I taught myself to read before starting school, at the usual age of five. So far from proving any sort of advantage, I found myself trapped in classes with pupils below my reading age, having to “move” at the speed of the slowest, bored and frustrated, “alienated”, to coin a phrase.

I have been a member of Mensa for some years, and, partly as a consequence of that, and partly through more general research, I am aware of a great many similar cases, past and present.

Given that many teachers are hostile to any sort of streaming, and that there is renewed talk of increasing the school entry age to six, this problem is likely to worsen.

Perhaps, having made it clear that ability is more important than age in one “direction” we may be able to convince people that the same applies in the other.

What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.

Sure, not always, but in most primary schools the overwhelming majority of pupils who struggle and should be kept down are boys born between April and September. The gender aspect is crucial here, nothwithstanding the whole ’summer baby’ syndrome.

I’ve not had time to read the reports referred to above, but have they taken boy/girl issues into consideration, or even ethnicity issues, as I suspect that most boys of a chinese/asian extraction do not need to be kept down as frequently compared to, say, white boys from disadvantaged communities.