Should children start school very young or at age seven?

There is a debate in many countries about the right age for children to begin their school education. Some people say children should start as early as possible, while others think that seven is a better age. Both sides have good arguments.

On the one hand, starting school early has several benefits. Young children learn languages very quickly and their brains are like sponges, so this is the best time to teach them reading and writing. In addition, at school children meet other children and learn how to share, how to wait for their turn and how to solve small conflicts. Another important point is that both parents usually work nowadays, and if the child is at school the parents can go to their jobs without worrying, which is very important for the family income.

On the other hand, other people believe that small children should stay at home until they are seven. They say that childhood is very short and children should enjoy playing instead of sitting at a desk. Moreover, some children are not ready and they can become stressed, lose their confidence and start to hate school from the beginning, which is a very bad result. For example, my younger brother could not read as quickly as the other children in his class when he was five, and although he reads perfectly well today, for years he told everybody that he was simply not clever, which was not true at all.

In conclusion, both opinions have advantages and disadvantages, and I think the best age depends on the child and on the family situation.

Much of this argument is conducted with the word school covering two entirely different things: a place children are looked after while their parents work, and a place formal instruction begins. Separating them dissolves most of the disagreement. My view is that early attendance is clearly good and early instruction clearly is not, and the countries arguing about the starting age are usually arguing about which of the two they mean.

The case for getting children into a setting early is strong and rarely about literacy. Four-year-olds who spend their days with twenty other four-year-olds learn to negotiate, to wait, to be disliked briefly and survive it — and the children who arrive at seven without that are conspicuous for a term. There is also a plain economic argument, since accessible early provision is one of the few policies that reliably raises women's employment. Both are arguments for attendance, and neither is an argument for phonics at four.

The case against early formal instruction is that its advantage does not last. Finland begins formal schooling at seven and its pupils are not detectably behind by adolescence, which suggests the years spent teaching reading at four buy a head start that later evaporates. What can be lost in exchange is real: a child who decides at five that they are bad at reading may hold that belief for a decade, and reading difficulty at that age is frequently just developmental variation being measured too early.

The resolution follows the distinction. Start children early, in play-based settings staffed by people trained in early years; start formal literacy and numeracy late, and stop treating attendance and instruction as the same decision.