entry to school and analyses were carried out to compare children’s progress, taking into account
the range of background factors referred to above. Further assessments were carried out at the
end of Years 1 and 2. EPPE has produced rigorous and persuasive data for policy makers and
provided practical guidance on quality for practitioners.
Key findings over the pre-school period
• Impact of attending a pre-school
-Pre-school experience, compared to none, enhances all-round development in children.
-Duration of attendance (in months) is important; an earlier start (under age 3 years) is related to
better intellectual development.
-Full time attendance led to no better gains for children than part-time provision.
-Disadvantaged children benefit significantly from good quality pre-school experiences,
especially where they are with a mixture of children from different social backgrounds.
- Overall disadvantaged children tend to attend pre-school for shorter periods of time than those
from more advantaged groups (around 4-6 months less).
• Does type of pre-school matter?
-There are significant differences between individual pre-school settings and their impact on
children, some settings are more effective than others in promoting positive child outcomes.
-Good quality can be found across all types of early years settings; however quality was higher
overall in settings integrating care and education and in nursery schools.
• Effects of quality and specific ‘practices’ in pre-school
-High quality pre-schooling is related to better intellectual and social/behavioural development for
children.
-Settings that have staff with higher qualifications have higher quality scores and their children
make more progress.
-Quality indicators include warm interactive relationships with children, having a trained teacher
as manager and a good proportion of trained teachers on the staff.
-Where settings view educational and social development as complementary and equal in
importance, children make better all round progress.
-Effective pedagogy includes interaction traditionally associated with the term “teaching”, the
provision of instructive learning environments and ‘sustained shared thinking’ to extend children’s
learning.
• The importance of home learning
-For all children, the quality of the home learning environment is more important for intellectual
and social development than parental occupation, education or income. What parents do is
more important than who parents are.
Key findings at the end of Key Stage 1
Lasting effects
-The beneficial effects of pre-school remained evident throughout Key Stage 1, although some
outcomes were not as strong as they had been at school entry.
• Duration and quality
-The number of months a child attended pre-school continued to have an effect on their progress
throughout Key Stage 1, although this effect was stronger for academic skills than for social
behavioural development.
-Pre-school quality was significantly related to children’s scores on standardised tests of
reading and mathematics at age 6. At age 7 the relationship between quality and academic
attainment was somewhat weaker but still evident, and the effect of quality on social behavioural
development was no longer significant. High quality pre-school provision combined with longer
duration had the strongest effect on development.
• Effective settings
-Individual pre-schools varied in their ‘effectiveness’ for influencing a child’s development. The
advantages for a child’s development of attending a particularly ‘effective’ pre-school centre
persists up to age 7. Of course this does not mean that contemporaneous experiences at
primary school have no impact on children’s lives - only that the individual pre-schools attended
continued to have an influence.