interactions with quality of the pre-school and early years HLE indicating that this is likely to
moderate the influence of pre-school. Again this points to the important role of parents and other
carers in providing rich home learning experiences during the sensitive pre-school period of
young children’s development.
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 more highly qualified parents, a better
early years 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. However, even for children
whose parents have little formal educational qualifications such protective experiences remain
beneficial. In summary, our results demonstrate that schools which are successful in raising
academic standards offer benefits to children’s longer term attainments in Reading and
Mathematics and this is particularly important for more disadvantaged groups of children who are
already at risk of low attainment. In addition, results also indicate that the quality of the pre-
school environment (at home and in pre-school settings) has long term implications for children’s
later attainment outcomes. Thus, interventions to improve the pre-school experiences of children
are likely to reduce the likelihood of poor attainment in the long term and offer protection for
those children who go on to attend less effective primary schools.
The implication of these findings is that policy development should seek to promote strategies to
support improvements in HLE especially for vulnerable groups and also continue to work 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 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
improved child outcomes at the end of Year 5, even though any pre-school experience was
found to benefit children on a wide range of academic and social/behavioural outcomes at
younger ages (rising five) when they started primary school.
In addition, the research indicates that the primary school attended also plays an important role.
Improving the academic effectiveness of less effective primary schools will be particularly
important for disadvantaged groups of pupils, since we find that attending an effective school is
more critical in terms of academic outcomes for this group. The finding that primary school
academic effectiveness is a more significant influence for disadvantaged pupils (especially those
who didn’t go to pre-school) is of particular importance to the achievement of the social inclusion
as well as the standards agendas. There are clear implications for the role of inspection given
Ofsted’s role of monitoring standards and quality in both the early years and in schools.
In order to help reduce the achievement gap for multiply disadvantaged groups, actions to
improve the HLE, pre-school and primary school experiences will be needed since improvements
to any one in isolation would be insufficient to boost outcomes on its own. In addition, it is likely
that targeted interventions for children who are well behind their peers in cognitive or
social/behavioural development at the start of primary school will also be necessary to prevent a
widening of the gap during Key Stage 1 and 2.
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