Hilary Wilce: First days of school: don't push your child

ello, and a big welcome to all parents with children starting school for the first time this week. Your child is either four or only just five. In other words, still very little. They probably still love to play and have cuddles, and maybe sleep in the afternoons, and perhaps dress up and be silly, or whisper in a corner with friends, or racket around making a great big noise about nothing.

Yet when they walk through the school gate this week all the emphasis will be on achievement. Teachers will be ticking boxes about their abilities ("maintains attention and concentrates" yes/no), and the pressure will be on them to start reading and writing early, so that by the time they face their first national assessments, at seven, their school will be hitting its required targets.

It shouldn't be like this, and this autumn you are likely to hear a growing chorus of educationists and psychologists protesting about what we are doing to our youngest children. In many other developed countries school starts later, children are eased into formal education when they are ready, and often do much better as a result.

But surely it's good for children to get going early, in a system where they will be rigorously assessed?

No it isn't. Starting too early is like pushing on a locked door. Boys, especially, struggle both to sit still and to master the fine motor movements required for writing, and as a result their first lessons are almost always about failure.

As for rigid assessment targets - they only invite teaching to the test, with some primary teachers now starting to revise before Christmas for tests that don't take place until almost Easter.

Which is not to say individual children shouldn't start reading when they are ready, nor that all children shouldn't have, in due course, a thorough drilling in phonics and other basics so they can sail into reading and writing with full confidence.

But to do this too soon, to try and ram it into little brains that are still mainly absorbing the world through play and exploration, is madness. And your most important job, as a new school parent, is to temper the effects of this madness.

So please, for your child's sake, bear in mind that: education is not about tests and exams. At this young age, especially, it is all about working out how the world works, and what your place in it might be. Your child will learn as much from walking to school in the rain, as from writing a perfect row of letter "g"s.

Remember that play is your child's work, and that the earliest reader in the class is not necessarily the one that ends up at Oxbridge.

School is not a competitive sport. Your child is, of course, a genius and no way will you have them languishing among the purple-covered reading books when everyone else is already on the yellow...But stop! Ahead lie years and years of educational hierarchies - reading, writing, tests, exams, music grades, school plays and team sports, not to mention the social tyrannies of needing to be popular and cool. Vow, now, never to get caught up in all that.

And vow that anything you do to help your child in school will always be for their own good, not for how it looks to everybody else.

It's their school life, not yours. Don't fight their every battle, or think that everything your child does or doesn't do is a reflection of you. Don't be a helicopter parent, hovering over your child's every move.

Allow them to make mistakes, do poor work, have disappointments, choose unsuitable friends, and get into trouble and take the consequences.

When they run into problems, which they will, help them to think about how to solve them themselves, or what they would like you to do to help. And allow them to take risks. That way they will really learn and grow.

You have the power to give them the best school start. Love, security and confidence are what lead to school success, not pressure and tension.

And it's in your hands to give your child the essential toolkit for learning - an enquiring mind, an understanding that persistence pays off, a readiness to have a go, and willingness to make mistakes. It's also in your power to offer them the priceless gifts of space and time.

Hold back from signing them up for too many extra activities, or hours of after-school care.

Let them come home and unwind after school, and, if at all possible, with you.

Hilary Wilce writes the weekly Quandary column in this supplement, and is the author of Help Your Child Succeed at School, published by Piatkus, £8.99

education@independent.co.uk

Interesting? Click here to explore further