Section 3: The Impact of Pre-school and Primary School on Children’s
Reading and Mathematics Attainment in Year 5
The results described in the previous section provide important evidence concerning the strength
of background influences on young children’s cognitive attainment at the end of Year 5. These
findings show that the overall impact of background factors on outcomes in Reading and
Mathematics appears to be reducing while children move through primary school in terms of the
percentage of total variance in children’s attainments accounted for. These findings are in line
with the results of other studies which have tracked children over their time in primary school and
found reduced variation accounted for by background variables the older the children get (i.e.
Mortimore et al., 1998; Sammons, 1993). It is necessary to take account of such background
influences before attempting to identify the impact of other factors such as any continuing effects
of pre-school attendance or the academic effectiveness of the primary school attended.
Given the earlier findings, that pre-school experience gave children a better start to school (see
Sammons et al., 2002; 2003), an important aim of the Year 5 analyses is to establish whether
there is evidence of any continuing pre-school influence at the age of 10 years. By age 10 the
children have already spent 5 years in primary school; the study investigated the influence of
primary school academic effectiveness, as well as the combined influence of pre- and primary
school on young children’s cognitive attainments at the end of Year 5. A further major interest
was to explore whether pre-school experience and primary school effectiveness has different
influences on different groups of children such as disadvantaged children or children of less
qualified parents. Again, effects of pre-school and primary school were investigated net of the
effects of any background, child or home variables.
The results of the analyses of pre-school influence are considered in terms of a number of
different indicators:
■ Whether or not a child attended any pre-school setting
■ Duration (in months) of attending a pre-school setting
■ Measures of the quality (from observations by researchers) of the pre-school setting
attended
■ Measures of the effectiveness (in promoting children’s progress from age 3 to 5 years) of
the pre-school setting attended.
Figure 3.1 illustrates the analysis strategy.
Figure 3.1: Strategy of statistical analysis of net pre-school effects
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