We can conclude that no one factor is the key to raising achievement - it is the
combination of experiences over time that matters. The child who has a better HLE,
goes to a high quality, more effective pre-school setting and who then goes on to attend
a more academically effective primary school has a combination of ‘protective’
experiences that benefit current and future educational attainment. In a later report
similar analyses will be used to investigate impacts on social/behavioural development
for the same pupil sample in Year 5.
The implication of these findings is that policy development should seek to promote
strategies to support improvements in early years HLE especially for vulnerable groups
and also work to continue to improve the quality and effectiveness of pre-school
provision. Pre-schools are well placed to identify children who may need extra support
and could be guided to work with parents to improve the HLE. The improvement of
provision in poorer quality pre-schools also needs to be given a high priority, since poor
quality provision does not appear to offer long term benefits in terms of better child
attainments at the end of Year 5, even though any pre-school experience was found to
benefit children in a wide range of skills and social behaviours at younger ages when
they started primary school, and in their first year of primary school (see Sammons et al.,
2002; 2003; 2004a; 2004b for equivalent results at age 5, 6 and 7 years).
In addition, the research indicates that the primary school attended also plays an
important role. Improving the academic effectiveness of primary schools is particularly
important for disadvantaged groups of pupils, since we find that attending a more
academically effective primary school is more critical for this group (further analyses of
the equity implications of the findings have contributed to the Cabinet Office Equalities
Review, EPPE et al., 2007 in press). The finding that primary school academic
effectiveness is a more significant influence for disadvantaged pupils (especially those
who did not go to pre-school) is of particular importance to the achievement of the social
inclusion as well as the raising standards agendas.
In order to help reduce the achievement gap for multiply disadvantaged groups,
concerted and complementary actions to strengthen the early HLE, and ensure good
quality pre-school and primary school experiences will be needed, since improvements
to any one in isolation would be insufficient to boost outcomes. In addition, targeted
interventions for children who are well behind their peers in cognitive or
social/behavioural development at the start of primary school are likely to be needed to
help prevent a widening of the attainment gap during Key Stage 1 and 2.
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