Five-year-olds in school have a higher risk of ADHD
The entry system in Norway favours the oldest schoolchildren, according to one researcher. Is flexible school start the answer?
The road from kindergarten to school is one of life’s many transitions.
“It’s an important one,” says Kathryn Christine Beck, researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH).
What difference does it make if you are five or six years old when you sit at your school desk for the very first time? Beck has taken a closer look at this in her research.
She finds that school performance in national tests is poorer for the youngest pupils in Norway. And the chance of being diagnosed with ADHD is as much as 59 per cent lower for the oldest school starters, who are born in January.
The six-year-old reform
Since 1997, six-year-olds have attended school in Norway. In recent years, many have argued that this is particularly disadvantageous for boys, especially those born late in the year.
There can be a whole year’s age difference between a child born in December and one born in January.
One of the main findings of Beck’s study is that the chance of getting a diagnosis is considerably higher among the youngest school starters. Another is that the youngest children perform worse on tests in both fifth and ninth grade and have a higher risk of being diagnosed with ADHD.
The children who started a year later performed better on their tests in both fifth and ninth grade. But the differences were smaller from fifth to ninth grade.
Beck says that some studies provide reason to believe that this effect levels out over time.
“In another study with older cohorts, we found no difference in educational attainment,” she says.
A key sociological theory is that encountering a disadvantage early in life leads to more disadvantages, explains Beck. For example, a bad start at school can lead to negative associations with school.
Beck believes that her findings should have implications for the school system. Delaying entry to school can be beneficial for children born late in the year. It can provide a more adapted start to the educational journey, she says in NIPH’s press release.
Could a flexible school start be the solution?
Worrying
“The fact that the academic performance of the oldest pupils is higher is not surprising, if we assume that age, knowledge, and skills are interrelated,” says Liza Reisel.
She is a researcher at the Institute for Social Research and a member of the Men's Equality Commission that submitted its report in March 2024.
“But if they receive a diagnosis for behaviours that are linked to difficulty sitting still, it’s worrying,” she says.
One of the commission’s many proposals was to advocate for a flexible school start. Reisel disagreed.
“It’s difficult to know what’s related to maturity and what’s about differences between children. Waiting may not make things better. It’s about how schools deal with restless children who find it hard to sit still,” says the researcher.
Delaying school start in Denmark
Other countries have much more variation in whether pupils are granted deferred entry. In Denmark, the proportion of kindergarten children who wait to start school is also higher. In the USA, this is called 'redshirting.'
The Norwegian school system is quite rigid, says Reisel. For example, it is much harder to skip a grade if it turns out waiting a year was the wrong choice.
There are also some challenges associated with leisure activities, such as football, which follows age groups rather than school year.
“You can play upwards, but not downwards. This is a challenge for children starting later, and can lead to exclusion and poorer integration. I think we should be cautious about delaying entry to school, given that society is the way it is,” says Reisel.
More ADHD among the youngest boys
Among the youngest children, boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Most boys with ADHD are diagnosed between the ages of 7 and 12. Girls are older, and the proportion of girls diagnosed with ADHD has risen sharply in recent years.
In her study, Kathryn Beck shows that there is little difference between boys and girls, both in terms of school performance and ADHD diagnosis.
“We’ve known this for a long time,” says Reisel.
Yet the school debate focuses a lot on boys. That partly has to do with how we understand maturation, says Reisel.
She points out that boys on average tend to have a bit more energy than girls, and that it’s hard to distinguish that from how mature a child actually is. For boys, their being-in-the-world doesn’t necessarily improve over time, she explains. The term refers to the fact that we live in a context. How boys are doing and functioning in their surroundings will not automatically get better as they grow older.
“Do you think the fact that more boys than girls are diagnosed with ADHD is precisely about their way of being in the world?”
“There may be other biological differences that actually make ADHD more likely in boys. But it can also be about their way of being in the world and the structures around us. It could be both,” she says.
Girls get better grades
When it comes to boys’ performance on national tests, the results are fairly evenly distributed between boys and girls. Girls do best in reading; boys do best in maths. The difference is that girls get better grades than boys.
“Since boys on average end up with poorer grades in tenth grade, this indicates some gendered challenges in terms of school adaptation. But pupil surveys indicate almost no gender differences in their motivation and how well they thrive," says Reisel.
She adds that there is also a lot of research showing that boys have poorer impulse control until around the age of 20.
“But how this relates to national tests and grades is not entirely clear,” she says.
Unfair
Fartein Ask Torvik is a senior researcher at NIPH and holds an additional post at the University of Oslo's Department of Psychology. Unlike Reisel, he is strongly in favour of a flexible school start system. He conveys to Kilden that the results of Beck’s study make him even more convinced.
“The study shows that older children do better in school and receive fewer ADHD diagnoses. In other words, the current system for starting school favours children who are mature enough for their year group,” he says.
That means those born early in the year.
“The study shows fairly strong effects, so if this can be translated into policy, there's potential for prevention,” he continues.
In his opinion, the current school entry system means that children have to adapt to a rigid system.
“It’s worst for those who are born late in the year who have to start when they're five and a half years old. The study shows that this isn't always what’s best for them," he says.
The neurological development and maturation of a child does not only depend on their due date, he explains. But if the child is in a grey area between a diagnosis or not, the time of birth can affect how serious the problems are considered to be.
Currently too few granted deferred entry
Today, around 0.5 per cent of Norwegian children are granted deferred entry to school. This is subject to an assessment by an expert from the educational and psychological counselling service (PPT).
“That share is too low,” says Torvik, noting that the share of Danish children is ten times higher.
He says that the rigidity of the current system is a poor argument for not extending the deferred school entry system.
Norway currently has a small, highly selected group of children who are granted deferred entry.
"Of course, it’s possible to imagine a situation where too many and the wrong children delay starting school, but we have a long way to go before we get there," he says.
If a more flexible school start system were to be introduced, however, research and ongoing evaluations of its effects would be essential, he believes.
“We need greater knowledge about what works and what doesn’t work in schools. That said, other parts of the school could also be more flexible.”
Torvik believes that if a flexible school start was introduced, more boys would take advantage of it, or they would be assessed as 'immature.'
“When these boys do better on tests, it will help to reduce the gender gap a bit. So even if the system takes the same approach for immature boys and immature girls, boys are likely to benefit the most from it,” he says.
Is flexible school start the solution?
But why is flexible school start better than measures others have advocated, such as reversing the six-year-old reform?
Torvik believes these are two different discussions.
“Reversing the six-year-old reform is about when the average child should start school. Flexible school start concerns whether all children born at a certain time should start school at the same time," he says.
He thinks some children would probably benefit from both measures.
"I believe that the content of children’s everyday lives is more important than whether the institution they attend this year is called a school or a kindergarten, and that it’s probably easier to improve the content than to reverse the six-year-old reform,” he says.
Reference:
Beck, K.C. The later the better? A novel approach to estimating the effect of school starting age on ADHD and academic skills, European Sociological Review, 2025. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcaf004
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This article was first published by Kilden genderresearch.no. Read the original here.
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