Young children in Scotland are brighter than those in the rest of the UK because their fathers read to them more often, their mothers run stricter households and their pre-school education is better, new research suggests. (…)

According to the Millennium Cohort study, which looks at children born around 2000, Scottish three-year-olds are an average of 1.5 months ahead of others in the UK. But last year’s international league table of literacy in primary school children ranked Scotland 26th, seven places below England. (…)

Primary reason for low standards

Sadly, I don’t find it at all surprising that Scottish children are more advanced at an early age, yet fall behind by the time they leave their primary schools.

Scottish parents still cherish the old values of talking and reading to their children, and tend to spend more time with them than their English counterparts, but all recent comparative studies place our ten- to 12-year-olds lower in the literacy and numeracy league tables than their English and many of their European counterparts.

The answer lies in our overcrowding of the primary curriculum, and our reluctance to ensure that they leave primary school with basic skills. In France, for example, if you don’t reach a certain standard by the end of the year, you repeat the year. Moreover, there is far greater concentration on the three Rs. Once a child leaves primary school without the basic skills, the problem compounds itself, because he or she falls further behind, and such pupils gradually become disillusioned with school.

So parents who have taken such a pride in ensuring their children get a good start by getting them into good habits when they are very young, should also insist that their children at least reach a basic level in literacy and numeracy during their primary years. More important, our political masters should set this as their overriding priority for primary schools. (…)

Source: Scotsman, United Kingdom
http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Scots-tots-are-the-UK39s.3714074.jp