[shillelagh]

Keeping kids back is a bad idea. Simple reason is that parents want their kids to be in the best primary school. Like baxenden primary school is oversubscribed and if you want your child to go to bash then you go to church long before your child is due to go there, you have your child christened there etc because you know the school is a good one. If you start keeping kids back another year then a parent is going to say oh that school had 5 kids kept back - i dont want to send mine there - i want her to go to peel park because they didnt have any kids kept back. So then that school will be over subscribed. But the kids who do then get into Peel Park may live in Baxenden or up Oswaldtwistle not live in the streets next to it they might have to go to Huncoat or Mount Pleasant or Mary Magdelene. Then with all of that you get parents taking their child to school in the car - more cars on the roads, more greenhouse gases etc. Basically what it comes down to is what the kids are taught. When i was at primary school we got taught maths, english, reading, geography, history, science, re and gym. We had two lessons of gym a week, friday morning before break was re (vicar taught us and he took the assembly on fri mornings), we had science on a wednesday afternoon, swimming on wednesday mornings. Thing is though we didnt have all the different lessons that are taught nowadays - science covered biology, chemistry, physics etc. We didnt have computers - we used books and learnt what the teacher taught us writing on the blackboard. We didnt have calculators we had to use pen and paper. We learnt to read in reception more often than not we knew some of our letters if not all because our parents sat down with us and read us books and we followed the story in the books using the pictures. How many parents nowadays sit down with their kids and read a book to them?