Play is beneficial for children, research is proving, and the question of whether children should start school later and play longer is being debated by teachers today.
Delegates at the annual conference of the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) have said that children should be a bit older before they are be pushed down the path of endless tests and pressure to achieve academically.
According to the PAT, children should be six or seven years old before they start school, rather than the present age of four.
The idea is that this would give them more time to learn essential lessons for a successful life through playing, which helps children learn to be sociable, make friends, share, negotiate and sort out arguments - the tools they will need for life, not just school.
Education experts like Pat Broadhead from Leeds Metropolitan University say play is making a comeback. But Deborah Lawson, a former chairwoman of the of PAT, warned today that time for play is increasingly squeezed by harried parents.
Starting school at a later stage to give more time for learning by playing is an approach familiar to Scandinavian and eastern European countries. It doesn't seem to do them any harm.
Forgive the generalisation, but you'd be quite hard-pressed to find stupid Norwegians, for instance. Even if they are comparatively behind British children to begin with, they soon catch up and even overtake them.
But perhaps more worryingly is the trend to get kids learning the basics of reading and writing even earlier - in nursery school at the tender age of three.
And from next year childminders and nursery assistants will have a legal duty to assess and record 500 key stages of development in the child they are looking after.
Is this a something we should worry about? Should children start school later and have more time for play?
