Mom stirs debate after revealing 'controversial' reason she's not sending her son to school this year
A mother has sparked a debate online after revealing that she’s not sending her 4-year-old son to school this year.
Emma Hutchinson, a 38-year-old mother of two and the blogger behind Dirt, Diggers and Dinosaurs, explains her family’s reasons for not sending her son Stanley to school this year, describing the confusion some parents have expressed after learning about their decision.
Stanley was due to start school on Sept. 5, Hutchinson wrote on her blog, but her family made the “controversial” decision to delay his start date until the following school year.
Stanley was born in the month of June, which would make him one of the youngest in the school year in the U.K. if he were to start now, his mother says. While he does not have any additional needs, Hutchinson says it’s in Stanley’s best interests to put off starting school until next year when he is 5 — the compulsory school age (CSA) in the U.K.
“For the extra year, he will be attending preschool part time, playing, bonding with his brothers, playing, exploring, enjoying days out, playing, growing and developing at his own pace,” she says.
A post shared by Emma (@dirt_diggers_and_dinosaurs) on Sep 14, 2018 at 7:38am PDT
Some of the questions Hutchinson says she’s been getting include whether her son has special needs, whether she is doing it because she can’t bear to let him go and whether her decision was because Stanley didn’t get into his first choice of school.
“The plain fact is…he’s 4,” she writes. “We’ve simply chosen not to send him to school EARLY, we are sending him at school age which if you go back a generation was the absolute norm.”
Hutchinson says she wanted to write the blog to let other parents know it is possible to prevent your child from starting school at age 4, if they feel that is right for them.
According to the School Admissions Code in the U.K., children usually start school the September after they turn 4, but parents of children born between April 1 and Aug, 31 — also known as “summer-born” children — can ask to delay that for a year.
Some schools will accept a deferral and allow a child to start the following year, while some schools will only allow children a deferred entry if they start in year one in the following year, the code says.
The Hutchinson family certainly aren’t the only ones opting to defer starting their child’s schooling until they are of compulsory age. A recent survey of local authorities in the U.K. revealed that the number of requests for delayed school entry increased significantly between 2015 and 2017.
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