An assessment of 535,000 five-year-olds in England found that, after a year of schooling, 91,000 could not write simple words such as “mum” or “cat” or hold a pencil correctly.

The number of children who had mastered basic literacy and numeracy was much lower than last year, as was the number of children who reached expected levels of physical development.

Boys proved worst at completing writing tasks, with 21 per cent unable to write key words compared with 11 per cent of girls.

About 21,420 children could not count to ten and 39 per cent could not hear or pronounce the short vowel sounds in words such as “pen”, “hat” and “dog”, while 17 per cent could not recognise or name all the letters of the alphabet.

Overall, 44.6 per cent of five-year-olds reached the expected level of improvement after their first year of primary school, a drop of 3.2 percentage points on 2005.

The Department for Education and Skills has defined a “good level of development” as children achieving six or more points across 13 scales in areas such as personal, social and emotional development, reading, writing and maths.

However, the figures suggest that the Government will fall short of its target of 53 per cent of five-year-olds in England reaching this level by 2008.

Ministers blamed the fall in attainment on tougher marking while teachers said that comparisons between years were spurious.

Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “Last year’s assessments were riddled with difficulties as teachers came to terms with the new scheme.

“The assessments are qualitative judgments on such issues as a child’s personal development and cannot be presented as simple numerical results or in league table form.”

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, said in April that the new targets would mean that 30,000 more children would reach expected levels.

She said that the Government would like to see “faster gains in our most deprived communities” in England, but figures for local authorities were unavailable yesterday.

The Education Department said that the public reaction to its curriculum for toddlers, the Early Years Foundation Stage, had been enthusiastic.

The framework has a play-based approach that is designed to integrate quality learning and care.

Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, said that the framework would improve the learning abilities of five-year-olds and enable “them to reach their full potential, just as any good parent would seek to do at home”.

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