Children are born ready to learn, but not every child is ready to enter school at the same age.

Ingrid Morden, Early Childhood Services/special needs consultant with the Lethbridge school board, says that children’s brains grow the most before the age of four and that is when most of their learning development occurs.

She presented a program to the school board on Tuesday called the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a population-based measurement for communities.

Morden said the program has been used across the country and around the world for the past 12 years, and that by February she hopes that Alberta will be on board with it as well.

“The message is that children need to learn early, often and effectively,” she says.

The program tests children before they enter the school system to see how prepared they are for the transition. This is done in groups of children rather than an individual analysis.

It is also used in Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba.

Morden said the test has five areas of focus: physical health and well being; social knowledge and competence; emotional health and maturity; language and cognitive development; and general knowledge and communication skills.

Morden said 17 per cent of kids enter school without learning these skills. She added it’s possible many kids need further development before entering school are “slipping through the cracks” and not getting what they need to be prepared.

Morden said while the EDI isn’t used to diagnose individual kids, it is useful in identifying neighbourhoods where kids aren’t as ready for grade school as others and might need more development.

The EDI is in the third year of a five-year program. Between 1999 and 2008, there were 620,000 children who were evaluated using the EDI in Canada. As well as Internationally in many countries.