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While I enjoyed the independence that travelling alone came with, at times the experience was stressful, daunting and a little scary. Occasionally, I felt like the outsider with everyone else on the inside. During those times, I acknowledged that travelling with friends, family or others in a group may have eased these feelings via the reassurance of “we’re all in this together”, as well as providing people to create and share memories with.
The New Zealand School Enrolment System
In New Zealand children are required to attend school from 6 years of age but legally, they cannot start school before turning 5 years of age. Consequently, it has become somewhat of a tradition for children to start school on, or closely after, their fifth birthday. This trend has resulted in a continuous and rolling enrolment of students starting school and joining new entrant or year 1 classes at different times throughout the school year. Furthermore, as the new entrant classes grow, older children are often taken out to form a new class, consequently, creating an additional transition for children within their first year of school.
New Zealand’s rolling and continuous school enrolment practice contrasts with the more common annual entry intakes and static class sizes that occur in the four countries I visited and, indeed, with the majority of countries in the OECD (Peters, 2010; Ali & Menclova, 2024). While each country has different start and finish dates for their school year and different criteria to determine a cut-off age for starting school, in each country all students start together at the beginning of the school year.
Table: Enrolment and cut-off age for kindergarten and school in four countries
When I shared with educators from the countries I visited how the New Zealand enrolment system contrasted with their own, it was, without exception, met with surprise, confusion.
New Zealand’s rolling enrolment presents:
Disruption for New Entrant/Year 1 teachers preparing for individual and ad hoc entries to school.
Disruption to learning programmes.
Recruitment issues: unpredictable rolls mean schools may have to find and recruit New Entrant teachers for 2-4 terms only and let them go at the end of the school year.
The scariness, stress and feelings of being an outsider while travelling alone that I described (top of page) must be even more applicable to a child starting school on the first day. Imagine turning up to a class that has been established several days, weeks or months ago and feeling like everyone else in class knows the school, the routines, the rules and already has friends—feeling like all eyes are on “the new kid” in class! Surely a child’s transition to school is the most crucial time when children need to feel that comforting sense of “we’re all in this together”? Indeed, New Zealand research indicates the importance of relationships and meaningful connections with that of a feeling of well-being, successful transitions to school and academic success (Peters, 2003).
The challenges of starting school alone versus the relative benefits of starting with others have not completely escaped the New Zealand education system though. From 2020, schools have been able to adopt cohort entry whereby groups of students who have turned five years of age start school together in the first or sixth week of a term closest to their birthday. In a 2022 report, the Educational Review Office (ERO) noted the positive benefits that starting school with others had on school transitions regarding social and emotional wellbeing, establishing and maintaining friendships, and an overall sense of belonging. The advantages of cohort entry compared to the constant drip of children under continuous entry, also have administrative benefits (e.g., planning for student numbers, recruitment and retention of new entrant teachers, planning for student and parent orientation visits to school) and improved learning and achievement with reduced disruption to learning programmes and increased opportunities for uninterrupted, cohesive blocks of learning.
Reasons schools reported for adopting cohort entry (ERO 2022 Report)
Given the acknowledgement of advantages with starting some children together, the question remains, why are we not starting all students together at the start of the year?
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