continue into their adolescent and adult life.

Armed with recent research, parents say allowing their children to begin Reception a year later will positively impact not only their academic attainment but also their socioemotional and mental wellbeing - especially for the youngest children in a given school year, born between April and August.

A growing group of families is pushing back on national guidance that strongly encourages children to begin formal schooling when they are 4 years old. Though the law officially allows the youngest children to begin Reception a year late if families apply, final decisions are left up to individual schools and local authorities, which often deny requests.

Parents say they want early childhood decisions to look more like they do in the US. Over there, on top of children starting formal schooling at the age of 5 (a year later than they do in the UK), between 5 and 12 per cent of pupils are “redshirted” (a term borrowed from a US practice in which first-year university student athletes join a team but are held out of regular competition for a season) for a year at the start of kindergarten. Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe, pupils are more likely to start formal schooling at around 6 years old instead of 4.

At the time of writing, Jones and her husband were due to defend their official complaint to the Department for Education over the denial of their requests to hold their son back. Jones said they were fighting the system not only for their son but also for other summer-born children as well.

Mixed research

Is it better for summer-born children to wait a year before entering Reception? And what does “better” mean in this context? The answer is complicated, as the research is mixed and anecdotes abound.

In the US, for example, older most often means better, particularly where sports are concerned: many parents believe older pupils will be bigger, more confident and more likely to be leaders. There’s a commonly held belief that “any parent who held their kid back, for whatever reason, never regretted it”, passed around not only between young parents at coffee shops and in Facebook groups but also among school leaders.

But what do rigorous studies say about the benefits of starting school later - or of being the youngest in the class?

A 2013 study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that “on average, pupils born later in the academic year perform significantly worse in school than those born at the start of the academic year”. The youngest also appear to struggle with academic confidence more than their older peers.

Similar results have been replicated in other places; in one 2017 study from the US National Bureau of Economic Research, the benefits of being older extended into college, with the oldest children in a given class earning higher SAT scores and being more likely to attend university.

Other research reveals that the youngest children in a class are diagnosed with mental illness and learning disabilities at much higher rates than older children. Summer-born UK pupils in any school year were 40 per cent more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and 30 per cent more likely to be diagnosed with depression, according to a 2019 JAMA Pediatrics study.

Yet another study, in the US, showed that the youngest pupils were 40 per cent more likely to be placed in special education programmes than their older counterparts. 

The positive academic and socioemotional effects of being older when you start school appear to be compounded for boys. “On almost every measure of educational success from [early years] to postgrad, boys and young men now lag well behind their female classmates,” economist Richard Reeves writes in his book Of Boys and Men: why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it. He cites evidence showing that boys at any age earn lower grades, get lower test scores and are three times less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than girls, with the effects particularly harsh for less-advantaged boys.

Reeves argues that the problem of male underachievement is structural, and a reasonable policy solution is to hold back all boys, regardless of whether they’re summer-born or not, so that they enter Reception a year later than girls. He says his reasoning is backed by research: boys’ brains develop more slowly than girls’ - especially executive function regions that help pupils make priorities and remember assignments - and an extra year would benefit critical brain development. Benefits really can’t be measured when children are aged 5, 6 or 7, he writes, but become pronounced when boys hit adolescence. 

“The cerebellum, for example, plays a role in ‘emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities’,” Reeves writes. “It reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls but not until age 15 for boys…By far the biggest sex difference is not in how female and male brains develop but when.”

This view is far from settled science. Psychologist Uta Frith, emeritus professor of cognitive development at UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, says she is unaware of solid evidence that, on average, boys’ brains mature more slowly than girls’. “We presume that there is individual variation in the speed of brain development,” she says, but current brain imaging techniques limit research. “There are clearly too many factors involved to produce the appropriate controls for such studies,” she adds.

‘It’s more about preventing harm than gaining an advantage’

Other significant research also seems to contradict the narrative that older is always better. A high-quality randomised study of Tennessee students in the US showed that older students didn’t necessarily gain an academic advantage; in fact, data showed that the youngest students pushed themselves, often resulting in them performing better than older students.

Several European studies, meanwhile, point to the academic success of mixed-age classrooms, where students from several different year groups are all educated together in the same class. One Norwegian study concluded that mixed-age students exceeded students in single-age classrooms on both class exams and standardised tests - the effect “driven by pupils benefiting from sharing the classroom with more mature peers from higher grades”, researchers wrote. 

Research that looks at the long-term effects of relative school age also calls into question the advantages of being older. The proven academic advantages for older pupils in elementary school fade away and actually reverse by the time students get to university, where younger students consistently perform better than older ones. 

After reviewing all of the evidence, this leads some researchers - such as Northwestern University’s Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, co-author of the Tennessee study - to conclude that holding a child back is “not really worth it”: the practice of holding the youngest kids back, she writes, “bestows few benefits and exacts some substantial costs”. 

Increased deferrals

But not everyone sees it that way, including growing numbers of parents of summer-born children - and that, along with the lack of clarity from the research, places schools in a difficult position. 

Since the Department for Education changed the rules to the School Admissions Code in 2014, to allow individual schools and local authorities more flexibility in holding children back instead of basing admissions strictly on birthdate, there has been an increase in parents applying for deferral.

In a paper currently under review, researcher Tammy Campbell, of the London School of Economics, found that school deferrals increased sharply in the decade after the loosening of restrictions, going from nearly zero to about 0.6 per cent of pupils in 2021. Campbell says that roughly 4,000 pupils started school a year behind their peers, at age 5, in the 2021 school year, and that the trend is driven sharply by summer-born children and children who have already been identified as having special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). 

“The rise in deferral seems to be entirely driven by ‘summer borns’,” Campbell says, citing the policy’s definition of children born between April and August. “It is most pronounced among the youngest: August borns. By 2021, more than 3 per cent of August borns enter Reception with the cohort below.” Children are also more likely to be held back if they are from higher-income families and speak English at home. 

The DfE guidance claims flexibility for families while also making it clear that deferrals should remain rare. “DfE supports the right of parents to decide their child will not start school until compulsory school age,” the recommendation declares, “but does not believe it should become the norm for summer-born children to begin Reception at age 5.”

The DfE claims that nine out of 10 requests for school deferral have been granted since the rule change, but campaigners and advocates say that, in reality, the picture is more complicated. Often, says Pauline McDonagh Hull, co-founder of the Summer Born Campaign, families are given permission to hold children back a year but then the next year are made to place their children in Year 1, not Reception. (This is considered a delay, not a deferral.)

Some families encounter the same resistance when it’s time to move to junior or secondary school, or if they move houses to a different county: schools may demand that an older child, one who is 10 or 12, returns to the year group assigned by their birthdate, sometimes skipping an entire year of schooling in the process. 

McDonagh Hull says that in the past admissions authorities have accused parents of trying to gain an advantage - “two bites of the cherry,” as she puts it - to reapply to get into a preferred school the next year. Similar arguments about whether redshirting gives children an edge occur in the US but they are more focused on elite sports and entrance to coveted “gifted” programmes.

“[The DfE] says in its guidance, ‘We don’t want it to become normal for summer-born children to do this,’” McDonagh Hull says. “The schools and councils just believe that children should be educated in batches because it’s the way they’ve always done it. But for us, it’s about what’s in the best interest of children. It’s more about preventing harm than gaining an advantage.” 

What the future holds    

Proponents of deferring say parents are looking to give the summer-born children extra time to mature, while detractors wonder if they’re just trying to game the system. In Canada, the US and the UK, families who hold children back tend to be wealthier and whiter than families who don’t, and some claim that’s the advantage to pupil success. 

Parents like Jones and McDonagh Hull say that, more than anything, they believe families should have a choice whether or not a four-year-old is ready for formal schooling. The Summer Born Campaign’s 20,000-member Flexible School Admissions for Summer Borns group says that through their communication with families all over the UK, they’ve found that the number of children allowed to stay back depends on the community; some people are more open to holding back summer borns, while in other areas, like Surrey, people are more resistant.

Jones says that, as a teacher, she believes holding some pupils back is what’s best for them - but she gets the idea that schools believe granting a deferral request will “open the floodgates” to many parents wanting to hold their children back, causing mass confusion around enrolment.

‘It’s children’s mental and social wellbeing that needs to be considered. There needs to be a culture change’

Some suggest there are ways around a massive overhaul of the enrolment system, such as educators adjusting their teaching or differentiating instruction for the youngest pupils - but others say required government testing in Reception makes that nearly impossible to do. 

“While Reception teachers can adapt their practice to take into account the younger age of summer-born children, official benchmarks such as the baseline test at the start of the year and the EYFS profile at the end do not take age into account,” says Alice Bradbury, co-director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (0-11 Years) at UCL Institute of Education. “Summer-born children are compared with others who may be nearly a year older than them, and there is a risk that these assessments create different expectations for these children that follow them throughout their school lives.”

Reception test results often follow pupils for years, Bradbury says, and may label pupils as “below expectations” when they’re just very young and need time to catch up.  

The 2013 IFS study suggests that schools might mitigate the worst effects of being summer-born by adjusting the window for benchmark testing. 

“IFS research has concluded that it is the age at which a child sits a test, rather than the age at which they start school, that is the main determinant of differences in attainment between those born at the start and end of the academic year,” study authors wrote. “This suggests that a policy of providing age-adjusted test scores, so that a child receives feedback about their attainment relative to others their age, rather than others in their class, would help address the educational inequalities we observe.”  

Until more meaningful changes are made, Jones is relying on her experience as a teacher and deferring her son’s entry to Reception, even if that means he attends a different school from his sister. Research has shown that teachers have some of the highest numbers of deferral if their own children are summer-born. 

“Schools are really focused on academics, but it’s children’s mental and social wellbeing that needs to be considered, even more so in today’s society,” Jones says. “There needs to be a culture change in how schools are looking at it.”

Holly Korbey is a journalist and the author of Building Better Citizens. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic, and she is a regular contributor on education for KQED MindShift and Edutopia. She tweets @hkorbey