Interesting item on the Today programme on BBC radio 4 this morning on how a large study of childhood cohorts shows that children born in August\u00a0systematically\u00a0under achieve all their lives compared with children born in September. This is because of the structure of the school year. I didn’t follow this\u00a0completely\u00a0as I only heard some of it. However,\u00a0Matthew\u00a0Syed (author\u00a0of Bounce) gave the\u00a0example\u00a0of top footballers. The\u00a0vast\u00a0majority apparently are clustered in birth months where they were amongst the older boys in a school year. They were bigger, stronger, more\u00a0likely\u00a0to be picked by PE instructors and sports masters, more likely to experience success and status, more\u00a0likely\u00a0to develop to the extent that they will be selected by club scouts, and so it goes on.\u00a0Conversely, younger boys are more likely to experience\u00a0mediocrity\u00a0or failure and so on. It is the case that in any one school year their will be children nearly a whole year apart in age. I need to find the study reported and see how this translates into\u00a0academic\u00a0achievement, if it does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interesting item on the Today programme on BBC radio 4 this morning on how a large study of childhood cohorts shows that children born in August\u00a0systematically\u00a0under achieve all their lives compared with children born in September. This is because of the structure of the school year. I didn’t follow this\u00a0completely\u00a0as I only heard some of … Continue reading “The social construction of top footballers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}