Apparently there has been a report, rejected out of hand by the government, which recommends that formal schooling should not begin until children are six years old.

Well, I suppose it depends what you mean my formal schooling, but to me reading came as naturally (and almost as early) as talking. Nobody had to teach me to read - the written word was all around and I read it: I read notices in shop windows, street signs, labels and, of course, books. I was reading at two and fluent by four. And before you think that I am setting myself up as some sort of genius, it was the same for my mother, her brother, my grandmother and a goodly selection of my cousins. I know about my family, but I am sure that there are many children for whom reading was a simple and and natural progression from speech which was acquired long before any formal schooling kicked in.

Because my grandfather was a fish merchant and part of my father's job was to run the market stalls, I went along to 'help' and learned numbers, arithmetic, weights and money just as naturally.

However, back with reading: my sister did not take to it with quite the same alacrity. This is probably my fault - at four and five I was a hard task mistress who undertook to teach my small sister to read and smacked her every time she misread a word. Although she learned to read, she was eight or nine years old before curling up with a novel became the pleasure to her that it had been to me since I was four or five. Now don't let anybody think it is because she is in any way less bright for it was she, not I, who topped the county's lists in her year's 11+ passes (just as Shelagh, one of the family's very early readers, had in her county ten years earlier). So very early reading cannot simply be a matter of intelligence.

I now move to family members who found - and still find - reading a chore. My brother-in-law is dyslexic, and all four of his children have inherited this problem to a lesser or greater extent. Joe went to a prep school which pushed literacy and numeracy, which were taught in formal classes, from the age of three. The school had a simple theory about which children were clever and which were stupid. Joe did not take to reading and writing, ergo he was stupid. By the time my sister moved him to a state school he was scared stiff of making mistakes and to this day will hardly attempt any writing beyond his signature. Josh, five years younger and taught first at a nursery and then at the village school by two wonderful and gifted teachers, is just as dyslexic but has no fear of either failure or the written word, and thus types away on the computer with his crazy spelling which usually comes close enough for the spellcheck or google search to make some sort of sense of it.

So, looking at either end of the natural reading scale from purely a family anecdotal point of view, it seems to me that the government is foolish to reject the idea of delaying formal teaching until children are six years old. Play based learning need not mean keeping children ignorant of numbers and the written word, just making them part of the fun with no literacy and numeracy targets for either the children or their teachers to fulfil.