Children who start school later do better developmentally, finds study

When's the right time to send a child to school?

It's an age-old debate that parents go back and forth on and and the answer is unlikely to be the same for each individual child. Still, a wide-ranging study has now found that later is probably better. Children who start school at a later age tend to do better than peers who don't, research from Australia shows. The study of 100,000 children in New South Wales found that one quarter of them start school later than they are eligible to, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. These kids did an average of three percent better in developmental milestones for each extra month of age, including cognition, emotional development and motor development. Though small, "these differences add up, and unsurprisingly there is quite a large development gap between four-and-a-half-year-olds and six-year-olds," said Dr Mark Hanly from University of New South Wales (UNSW), lead author on the study. The children held back were more likely to be born closer to the cut-off date for starting school, to have gone to preschool, to live in areas where other kids are being held back and from a more advantaged socio-economic background. They were also more likely to be boys than girls. "This might be because parents and teachers believe that boys and younger children are often less school-ready,” said study director Kathleen Falster of UNSW. Dr Hanly described the fact that certain parents are waiting to send their kids to school as an "affluence phenomenon." "Migrants tend not to delay their kids. Parents with lower levels of education tend to also not be delaying their kids," he said. "Many parents want to maximise their children's education opportunities, and this is a way that more advantaged parents can do that. The implications are quite marked for some kids." The research, published in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly, did not look into whether the early advantages associated with a late school start made a difference in the long-term.