A new report has found students who are older when they start school are outperforming their younger classmates.
Study co-author Dr Kathleen Falster said other factors - like health and maturity - were affecting the age students start at school. "But when you start to add this up over six months or more, then you're really looking at increasing differences. Not surprisingly then, there's quite big differences developmentally between four-and-a-half-year-old children and six-year-old children."The report showed that migrant parents and low-income earners were more likely to send their children to school earlier, rather than holding them back.
"[They should not be] forced into a position where childcare is unavailable to them because of cost and it is too expensive, which I think we know is unfortunately happening in a lot of communities." Childcare workers said these social inequalities are translating to performance inequalities in the education system.
Either childcare needs to be cheaper or it needs to be easier for parents to not work for this to happen here.