schools (ES = -0.14). Children of parents with at least one academic qualification have better
attainment in Mathematics in Year 5 if they had any pre-school experience irrespective of the
effectiveness of the pre-school.
The findings in this section indicate that attending any pre-school provision seems to benefit the
majority of children who are classified as relatively less disadvantaged (because at least one of
their parents has some academic qualification). However, for more disadvantaged children the
quality and effectiveness of pre-school attended appears to be particularly important. Even so
only weak to modest benefits on later attainment at Year 5 remain evident for both groups.
Overall the impacts for both groups seem to be stronger for Mathematics than for Reading.
The Impact of Primary School Effectiveness
We conducted additional analyses to establish the net influence of primary school academic
effectiveness on attainment at Year 5 without taking into account any characteristics of pre-
school experience in the first instance (but with all the other relevant background, HLE and child
characteristics considered, see Figure 3.6 for an illustration of the strategy of statistical
analyses).
Figure 3.6: Strategy of statistical analysis of net primary school effects
Value added effectiveness measures for primary schools were calculated, using National
assessment data, for successive pupil cohorts (2002-2004) for all primary schools in England
linking KS1 and KS2 results, and separate indicators were calculated for the different core
curriculum subjects English, Mathematics and Science (Melhuish et al., 2006). Each primary
school’s value added effectiveness in English was modelled as a potential predictor for EPPE 3-
11 children’s Reading outcomes, in Year 5, and the school’s value added effectiveness in
Mathematics as a potential predictor for our child sample’s outcomes in Mathematics.
We found that the academic effectiveness of the primary school attended matters for longer term
cognitive development (see Figure 3.7). It makes an identifiable and separate contribution to
children’s later attainment at Year 5, after controlling for child, family and HLE influences.
Children who had attended a very highly, highly or medium effective primary school in
Mathematics have significantly better attainment in our independent standardised tests of
Mathematics in Year 5 than children who had attended a low effective primary school. Children
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