Nursery World - Motor skills gap hampers young children's learning

A growing body of evidence suggests that there is a rise in the number of children starting school with immature motor skills, which is hindering their ability to learn, a leading neuroscientist has claimed.

Sally Goddard Blythe, director of the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology, told Nursery World, 'There are children who are five-year-olds on the outside but three-year-olds in terms of their motor skills.'

Recent research in Germany found that more than half of seven- and eight-year-olds in a group of 164 primary school children showed traces of residual primitive reflexes. This was in line with the findings of other small-scale studies, in Northumberland in 2006 and Northern Ireland in 2004, she said.

'There are some children who have developmental delay for underlying neural reasons and they should be treated and supported, but there are another group of children who for no reason do not seem to be developing as they should.'

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