Research shows that relative age plays a crucial role: the youngest children in a grade initially achieve poorer academic results and are more likely to face bullying. Furthermore, researchers have found that some of the effects of relative age at school entry can persist into adulthood.
Simply limiting deferrals will not solve the problem. Tightening the rules will merely spread out the age difference among classmates. In every class, someone will remain the youngest and face the challenges associated with relative age.
According to available evidence, school flexibility therefore plays a key role. Experience from other countries shows that the effects of relative age are least pronounced where schools use differentiated instruction and where educational decisions made in the early years of schooling can be easily adjusted over time.
“A six-year-old child who is 11 months younger than a classmate is not a weaker version of that same student—he or she is simply at a different stage of natural development. We must provide teachers with the tools to work with this variability,” says Luca Fumarco.
The research findings thus offer several recommendations for the Czech reform. Above all, it is important to take a child’s age into account when assessing their development. Teachers and psychologists should explicitly consider this factor during diagnosis and assessment in the early grades to prevent natural developmental differences from being mistakenly labeled as disorders.
Adequate support in the early grades is also crucial. Limiting deferrals should be accompanied by differentiated instruction, targeted mentoring, and methodological support for teachers working with children in the early grades.
It is equally important to ensure the flexibility of educational pathways. The system must guarantee that early decisions regarding a student’s placement or specialization are, as far as possible, fully reversible.
At the same time, the impacts of eliminating deferrals must be systematically evaluated. Based on administrative data, it should be possible to track their impact on academic performance, absenteeism, the incidence of diagnoses, and the overall well-being of children. It is necessary not only to monitor descriptive statistics but also, in collaboration with experts, to assess causal effects.
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