Reference to summer born children appears in the DfE’s new white paper ‘Educational excellence everywhere‘ (pg.67), which was published on March 17th.
Setting out the government’s plans for the next 5 years, it says:
“4.61. We intend to make a number of changes to make it easier for parents to navigate the admissions system. We will also seek views on making admissions processes clearer and simpler, including proposals to better support parents who want to delay entry of summer-born children so they can start reception at age 5, and clarifying that those children can remain with that cohort as they progress through school. We will streamline functions of the Office of the Schools Adjudicator so objections to admission arrangements are resolved more quickly.”
Most parents of summer born children would argue their children are not ‘delaying‘ entry – but rather starting AT compulsory school age instead of one year ‘early‘.
That said, what matters most is for this option to be become genuinely available for every summer born child, in every part of the country, without adversely affecting their equal standing in the admissions process – and putting an end to the postcode lottery.
More information can be found here.
summerbornchildren 
It still saddens me that the DfE still clearly don’t understand that we’re not “delaying” anything we are just starting our children ON TIME at CSA 😢
Hopefully this mindset can be changed moving forward and people will understand this more.
However I am glad that this has been mentioned and I’m sure these creases can be ironed out?!
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That’s great, but I was rather hoping from what Nick Clegg suggested last year that this would have been sorted by now….
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What does “proposals to better support parents who want to delay entry of summer-born children so they can start reception at age 5” actually mean? The ONLY acceptable way to go forward from the current situation of postcode lottery where some LAs and admissions authorities are very accommodating to requests to reception start at CSA and others are completely against and anything in between is to allow all children access to full education if their parents ask for it.
Can we please make this very clear in the upcoming changed to the Code and stop the local bureaucratic machines making lives of parents and children so uncertain and stressful.
Only then, when children are NOT forced to miss a year (any year) of school against their parents wishes and made catch up from the moment they enter the classroom we can talk about “educational excellence”. Until then it is just hollow, empty words. Sorry.
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