Child psychiatric disorder and relative age in school year

Editor—Goodman et al said that teachers often forget to make allowances for a child's relative age.¹ They also seem to forget to make allowances for a child's educational needs, intellectual potential, and already obtained academic ability. Children are not regarded as individuals in education.

Being the youngest in the year is associated with educational disadvantage only if the teacher does not make allowances for a child's ability or needs. It is not the parent that has the unreasonable expectation: it is the system, which expects everybody to function at a certain level at a certain age in their life regardless of their intelligence, ability, need, personality, or situation.

Grouping children by relative age would help solve the problem only if all those children at that particular age were at the exact same level and stage of their educational, social, and emotional development and had the same needs that needed to be met.

Children need to have their particular educational needs met to be happy and fulfilled in their education. Meeting children's age requirements is in most cases not meeting the child's educational needs and is very damaging to a child's self esteem and feelings of self worth, which in turn affects them psychologically and emotionally.

Surely a more sensible approach would be to start children at school when they are emotionally and socially ready to start school and then put them into classes at a level that is appropriate and suitable to their ability and need.