Figure 1.7: The net effect of early years HLE on Mathematics attainment at the end of Year 5
The Net Effect of Early Years HLE:
Mathematics
Summary of Background Influences
We tested the net influence of different child, parent and early years HLE measures on
Mathematics and Reading outcomes in Year 5, while controlling for all other measures
simultaneously and thus the results provide well controlled and robust estimates of statistical
significance for specific background characteristics. It does not imply that measures are not of
educational or policy importance if they are not statistical predictors after control for other, related
measures. For example, SES is itself related to mother’s educational qualification level and
income and to other aspects such as birth weight. Likewise, measures of the HLE are inter-
related and associated with other measures such as the gender of the child. The contextualised
model shows which set of measures, taken together, provides the best set of predictors of
children’s attainment and which measures show a specific impact over and above other
influences, helping to tease out the strongest predictors. This is important in identifying the
nature of the equity gap in achievement for different pupil groups and can help to inform policy
makers of the relative importance of different sources of influence.
The contextualised analyses show the strength of background influences on young children’s
cognitive attainments at the end of Year 5 of primary school education. Nonetheless, the models
reveal that, taken together, background characteristics are less strongly associated with
individual variation in Reading and Mathematics attainment in Year 5 (in terms of percentage of
variance accounted for) than they were with similar cognitive outcome measures at the end of
Year 1. This does not imply that certain individual background factors might have less influence
than they used to have. The general pattern is likely to reflect the importance of other influences
such as attending primary school for a significant proportion of time, as well as variations
between individual schools in their academic effectiveness, and also the growing influence of the
peer group.
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