I am an August baby - When I went to school, I was one of the youngest. Cut-off date September 30. Primary grades was based on ability grouping, much like the Swiss model. Once master, moving to the next thing to master. As a result every student was on an even playing ground when it came to basic skills and foundation of the 3 Rs. I always started off in the lowest ability, but I quickly moved up to catch up with my best friends who happened to be the oldest, being born on October to December.

The British article is crazy. Its not going to fool kids, nor will it help the August babies getting extra points to increase grade average. All that is shuffling the numbers around, and ignoring the students’ learning needs. Sure I sometimes struggle in the early grades, but when kids were struggling it was fixed by the teacher. As a result, there wasn’t any teasing and bullying based on ability. For gosh sakes, if a student called someone stupid, they were hauled into the principal’s office for a dressing down.

As the SQE article stated, “Children come into education with wide variations in ability. The
tragedy of British and Canadian education is that it takes these differences and accentuates them. It widens the gaps between children as they grow
older. A large proportion fall ever further behind and end up as ill-educated failures.”

“And now in the Canadian education system, they have managed to extend it include the summer time babies all the way to the babies born in the December months. It shows up in the data streams in the earlier school years, and as well as in SE support and struggling in learning.
In Canada, the failure of individualized teaching is, to some extent,  compensated for by widespread college education that manages to repair
some of the damage.  The saving grace - not much of a saving grace…..