(who had not attended a pre-school centre). Although causal connections cannot be drawn,
these findings, combined with those on the advantages of an early start date, suggest that pre-
schooling has an important positive impact on young children’s cognitive attainment. Thus,
children who do not attend a pre-school may be at a disadvantage when they start primary
school. Indeed analyses conducted on the EPPE data sets intended to explore ‘at risk’ status in
relation to special educational needs indicate that ‘home’ children are over-represented in the
cognitive ‘at risk’ category, compared with other EPPE children, even when the level of multiple
disadvantage is held constant.
The EPPE research indicates that pre-school can play an important part in combating social
exclusion and promoting inclusion by offering disadvantaged children, in particular, a better start
to primary school. The findings indicate pre-school has a significant and positive impact on
progress over and above important influences such as family SES, mother’s qualification level,
ethnic and language background, income etc. The quality of the pre-school centre experience as
well as the quantity are both influential. The results show that individual pre-school centres vary
in their effectiveness in promoting cognitive progress over the pre-school period, and indicate
that better outcomes are associated with some forms of provision. Likewise, the research points
to the separate and significant influence of the home learning environment. These aspects
(quality and quantity of pre-school and home learning environment) can be seen as more
susceptible to change through policy and practitioner initiatives than other child or family
characteristics, such as SES.
b) Social/behavioural development
The impact of a child’s background
The early findings on the children at the start of the study (see Section 4) show important
differences in young children’s cognitive and social/behavioural attainments related to specific
child, parent and home environment characteristics. It should be noted that in general, children’s
cognitive attainments are more susceptible to child, family and home environment influences
than social/behaviour for this pre-school age group. This may reflect problems of measurement
or real effects.
The analyses of social/behavioural outcomes emphasise the need to control for differences in the
characteristics of young children who attend different pre-school settings, in both prior
social/behavioural development and other relevant characteristics, in studies of pre-school
institutions. Such control for intake differences is important to ensure that valid comparisons are
possible for individual centres and for type of provision. It is also essential for studies seeking to
compare children who do or do not attend a pre-school centre, because of differences in a range
of characteristics (see Technical Paper 8b).
Home learning environment
The research indicates the importance of a range of factors, such as mother’s educational level,
socio-economic status (SES) etc, and the home learning environment, (i.e. activities that offer
learning opportunities to the child), when investigating young children’s social/behavioural
outcomes. The analyses confirm that parental involvement in activities (such as reading to their
child, teaching songs and nursery rhymes, playing with letters & numbers, visiting the library,
painting & drawing, emphasising the alphabet, etc) are significant in accounting for differences in
social/behavioural development at the start of primary school. The effect sizes relating to the
home learning environment (and in particular the home learning environment index9) are
generally higher than for family measures such as mothers’ qualification level. The home
learning environment measures also influence young children’s social/behavioural developmental
gains over the pre-school period. It is interesting to note that the pre-school home learning
environments differ for boys and girls. As a group significantly more girls’ parents reported
activities such as reading, teaching songs and nursery rhymes etc. It is not possible to establish
whether these self-reported differences in parenting reflect different expectations of boys and
9 The home learning environment index provides a summary based on the individual measures reported
above such as parents reading to their child. It is interesting to note that the home learning environment
index is only moderately correlated (r=0.3) with family SES or mother’s qualification levels.
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