The results clearly indicate the importance of different aspects of parental activities that
contribute to the quality of the children’s home learning environment. While other family factors
such as mother’s education and family SES are also important, the ‘Home Learning
Environment’ exerts a significant and independent influence on attainment at both age 3 years
plus and later at the start of primary school (rising 5 years) and on progress over the pre-school
period. Aspects of self-reported parental involvement in activities (such as reading to their child,
teaching songs and nursery rhymes, playing with letters and numbers, visiting the library,
painting and drawing, emphasising the alphabet, etc) remain significant positive influences which
account for differences in attainment and also influence young children’s cognitive progress over
the pre-school period. The study also shows that the home learning environment index
(measuring the extent of different activities involving the child at home) is only moderately
correlated (r=0.3) with family SES or mother’s education.
These results suggest that policies for parents in disadvantaged communities that encourage
active parenting strategies can help to promote young children’s cognitive progress as well as
positive social/behavioural outcomes. Many pre-school settings already encourage parental
participation, and some have developed programmes that feature parent education. The EPPE
results indicate that programmes which directly promote activities for parents and children to
engage in together are likely to be most beneficial for young children.
Variations in centre effectiveness
The value added multilevel analyses of children’s progress show that the individual pre-school
centre attended by a child also has an impact on cognitive progress.3 In some centres children
make significantly greater gains than in others. Centre effects are larger for pre-reading followed
by early number concepts, possibly reflecting different emphases between individual settings in
curriculum provision and the priority accorded to different types of activities. A number of centres
were identified - some more effective in terms of child outcomes and some less effective. Just
over one in 5 centres (22.0%) were found to be statistical outliers (performing significantly above
or significantly below expectation for one or more cognitive area).
Typically centres varied somewhat in their effects on different cognitive outcomes. No centres
performed significantly above or below expectation for all cognitive outcomes. Pre-school centre
effects are only moderately correlated in language, early number concepts, pre-reading and non-
verbal measures. Thus pre-school settings show important internal variation in effectiveness for
different child outcomes. Nonetheless, the most usual profiles across the five outcomes studied
show that a number of centres can be distinguished with broadly positive effects, whereas others
showed generally poorer effects for most areas of cognitive progress.
Child mobility (moving between pre-school centres) was fairly common during the pre-school
period. Over a fifth of children (23%) left their target centre before starting primary school and
moved to other provision. The amount of mobility varied by type of provision, being very
uncommon for those in nursery classes or nursery schools, but the majority of playgroup children
(52%) had moved from their centre, often to a different form of provision, such as a nursery
class. A change of centre was associated with poorer progress in pre-reading. The much higher
mobility for playgroup children has implications for the analysis of the effects of this type of
provision. This high mobility means that it is difficult to measure the impact of playgroups on
children’s progress (either at the level of individual centres or as a type of provision) accurately.
Playgroup children also tended to experience a lower average number of sessions at the target
pre-school before starting primary school. This was also related to poorer progress.
The impact of pre-school - quantity and quality
After taking account of child, parent and home environment factors, children who started pre-
school at a younger age (i.e. below 3 years of age) had significantly higher age-adjusted
cognitive attainment at the start of the project than those who started at an older age. However,
3 Significant centre-level variance in children’s cognitive progress remains, even when account is taken of
prior attainment and other intake differences (in terms of child, parent and home environment
characteristics).
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