28 pc of kids starting school in UK don’t know how to speak properly, study reveals

Did your child know how to speak well when he or she started school?

The Department for Education (DfE) in the UK have released statistics which show 28 percent of four and five-year-olds starting school lack sufficient communication skills. That’s more than a quarter of children starting school that don’t have the ability to talk properly, a skill they are expected to have before they start primary school. The level of communication that they are expected to have includes talking about things in the past and future. British Education Secretary Damian Hinds thinks this is a “persistent scandal”. He expressed his concern about the findings by saying:

“This matters, because when you’re behind from the start you rarely catch up.” "Your peers don’t wait, the gap just widens. This has a huge impact on social mobility.”

The Minister is tackling this by highlighting the parents role in their children's’ lives and the fact that many parents are not teaching their little ones how to speak accordingly. Hinds made it clear that he doesn’t want to lecture parents on how they raise their kids, but he warned them that their children will fall behind in school if they don’t teach their kids these things before they start. The Minister said:

“The truth is that the vast majority of these children’s time is at home. Yes, the home learning environment can be, understandably, the last taboo in education policy – but we can’t afford to ignore it when it comes to social mobility.”

The department's study also revealed that children with inadequate vocabulary at five-years-old are more than twice as likely to be without a job when they are 34 as children with great vocabulary. If you're looking to increase your child's vocabulary, here's a piece we did last year that you should check out.