Schooling or play - what's best in the early years? Or are the Greens really "mad"?

Tristram Hunt, Labour’s shadow education secretary, certainly caused a stir recently by slamming the Green Party manifesto pledges on education, calling them a “flashback to the 70s”. One policy he picked out in particular was the policy to delay school starting age to the age of six.

This has made me – and a whole world of folks passionate about the early years – very, very angry.

What incensed me wasn’t (so much) that he was clearly seeking to point-score politically, using emotive language to suggest this policy would disadvantage the most vulnerable.

What really annoyed me was simply the way he elided raising the schooling start date with lack of early years provision. The way a senior frontbench politician just ignored the evidence and has sought to persuade the electorate – most of whom understandably don’t read the latest thinking on education and childhood – that raising school start dates is somehow retrograde. How the shadow education secretary just dismissed the profound and far-reaching work of all the myriad nurseries, children’s centres, childminders, play projects and yes, parents.

The Cambridge Primary Review, reporting back in 2010, was the culmination of ten years of evidence gathering, both through extensive analysis of educational research and engagement with professionals across primary schools and beyond. It was the biggest and most thorough review of the primary curriculum since the 1967 Plowden Report.

Three of their 75 recommendations to policymakers were: ?