Five to Twelve: The Girls Look Fine at Five. That’s Exactly the Problem.

Ask any mother in our community when she first knew something was different. Very few say five. At five, her daughter was “a pleasure to teach”. She sat quietly, followed the rules, held it together all day – and fell apart at home, where nobody official was counting. This week the Department for Education published the first findings from Five to Twelve, a major new study that will follow thousands of children from age five to age twelve. It deserves attention – for what it found, and for what it isn’t yet measuring.

Five to Twelve is a longitudinal study commissioned by the DfE and run by the National Centre for Social Research. Researchers interviewed 8,632 families of children aged 5 to 6 in English state primary schools during the 2023-24 school year, and will keep following those same children through to the end of primary school and beyond. The first report, published this week, is the baseline: a snapshot of who these children are at five – their health, their development, their homes, and what the system already expects of them.

Baseline studies rarely make headlines. This one matters because of what happens next. These children will be tracked through the exact years in which the girls we work with disappear: the years when masking hardens, when the sensory load rises, when friendships turn complicated, and when the move to secondary school tips so many into crisis.

Here is the finding that really stands out for the report writers: 17% of boys aged 5 to 6 had scores indicating socio-emotional difficulties, compared with 10% of girls.

Read quickly, that says boys struggle more. Read carefully, it says something different. The measure used is the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, a screening tool completed by adults about the child. It can only count what adults can see. A five-year-old who melts down in the classroom registers. A five-year-old who holds it together all day, says nothing, and sobs at bedtime does not.

We hear from thousands of families whose daughters scored “fine” on exactly this kind of measure at exactly this age – and who were in crisis by twelve, undiagnosed until burnout made the masking impossible. The gap between 17% and 10% is not simply a gap in struggling. Some of it is a gap in visibility. Masking isn’t coping.

The SEN register tells the same story. By age 5 to 6, 17% of boys in this cohort were already identified with special educational needs, against 7% of girls – and this is not because the girls were sailing through: girls scored higher on average in the study’s verbal and non-verbal reasoning assessments. The girls in our community who were finally diagnosed at twelve and thirteen were, at five, in that unidentified 93%.

If the researchers reading their own data assume the girls are alright, this study will document the making of the hidden girls in real time – and still miss them.

The study’s findings on special educational needs should stop every commissioner and every SENCO mid-sentence. At age five, 44% of children with SEN had scores indicating socio-emotional difficulties, compared with 10% of children without. They slept less, were rated as having less developed motor skills, and scored lower across verbal skills, reasoning and working memory. And they were already less likely to be predicted to meet expected standards in reading and maths by the end of primary school.

Let’s think about that. At five years old, the system has already forecast which children it expects to fail at eleven. A prediction is not a plan. If we know at five, the question is not whether these children will struggle, it is what schools, health services and local authorities intend to do differently in the six years they have been handed.

Poverty compounds all of it: children eligible for free school meals had three times the rate of socio-emotional difficulties of their better-off classmates (30% against 10%), and were more likely to have a longstanding health condition (42% against 35%).

The full report has a whole chapter on the cohort child at school. It asks teachers about predicted attainment, behaviour, bullying, and how close the teacher feels to the child. What it never does is ask the children whether they like school, feel safe there, or feel they belong. And there is no measure of attendance or absence anywhere in the year 1 findings. For our community, those are the earliest warning lights there are. A child can meet every milestone on a cognitive assessment and be quietly drowning in the classroom. By the time it shows up in the data adults collect about her, she may already be at home, unable to walk through the school gate.

If Five to Twelve wants to see what is coming, it should ask the children themselves, and keep asking, every year, as the answers change.

This study is a rare chance to catch, in national data, the pattern families describe to us every single day: the girl who was “fine” at five, “a little anxious” at eight, and gone from education by twelve. Everyone will call it sudden. It is never sudden.

So we’ll be watching for three things as future waves are published. Whether internalised distress is measured as carefully as visible behaviour. Whether the girls whose difficulties “emerge” at ten or eleven are recognised as children who were struggling invisibly all along. And whether a prediction of failure made at five is ever treated as the emergency it is.

And if you’re the parent reading this, you don’t need a national study to trust what you see at your own kitchen table. If she’s fine at school and in pieces at home, that’s data. It’s just data the system doesn’t collect yet. You can find us, and them, in the AGN Facebook group, and at our free monthly family workshops.

Source: Department for Education, Five to Twelve: year 1, published 12 August 2026.