Ready for school? The components of school readiness and their importance for school performance and adult outcomes
This project will be undertaken during 2005 and 2006.
For more information on this project, please contact Kathryn Duckworth.
Programmes such as Sure Start are targeted at the achievement of 'school readiness' and recognise the importance of broad-ranging features of child development beyond those of cognitive skill enhancement. This project will inform the specification of the objectives of pre-school programmes in terms of the relative importance of child behaviour and cognitive capability.
Parents are interested in this question too and, as the DCSF seeks to build family learning programmes and engage parents more in their children's learning, it is helpful to know more about the importance of children's state of development at school entry and how this impacts on their success at school. This research will lead to the provision of clear guidance to parents and schools about the relative importance of different features of development.
A related issue is the recognition that slow or failing non-cognitive development can create barriers to success in the cognitive domain. Understanding how these aspects of development interact will inform policies targeted at school improvement and pupil attainment. It will also help clarifying some of the wider benefits of school resources and allow an assessment of the role of schools alongside the continuing role of families.
The subject of this project is the role of the family in the development of:
- "Hard" skills, i.e. cognitive skill at entry to school.
- "Soft" skills, i.e. socio-emotional skills at school entry such as not being disruptive in class, and being sensitive to other children's feelings.
The project assesses the relative impacts of families on pre-school soft and hard skills and the relative power of "hard" and "soft" skills to predict later school achievement. Each of these types of pre-school attainment is strongly influenced by parenting style and other aspects of the home such as income and parents' education. These family effects are being evaluated and compared.
The project also examines the extent to which changes in school success lead to changes in behaviour and engagement and vice versa.
This project will draw on data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), which contains extensive measures of pre-school development across a range of aspects including cognitive skill, behaviour, communication skills, personality and temperament.
These pre-school measures are being used to predict attainment at age 11 in terms of Key Stage scores but also in terms of mathematics reasoning skills and "soft" outcomes such as pro- and anti-social behaviour. Multivariate regression is also being used to control for as many features of the home and school environments as possible in order to evaluate the relative importance of the "hard" and "soft" skills. Person-centred approaches may also be used to identify children with diverse combinations of developmental success on the different measures and to compare the subsequent school outcomes of these different "types" of pupil at entry.
