The name is absent

at primary school strongly suggest that pre-schooling provided a significant cognitive boost at
entry to reception and had benefits on most areas of social behaviour, particularly Peer
sociability.

Analyses of attainments at the end of Year 1 explored the impact of child, parent and home
environment factors. Even with influences controlled, ‘home’ children’s cognitive attainments are
poorer than those of children who had attended a pre-school centre. The results also point to a
link between a longer duration of pre-schooling and higher cognitive attainments, in comparison
with the ‘home’ group. These findings, combined with those on the advantages of an early start
date, continue to indicate that pre-schooling has a strong positive impact on young children’s
cognitive attainment. The implication is that children without pre-school experience remain at a
disadvantage during their first year of primary school. Further analyses exploring ‘at risk’ status in
relation to special educational needs indicate that home children remain over-represented in the
cognitive ‘at risk’ category in Year 1, compared with other EPPE children, even when multiple
disadvantage is held constant. In addition, proportionately many more ‘home’ children were
identified by their teachers as showing some form of SEN during Key Stage 1 (see EYTSEN
Technical Paper 2, 2004 for details).

Social/behavioural outcomes also continue to indicate that the positive pre-school impact is
sustained through to the end of Year 1. However, while quality of pre-school shows a positive
impact in reducing Anti-social behaviour after the age of 3+ (over the pre-school period) there
was a weak but significant association between very long duration of pre-school (associated with
an earlier start age under 2 years) and increases in scores on the Anti-social measure in Year 1.
However, only a very small number (under 5%) show any increased scores. At age 6 Self-
regulation, Positive social behaviour and reductions in Anxious behaviour are particularly
associated with higher quality of the pre-school attended and more effective pre-school centre
experience.

Overall the Year 1 analyses indicate that the early boost given by pre-school has not washed out
by age 6 years plus, nor have ‘home’ children caught up. The absence of pre-school has a
continued negative influence on cognitive and several social/behavioural outcomes, although
children who had very long duration in pre-school show relatively less good scores on the Anti-
social measure in Year 1 (These are children with extensive group care under two years of age).
This risk should be placed in the context of very positive scores for most children on this aspect
of behaviour and reduced Anxiety and improved Self-regulation evident.

The longitudinal follow up of EPPE children confirms that pre-school continues to show a positive
impact on most developmental outcomes over the early years of primary school. This supports
earlier conclusions that pre-school can play an important part in combating social exclusion and
promoting inclusion by offering disadvantaged children a better start to primary school. The
duration of pre-school is especially influential for cognitive attainment in reading and maths, but
both effectiveness and quality still show an impact on child outcomes. For example, the change
in effect size for duration, over the early years of primary school for 2 outcomes is illustrated
below.

Table 8.1: Effect of duration at entry to school and end of Year 1

Other results again point to the continuing influence of the pre-school and home learning
environment, although impact is somewhat weaker than at earlier time points, which may be due
to the accumulating and powerful influence of the primary school.

41

<<   <   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   >   >>