'Third of children struggle to write'

This headline in last Friday's Metro caught my eye.  The article revealed that: 'One in seven children struggles to write their own name or say the letters of the alphabet after a year of primary school, a Government study reveals.  42 per cent of children could not write a shopping list, while a third failed to recognise simple words like 'dog' or 'pen'.'

In the next sentence the article mentions that we are actually talking about 'five-year-olds', which rather puts the crisis into perspective for me.  For a start, isn't the first year of primary school called the Foundation Stage, devoted mainly to 'pre-academic' skills and play?  So where would five-year-olds have learnt to write a shopping list?  And also, why is the government using a survey to check up on this skill?  Or is perhaps the Foundation Stage being used to teach academic skills after all?!??

The article also took me down memory lane.  I remember walking home after my first day at school when some of my friends started writing their names on a wooden fence. I didn't know what was going on because I had never written my name.  And I was seven at the time.  It was, of course, not in the UK but I had already had one year of Kindergarten.  Clearly, that type of 'Foundation Stage' did focus on non-academic skills..

When I finished my ponderings, I noticed that the next article was headlined: 'Primary children "fear modern life"' and mentioned that a Cambridge University study had found that primary children 'face excessive pressure in school exams, which distort the curriculum'.  Indeed!