The name is absent

Key findings

The key findings are reported in terms of the three main sets of influences studied:
child/family; evidence of continuing pre-school influence; and the contribution of the
primary school attended.

Child, Family and HLE effects

• The quality of the early years home learning environment (HLE) and parents’
(especially mothers’) qualification levels are the most important background
factors relating to a child’s attainment in Reading and Mathematics at Year 5,
followed by low birth weight, need for support with English as an additional
language (EAL), early health or developmental problems and socio-economic
status (SES).

• Taken together, child, family and HLE influences on children’s attainment in
Reading and Mathematics, in Year 5, are weaker predictors than they were in
Year 1. This is likely to indicate the increased primary school and peer group
influence.

Pre-school effects

• There is evidence of a continuing positive effect of attending higher quality or
more effective pre-school settings on children’s subsequent outcomes in
Mathematics and Reading at the end of Year 5, once the influence of background
factors has been taken into account.

• Those children who attended low quality pre-school no longer show cognitive
benefits by Year 5; their results are not significantly different from the children who
did not attend pre-school. This is a change in comparison to earlier findings at
age 5 (the start of primary school) when all pre-school experience was found to be
beneficial.

Primary school effects

• The academic effectiveness of the primary school a child attends (as measured
by independently conducted value added analyses of National assessment
results for 2002-2004) was found to be a significant factor in accounting for
variation in EPPE 3-11 children’s Reading and Mathematics attainment in Year 5.
Children who had attended a primary school identified as academically more
effective had better outcomes at age 10 than children who attended a less
effective primary school, after allowing for the influence of child, home and pre-
school factors.

• Attending a more academically effective primary school was a more important
factor for the later attainment of children who had not attended pre-school or who
had attended a low quality pre-school, than to those children who had attended a
more effective or higher quality pre-school.

• Equally, early experience of attending a better quality or more effective pre-school
appeared to act as a protective factor against the limitations of later moving to a

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