Delaying a child's entry to primary school may negatively affect their academic performance later on, a new study suggests.

According to UK and German researchers, many parents choose to delay their child's entry to school for a year if the child was born during the summer months or they were born prematurely.

Many believe that their child is not ready for school and may struggle academically, and previous research has even suggested that those born more than three weeks premature may be better off waiting an extra year before starting school.

The researchers decided to investigate this further.

"We obviously could not delay children starting school for the experiment, so we had to find a suitable study sample. We chose the Bavarian Longitudinal Study because Bavarian policy requires all children to be assessed by a community paediatrician three to 12 months before their school entry date to assess their readiness for school," explained one of the study's authors, Prof Dieter Wolke, of the University of Warwick in the UK.

In Germany, children can attend kindergarten, similar to our junior and senior infants, and then officially begin school when they are six. For this study, the researchers looked at almost 1,000 children, 472 of whom were born prematurely.

The study compared the teachers' ratings of achievement and the results of standardised tests in year one and then again when they children were eight years old. It found that starting children a year later did not lead to better academic performance. In fact, academic performance appeared to be poorer.

"Our study shows that delaying school entry has no effect on year one teacher ratings of academic performance, but it is associated with poorer performance in age-standardised tests of reading, writing, mathematics and attention as the children get older," Prof Wolke commented.

The researchers called for more studies in this area to assess the long-term effects of delaying school entry.

"We found missing one year of learning opportunities was associated with poorer average performance in standardised tests at eight years of age for both pre-term and full-term children. Future research is needed to determine the long-term effect of delayed school entry on academic achievement, but our results certainly give parents and educational providers food for thought."

Details of these findings are published in the Journal of Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology.