Today Ed Balls has argued more children should start school at age four. This seems to fly directly in the face of the recommendations from the independent Primary Review last week that we should be thinking about raising the school starting age to six. Who’s right?

Actually, the debate about school starting age has acted as a distraction from a more important point: what sorts of learning are age-appropriate for very young children aged four to seven. It doesn’t matter so much whether children start school at five or six – what matters the most is that all four and five year olds are experiencing learning opportunities that are appropriate for them.

As I argued in the Guardian last week, there is a rich evidence based on how young children learn best, which points to the importance of a range of interactive pedagogical techniques rather than the jump straight into formal, desk-based models of learning found in most five to seven classrooms. These include complex sustained play structured by trained teachers, quality sustained talk and first-hand experience.

So in Finland, which has enjoys excellent educational outcomes, children start school at seven, but 96 per cent of five and six year olds are in high-quality pre-primary education that is centred around a play-based curriculum.

In England, over 9 in 10 children start school age 4 in reception classes, anyway. This is an issue because research has found that the quality of learning is compromised in reception classrooms – because it tends to mimic the more formal learning of Key Stage 1 in five to seven classrooms. Government-funded research found that the quality of learning was higher, on average, in nursery schools than in reception classes.

This is because teaching through play and interaction is not easy – it is a learned skill, just like other ways of teaching. School teachers of four to seven year olds do not get enough training in how to do this: instead, teacher training courses tend to start from the assumption that young children are mini versions of their older primary school peers. There’s no problem with young children being at school: the problem comes when they don’t get to experience the style of learning to which they respond best.

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