children whose mothers have a degree or higher degree showing higher attainment. Likewise
family SES is also significant, with those from semi and unskilled manual backgrounds, or whose
parents had never worked showing relatively lower attainment, and those from professional non-
manual group relatively higher results in national assessments. Low income, as indicated by
free school meals, also has a moderate impact, with children from poor families having lower
attainments.
Taken together, background characteristics are weaker predictors of reading and mathematics
attainment at age 7 years than of General Cognitive Ability (GCA) at age 3 years, or of
attainment in pre-reading, early number or language at entry to primary school. In particular, the
impact of EAL status has reduced, probably reflecting improvements in fluency in English as
children move through pre-school and primary school. Both pre-school and school influences
may be acting together to help reduce the power of background influences on attainment in
subjects such as reading and mathematics, in comparison with earlier assessments of cognitive
ability. By contrast, the impact of background on social behaviour (which was much weaker
during the pre-school period than was found for cognitive outcomes) shows somewhat stronger
influences on Positive social behaviour and Anti-social behaviour as children move through Key
Stage 1. In general older children and girls show better social behaviour at the end of Key Stage
1, especially for Self-regulation.
Home learning environment
The home learning environment (HLE), as reported by parents in the pre-school period, was
found to exert a strong impact on cognitive development and a weaker positive impact on
aspects of social behaviour at school entry and at age 6, even when parental qualification levels
and family SES and low income are controlled. Aspects of the home learning environment
(related to activities as reported in parent interview) experienced by children during the pre-
school period continue to show significant positive effects on attainment and social behaviour at
age 7 years plus, net of the influence of child and family background influences such as family
SES and mothers’ qualification levels. Boys and girls have significant differences in HLE, with
boys tending to have lower scores. Such differences in this feature of parenting may account for
some of the gender differences in cognitive attainment and social behaviour evident from age 3
years onwards. The results on HLE confirm that such pre-school experiences remain significant
predictors of later educational outcomes at the end of Key Stage 1.
The continued impact of pre-school - Duration, quality and effectiveness
Analyses explored cognitive attainment at the end of Year 2 and whether this relates to duration
(in terms of number of months), quality and effectiveness of pre-school experience. Taken
together, in all comparisons the attainment of the ‘home’ group is significantly poorer than that of
children who had attended a pre-school centre. It is not possible to fully separate the influence of
quality, duration and effectiveness of pre-school attended in comparisons of the pre-school and
‘home’ sample, since, in practice, pre-school is experienced as a ‘package’ combining these
different features. However, the findings support the conclusion that these three features
generally remain predictors of better cognitive attainment during Key Stage 1. Also, measures of
the effectiveness of the pre-school attended continue to show a significant positive impact on
young children’s subsequent attainments at the end of Key Stage 1.
In terms of progress after entry to primary school, there is no indication that pre-school children
made greater gains than the ‘home’ children. The absolute attainment scores of the pre-school
children remains significantly higher than the attainment of the ‘home’ children at the end of Key
Stage 1, although there has been a modest narrowing of the gap from the ‘home’ children’s lower
starting point.
The results suggest that, overall, attending a pre-school rather than none has a positive impact.
In addition, experiencing a longer duration, higher quality and more effective pre-school centre
has significant benefits in preparing young children for a better start to school. The Year 2
analyses suggest that such children continue to show better reading and mathematics attainment
in national assessments at the end of Key Stage 1. The lessening of effect sizes has been
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