Younger pupils are at a disadvantage Some parents enrol children later to increase their chances

More and more parents are letting their children start school a year later - some with the aim of improving their offspring's educational opportunities. Experience shows: The older children in a class have an advantage.

There was a time when parents were proud if their child was so precocious and clever that they could start kindergarten or school a year earlier than planned.

Those days are over. Today, the focus is on parents who apply for their son or daughter to start compulsory kindergarten a year later than their child should. In many cases, it is the parents who want this. The usual reason given is that their child is not yet ready for kindergarten.

In fact, some children are not yet ready to cope with kindergarten life five mornings a week, to abide by the rules, to be without a parent for so long. Using the toilet can also be a challenge for the youngest kindergarteners. Difficulties in kindergarten with particularly young boys and girls have been an issue for years.

In most cantons, two years of kindergarten are compulsory, in the others one year. Starting school is the same as entering kindergarten.

Kindergarten at the age of 4 years and three weeks

Most Swiss cantons have lowered the school entry age in recent years. In 20 cantons, children who turn four by July 31 at the latest must start their first of two years of kindergarten the following August, meaning that the youngest children are only four years and three weeks old when they start kindergarten for the first time.

In the remaining six cantons, the cut-off date is between May 31 (Schwyz) and December 31 (Graubünden).

The federal government's Education Report 2023 has addressed the issue. It shows that those cantons with earlier key dates for kindergarten entry - where children are therefore older - tend to have fewer provisions. The proportion of children who start kindergarten later following an application is smaller.

However, the full variance is also evident among the cantons with a cut-off date of July 31. There are cantons in which equally few children start school later and those in which a particularly large number wait a year.

Leaders in delayed school enrolment

The canton of Thurgau is the leader in delayed enrolment with 18%, followed by the canton of Bern with 17%. Both have a cut-off date of July 31 - as does the canton of Ticino, where the proportion of children who are delayed is in the low single-digit percentage range, as low as in Graubünden. The latter has a voluntary pre-kindergarten year, which the majority take advantage of, as Dagmar Rösler, President of the Swiss Teachers' Association LCH, explains.

The factors that determine how many parents do not yet want to send their children to kindergarten are therefore not solely determined by the date. How liberally the cantons deal with parents' applications also plays a role. In the canton of Bern, it is sufficient for parents to request this. In most other cantons, the school supervisory authorities of the municipalities, i.e. the school board, make the decision.

Another aspect is more important than this investigation into the causes: not all parents want to send their child to school a year later because they consider it to be underdeveloped. Some do so because they hope their son or daughter will perform better at school if they are one of the older and therefore more cognitively developed children in their class.

Children who start school later have better educational opportunities

And they are statistically correct, as the education report also states: "The younger a child, the greater the likelihood that they will perform worse in performance tests than their older classmates due to the biological age difference." This is particularly detrimental to those who start kindergarten regularly despite their young age. They can even be over a year younger than certain classmates, with whom they are inevitably compared.

Dagmar Rösler from the LCH tells blue News that teachers notice age differences in their pupils in class up to the sixth primary class.

The advantage of the older students continues into secondary school. "Schweiz am Wochenende" quotes a study according to which older pupils are overrepresented throughout Switzerland. In the cantons of Bern and Schwyz, the older half is overrepresented by more than 30 percent, compared to 10 percent nationwide.

Was lowering the school entry age a mistake?

This raises the question of whether lowering the school entry age made sense, given that the chances of educational success increase when a child starts school later. Dagmar Rösler believes this conclusion is wrong: "It may be that children have an advantage over their classmates. Educational opportunities do not decrease overall for the whole spectrum."

The LCH President suspects that it is less the actual age that is decisive than the commitment of the parents. "Those who defer their children because they hope it will give them better educational opportunities may tend to support their children more than those who send their children to kindergarten when they are required to do so by their canton."

Regula Roebers, Head of the Department of Developmental Psychology at the University of Bern, explains in the "Berner Zeitung" that it is an advantage to send children to kindergarten early. It offers "unique learning opportunities" to children who actually have deficits. In addition, the specialists would recognize developmental delays more quickly. Ultimately, the most important thing is the daily structure and contact with peers.