Melissa Chan-Green

I guess, though, if you are starting kids at one point in time and you're still going to have some inequity, right, because you're going to have some who have just turned five and some who turned five a year earlier.

But what you get is...

the same amount of time at school, so they all start on an even footing in terms of the amount of teaching that they might get in that one year, whereas currently we have a system where you can be older and have had more terms at school than your younger peers.

So although you'll never actually be able to get it completely equitable where everyone starts school at the same age or the same day and gets the same amount of time at school, does a cohort entry...

mitigate some of those inequities.

So are you saying that potentially one of the things that you might be looking at and just analysing right now is if you had a couple of entry points, then you at least have groups of children who you can say, well, we know that this whole group haven't had

perhaps they're not at the same point in the sequence of structured literacy or structured maths or whatever topic it particularly is.

And you could scaffold them or support them

as a cohort or as a group because you know they are all in the same boat where they're not quite had the same exposure as the rest of the class.

Because at the moment, although schools have flexibility and I'm sure that is quite welcomed by schools to be able to work in the way that best fits for their community,

does it not mean that there is also potentially some inequity of access to when you can start school depending just purely on where you live and the way the schools in your area operate?

Yeah, because it would impact early childhood, not just your ability to have children in early childhood, but it would impact early childhood centres as well, I guess, if they were having whole big groups that were moving out all at one time into school.

What kind of feedback have you had on that?

At the moment, is it just anecdotal or are you at the point where you are going out and proactively asking for feedback at this stage?

Yeah, so is what you're saying that because we now have a curriculum that I guess more closely aligns with some other international curriculum in like-minded countries that you then have to look at, OK, well, if we're expecting...

achievement of this particular, I guess, list of achievements, expectations, then are we giving our students the same amount of time or exposure to the classroom as other countries given

we operate on a different enrolment system.

Is that kind of what has prompted this thing?

You don't want to hire me for your policy team, trust me.

You'll be far more experienced in that.