I always knew she would be young, but if everyone stuck to the system in place she would never be more than a year younger.”įigures provided by Victoria’s Department of Education, which simply encourages parents to send their children to school the year they turn five, shows that the amount of preps who were aged six on April 30 of their first year has roughly actually declined slightly in recent years: 9097 of 43,967 in 2008 (20.7 per cent) to 8807 of 50,858 in 2013 (17.3 per cent).īut what has changed is the amount of attention the issue is generating. “The only reason I’m thinking Sunday shouldn’t go to school next year is because all these other people have done this. Does a six-year-old prep outshine a five-year-old classmate? Does that extra 12 months of growth give them an advantage? If someone else has set their child up as a leader, does that make my child the follower? Like an increasing amount of Victorian parents, she began to question the implications. Lomas noted that five of the 26 students in Sunday’s four-year-old kindergarten class are already five years old. Most of them say, ‘I don’t want my child to be a follower, I want them to be a leader.’ ” “Most of them want their kids to be able to read and write before they go to school. “I’ve spoken to some of the parents and most of them just say, ‘I didn’t want my kid to be the youngest going to school,' ” says Sunday’s mother, Jacqui Lomas. But with more six-year-olds in the prep classrooms, there’s a fear of imbalance worrying some mothers and fathers. That’s a common occurrence in Victorian primary schools, where children have until April 30 of their grade prep year to turn five. Like her two siblings, Sunday will be attending Newport Lakes primary school, but when the 2015 school year starts on 29 January, the new student will still be four years old. She’s emotionally buoyant and communicates readily, and yet her parents have been uncertain about the next stage of her development. Still wearing a dress-up gown from the Frozen-themed party she had attended the previous day, the Newport kindergarten student bounces from the pantry to the couch, observes her older sister Henrietta’s guinea pig Petal, and then watches television while lying upside down. Sunday Lomas-Mee looks like your average Melbourne four-year-old. One family holds back, so another feels the need to do the same, while those who don’t suffer anxiety. In a society where concerned parents often fixate on the progress of their children, expecting milestones to be quickly reached and hoping for signs of above-average achievement, the debate over the prep starting age has become an arms race of sorts.
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