Section Six: The Developmental Progress of Children over the Pre-
School Period
Background
The Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) project explores the impact of pre-
school provision on young children’s cognitive progress and their social/behavioural
development. This section reports on the main findings of the first phase of the longitudinal
research covering the pre-school period from age 3 years plus to the start of primary school.
The research seeks to establish whether different types of pre-school settings differ in their
impact and effectiveness. It also seeks to identify any variations between individual pre-school
centres in their impact upon children’s cognitive progress and social/behavioural development.
This section describes the results of analyses of young children’s cognitive and
social/behavioural development during their time in pre-school. Developmental gains were
measured from entry to the EPPE study until the start of primary school. Cognitive attainment
assessed at entry to primary school was measured in terms of five attributes: four derived from
the British Ability Scales II (Eliot et al., 1996), language attainment, two non-verbal measures,
early number concepts and a fifth derived from work on early literacy skills (Bryant & Bradley,
1985) i.e. pre-reading attainment (for details of assessments see Technical Paper 1). Young
children’s social/behavioural outcomes were assessed by a questionnaire completed by the class
teacher in the first term of primary school. Four aspects of social/behavioural development are
dealt with here, namely ‘Independence & Concentration’, ‘Co-operation & Conformity’, ‘Peer
Sociability’ and ‘Anti-social / Worried behaviour’. A range of statistical methods has been used to
analyse data for around 2,800 children, representing around 95 per cent of the total child sample
at entry to the study. Multilevel modelling has been used to identify and explore pre-school
centre effects. An additional sample of ‘home’ children (without pre-school centre experience)
was recruited at primary school entry bringing the total to over 3171 in some analyses.
Methodology
EPPE uses multilevel modelling to measure the influence of different background factors on
young children’s social/behavioural development at the start of primary school. Contextualised
analyses are used to identify the unique (net) contribution of particular characteristics to variation
in children’s outcomes while other influences are controlled. Thus, for example, the impact of
family socio-economic status (SES), is established while taking into account the influence of
mother’s qualification levels, low income (indicated by eligibility for free school meals), ethnicity,
birth weight, home learning environment etc. It is of policy interest to establish the nature and
strength of such background influences, individually and in total, because they are relevant to
issues of equity and social inclusion.
Multilevel modelling has been used to identify pre-school centre effects and the ‘value added’ by
different centres.1 Value added multilevel models investigate children’s developmental gains over
their time in pre-school, by controlling for a child’s age at assessment and prior development at
entry to pre-school, as well as a wide range background influences. These analyses are used to
establish whether there is evidence of pre-school influences on young children’s developmental
gains. In particular, to measure the extent to which children’s developmental gains are
associated with the pre-school centre attended. The centre level variance provides an indication
of the size of any effect related to pre-school attended. More effective centres (positive outliers
in value added terms) can be identified where children made significantly greater developmental
gains than predicted on the basis of prior social/behavioural and intake characteristics. Centres
1 Social/behavioural developmental gains were measured from entry to the EPPE study (age 3 years plus)
until the start of primary school (usually at entry to reception classes at rising 5 years, though in some
instances children are enrolled directly into year 1 classes and did not join a reception class).
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