where children made less developmental gains than predicted can be viewed as less effective
(negative outliers in value added terms)3.
The multilevel value added analyses are also extended to establish the extent to which factors
such as type of pre-school attended, number of sessions, quality characteristics ratios and staff
qualifications show any statistical relationship with the effects of pre-school. It is thus possible to
establish whether variations in quality and extent of time in pre-school have an impact on
children’s developmental gains and, in particular, whether higher quality and more pre-school
experience have a positive impact.
Findings concerning a sample of ‘home children‘, who have had no pre-school centre experience
before starting primary school, are reported for comparison with the pre-school sample. The
contextualised multilevel analyses explore whether home children are at a disadvantage in terms
of development when they start primary school and the extent to which any developmental gap
can be attributed to the absence of pre-school experience, rather than to differences in their
background characteristics. These analyses provide important additional evidence concerning
the overall impact of pre-school provision.
Main Findings and Implications for Policy
a) Cognitive development
The impact of a child’s background
The early findings relating to children at the start of the study described in Section 4 illustrate that
there are important differences in young children’s cognitive and social/behavioural attainments
related to specific child, parent and home environment characteristics at entry to the study (age 3
years plus). The continued effect of ‘disadvantage’ on cognitive outcomes was also found at
entry to primary school (See table 6.1).
Table 6.1 Percentage of children identified as ‘at risk’ using multiple disadvantage
indicators at entry to primary school
|
Pre-school sample children________________ |
‘Home’ children_____________________________ | |||||
|
Number of |
General |
Pre Reading |
Early |
General |
Pre Reading |
Early |
|
^^0 1-2 3-4 5+________ |
^^66 13.1 34.5 54.7________ |
7.2 16.8 28.5 44.0_________ |
9.4 14.8 34.3 55.8_________ |
33.3# 35.5 51.0 70.8_________ |
22.2# 37.5 38.7 46.7_________ |
22.2# 33.3 45.3 69.0__________ |
|
n____________ |
2582_______ |
2567_________ |
2560_________ |
185__________ |
185__________ |
184__________ |
|
# Less than 10 pupils. N.B. ‘General cognitive ability’ refers to ‘strong cognitive risk’ | ||||||
For certain outcomes, especially pre-reading and early number concepts, children from some
ethnic minority groups, (including Black Caribbean and Black African), and children for whom
English is an additional language (EAL) made greater progress during pre-school than white UK
children or those for whom English is a first language. These results remain significant even
when account is taken of the influence of other important factors, like mother’s education level
and socio-economic status (SES). Overall, such groups had significantly lower cognitive scores
at entry to the study in language measures (though not in non-verbal scales). This suggests that
the experience of pre-school provision may provide the opportunity for some groups to begin to
‘catch up’ in terms of particular areas of cognitive attainment (e.g. pre-reading skills).
The analyses have explored the extent of variation in children’s attainments in school entry
assessments for different groups of children. Child, parent and home environment
characteristics of children together account for a lower proportion of the variance in attainment at
3
Outlier centres are identified by reference to the confidence limits associated with each residual estimate of centre
effects (p<0.05).
23