With a deadline of midday December 12, 2014, the Education Committee is inviting your views, via an online forum, on the strength of the evidence in relation to the DfE’s current policy on Summer Born Children (among others).
In order to identify areas for scrutiny in early 2015, the Committee asked the DfE to provide a two-page note answering the questions ‘What’s the policy?’ and ‘What’s the evidence for this policy?’ for nine topics, and is now asking members of the public to evaluate the DfE’s evidence and submit comments via an ‘Evidence check’ forum.
The nine topics covered are:
• Phonics
• Teaching Assistants
• Professional Measurement Metrics
• National College of Teaching and Leadership
• Summer Born Children
• Universal Infant Free School Meals
• Impact of Raising the Participant Age
• Music Education
• School Starting Age
The Committee is also asking for views on the Department’s use of evidence in its policy making and its mechanisms for analysing evidence, as a whole.
• Department’s use of evidence
The Committee will use the comments it receives to select topics for one-off oral evidence sessions in early 2015. The Committee may wish to quote comments made. Comments will be pre-moderated.
summerbornchildren 
Having just read this, it seems as if the conclusion is more opinion than evidence based. Who writes these documents? I’m an intelligent person but they are so confusing to read! Why can’t they introduce a little more clarity? The evidence overwhelmingly shows that summer born children are at a disadvantage and that parents favour flexibility. Compulsory school age is 5 and the code should reflect this CLEARLY. It’s still massively confusing and makes the postcode lottery worse. Also, as happened in our case, Local Authorities continue to claim it is in children’s best interest to begin in Year 1 with her peers – where is the evidence that proves this?
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I’m glad the issue is paired with school starting age for a wider exploration of the issue. There is quite a lot of evidence to suggest emotional regulation doesn’t occur till seven or eight but I guess they won’t look at research/evidence from contemporary Educational Psychology or the research that indicates the high levels of SEN misdiagnosed in summer born children. Can’t help but think that the outcome will be, “Yes we looked at this. As you were folks”. It’s just an attempt to placate the masses who don’t know what is good for them… Get them in school and get those mums back into the work force so they can fund our civil servants. The conclusions of this will be disappointing I’ll bet….
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