Australian students are almost twice as likely to start school without kindergarten or preschool than the OECD average, raising concerns about the effect on academic performance in later years.
The world’s largest study of 15-year-old students found 11.5 per cent of Australian students did not attend pre-primary school or attended for less than a year, compared with the OECD average of 6.2 per cent.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s PISA test found students who had not attended pre-primary school or attended for less than a year “scored lower in reading at the age of 15 than students who had attended for between one and three years, before and after accounting for students’ and schools’ socioeconomic profile”.
