Further analyses of children’s social/behavioural development and attitudes to school in Year 5
will be reported in subsequent Research Reports.
Aims
The aims of the multilevel analyses were:
• To model young children’s cognitive attainment and progress over Key Stage 1 and 2.
• To explore the influence of child, parent and HLE characteristics on children’s attainment
at the end of Year 5.
• To compare the influence of child, parent and HLE characteristics on children’s
attainments in Year 5 to the influence at an earlier age (end of Year 1).
• To investigate any continuing impact of pre-school, including any variations in children’s
outcomes for those who attended different types of pre-school, and those who received
no pre-school provision (the ‘home’ sample).
• To explore the net impact of measures of pre-school process, particularly measures of
quality and effectiveness on later child outcomes.
• To look at the combined impact of ‘good’ home learning characteristics and attending
‘good’ pre-school.
• To investigate the net influence of primary school effectiveness on cognitive attainment
and progress (controlling for child, family and HLE characteristics).
• To investigate the interactive effect of pre-school experience and primary school
experience on cognitive attainments.
• To explore whether the impact of pre-school and primary school differs for disadvantaged
children compared with other less disadvantaged children in the sample.
Methods
The analyses employ a range of statistical techniques from descriptive and correlation analysis
to multilevel (hierarchical) regression methods to examine the influences on children’s cognitive
attainment and progress. The paper focuses on two measures of Year 5 attainment assessed
with standardised assessments (NFER-Nelson Primary Reading Level 2 and Mathematics 10) in
Reading and Mathematics. At the end of Year 1 tests of the same type were administered, so
comparable measures of prior cognitive attainments are available.
Multilevel models provide more accurate assessments of the predictive power of different child,
pre-school and primary school characteristics. Earlier analyses enabled the calculation of value
added estimates (residuals) of individual pre-school effects (see Sammons et al., 2002 for
details). These value added measures of pre-school effectiveness have been included in
subsequent analyses of children’s educational outcomes, at the end of Year 5 in primary school,
to establish whether the effectiveness of the pre-school attended continues to show an impact on
later cognitive attainment.
To examine the impact of primary school, measures of primary school academic effectiveness in
English and Mathematics have been derived from independent value added analyses of pupil
progress for three successive full cohorts (2002-2004) using National assessment data sets
matched between Key Stage 1 and 2 over three years (see Melhuish et al., 2006).
Background information about child, parent and family characteristics, was obtained initially
through parent interviews conducted soon after children were recruited to the study. The parent
interviews were designed to obtain information about a child’s health and care history, details of
family structure and parents’ own educational and occupational backgrounds as well as some
indications of parent-child activities and routines. Parents were asked to give some further
information about child, parent and family characteristics when the children were in Key Stage 1
(aged approximately 6 years) via a parent questionnaire which covered changes in background
information (in employment, income, family structure, number of siblings etc) as well as