Executive Summary
This report presents the results of analyses related to the Key Stage 2 phase of a major
longitudinal study investigating the influence of pre-school and primary school on
children’s cognitive and social/behavioural development (EPPE 3-11) in England. The
study is funded by the Department for Education and Skills. The focus of this report is on
children’s cognitive attainments at the end of Year 5. A report on children’s
social/behavioural development at this age will be published separately (Effective Pre-
school and Primary Education 3-11 [EPPE 3-11] Team, 2007). The original EPPE pre-
school sample was recruited to the study at age 3 years plus and followed to the end of
Key Stage 1 (Year 2) in primary school. An additional ‘home’ sample of children (who
had not attended pre-school) was recruited at the start of primary school. The EPPE 3-
11 project is following up the sample to the end of primary schooling (age 11 years plus).
The research has adopted an educational effectiveness design and mixed methods
approach (Sammons et al., 2005; Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2006) in order to investigate
child, family and home influences on developmental outcomes so that the relative
importance of these influences can be studied in relation to the strength of pre-school
and primary school factors.
EPPE 3-11 has a wide range of data on children’s development, child, family and home
learning environment (HLE) and pre-school characteristics. Additional value added
measures of primary schools, derived from multilevel statistical analyses of national data
sets conducted for all primary schools in England (Melhuish et al., 2006), are also used
in analyses to provide independent indicators of the academic effectiveness of primary
schools attended by children in the EPPE 3-11 sample to complement the measures of
quality and effectiveness of pre-school settings. It is therefore possible to explore both
pre-school and primary school influences on children’s outcomes in Year 5.
Standardised tests of Reading and Mathematics have been used to provide measures of
children’s educational outcomes in Year 1 and again in Year 5. The sample included
over 2550 children for whom Reading and Mathematics data were available at these two
time points drawn from over 950 primary schools. Measures of the quality of the 141
pre-school centres originally attended by children in the pre-school sample were based
on trained researchers’ observations in each centre, using environment and care-giver
interaction rating scales. Measures of the effectiveness of individual pre-school centres
were derived from value added models of the EPPE children’s progress against
expectations in each centre, controlling for prior attainment and background
characteristics.
The aims of the analyses were:
• To explore the how child, parent and home characteristics are related to children’s
attainment at the end of Year 5.
• To compare the influence of child, parent and home characteristics on children’s
attainments in Year 5 to the influence at Year 1.
• To model children’s cognitive attainment and progress over Key Stage 1 and 2.
• To investigate any continuing impact of pre-school, including variation in children’s
outcomes related to different types of pre-school, and for those with no pre-school
provision (i.e. the ‘home’ sample).
• To explore the impact of measures of pre-school quality and effectiveness on later
child outcomes.