In a speech delivered on the 5th September, the Mayor of Greater Manchester proposed a pioneering new approach to tackling educational inequality and helping more children become ‘school-ready’.
This new drive to improve school-readiness comes on the first day of the new school year as the Greater Manchester Combined Authority estimated that 12,000 Greater Manchester children will be starting Year One without the skills to learn.
Greater Manchester’s renewed focus on school-readiness is rooted in economic and academic evidence. The Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER1) highlighted early years performance as key to closing Greater Manchester’s skills and productivity gap. The 2010 Marmot Review into health inequalities in England also made clear that children’s experience in the early years has lifelong effects on ‘obesity, heart disease and mental health, to educational achievement and economic status’
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