Labour’s goal to get kids ‘school ready’ needs a shared script

Good morning. One of the six “milestones” the government has pledged to meet by the end of this parliament is a promise that three quarters of five-year-olds in England will be “school ready” by the time they start reception. 

Children’s centres and family hubs for young families are key to this mission and yet, as I wrote yesterday, funding for these services has in fact declined over the past year.

Today, with Stephen still on holiday, I want to go into a bit more detail about another glaring problem with this milestone.

False starts

Keir Starmer has promised that 75 per cent of five-year-olds in England will be “ready to learn” when they start school. 

Just 68 per cent of children are currently deemed to have reached the standard when starting school, according to government data.

But despite the government target, I was shocked to learn recently that the measurement the government uses to evaluate progress is “good level of development” (GLD), which is in fact used to assess children at the end of that first year, not the start.

There is also no official description of “school readiness” given to parents before their child enrols in Reception class.

In recent weeks, teachers have told me they are increasingly being diverted from following the curriculum because they are forced to teach the children basic skills they would traditionally have learned from parents at home, such as potty training, or eating and drinking independently. 

One teacher I spoke to has introduced finger strengthening exercises into his classroom after lunch each day because of the growing number of children starting his school without the strength to hold a pencil, or a knife and fork. 

A recent survey commissioned by the early years charity Kindred², which involved more than 1,000 teachers and 1,000 parents of Reception-aged children, is revealing.

While 90 per cent of the parents surveyed believed their child was ready to start school, the teachers reported one-third of children were not.

The discrepancy in perceptions of who was responsible for this is also fascinating, with almost half of parents surveyed saying they do not view it as their role to prepare their children for school, but for the teacher to develop such skills in the classroom. 

As a result, teachers said dealing with these developmental delays can take an average of 2.4 hours away from their traditional teaching day. 

The charity has since published a list of skills they believe parents need to understand the definition of “school ready”, which includes a child being able to use cutlery, independently use the toilet, recognise their own name and hang a coat on a peg. 

The list has been endorsed by the education secretary Bridget Phillipson. But there is nothing mandating schools to send this list to parents before their child joins the classrooms. 

At the same time this is happening, over the past year almost half of councils in England cut their budgets for community services that are designed to support families. 

According to freedom of information requests, made by the Centre for Young Lives and shared with the FT, the total spending for all children’s centres and family hubs decreased from £444mn in 2023-24 to £437mn in 2024-25, marking a real-terms 1.6 per cent drop.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the knock-on impact of a lack of family support services on children’s development and the subsequent impact on schools.

The FOIs show that as of 2025, funding for family services amounts to only a quarter of the annual allocation under the previous Labour government’s Sure Start programme in 2010.

In the years since then, when the ringfenced grant for Sure Start was removed, there has been a significant reduction in funding and availability of services aimed directly at families with young children.

Instead, government spending on early years had shifted away from integrated services and moved towards funding free childcare for parents earning over a threshold.

A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that “children with access to a Sure Start centre before they started school had a positive significant impact on their education readiness, particularly low-income children”.

If the government wants to meet its “milestone”, being less squeamish about telling parents like myself what milestones our children should be meeting before they start school feels vital.

Now try this

On the theme of parenthood, I recently finished Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy. The novel is as agonising as it is darkly funny about the realities of early motherhood.

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