BMJ  2003;327:1286 (29 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7426.1286-b

Letter

Child psychiatric disorder and relative age in school year

Children need to be regarded as individuals in education

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Goodman et al said that teachers often forget to make allowances for a child's relative age.¹ They also seem to forget to make allowances for a child's educational needs, intellectual potential, and already obtained academic ability. Children are not regarded as individuals in education.

Being the youngest in the year is associated with educational disadvantage only if the teacher does not make allowances for a child's ability or needs. It is not the parent that has the unreasonable expectation: it is the system, which expects everybody to function at a certain level at a certain age in their life regardless of their intelligence, ability, need, personality, or situation.

Grouping children by relative age would help solve the problem only if all those children at that particular age were at the exact same level and stage of their educational, social, and emotional development and had the same needs that . . . [Full text of this article]

6 Lesley Crescent, Mortdale, NSW 2223, Australia challita@bigpond.com

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Relevant Article

Child psychiatric disorder and relative age within school year: cross sectional survey of large population sample

Robert Goodman, Julia Gledhill, and Tamsin Ford
BMJ 2003 327: 472. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]