Abstract
Children’s development in the early years has been shown to be related to their success in later life in a range of areas including education, employment and crime. Determining why some children do better than others in the early years is a key issue for policy and is crucial in attempts to reduce inequalities. This research examines differences in early child development by examining the factors associated with the cognitive ability of children up to age 5 using cognitive assessments administered as part of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and teacher reports of child ability. The results show that younger children, those with low birth weight, lower parental education, lower income and living in social housing are more likely to have lower achievement, on average, and a higher probability of being at the bottom of the distribution of cognitive scores at age 5.
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Notes
The sample is limited to families in England because one of the outcome variables—the Foundation Stage Profile (FSP)—is available only for children in England. Children in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland were also rated by teachers using a similar instrument, but the results are not directly comparable to the FSP.
The MCS sample was taken from the UK population which was stratified by country: England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. England was stratified into three types of ward: ethnic minority, in which at least 30% of the residents were ethnic minorities; disadvantaged, which were those that were in the 25% poorest wards; and advantaged, which is a relative label for those wards not falling into either of the other two categories. Wards in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland were stratified into advantaged and disadvantaged. All children born in the selected wards between the specified dates (approximately a year starting in mid to late 2000),who were eligible for child benefits and were alive and living in the UK at age nine months were part of the preliminary MCS sample. Full details of the sampling are available in the technical report on sampling (Plewis 2007).
The correlations of the MCS 2 value-added variables with the MCS 3 outcome variables range in magnitude from 0.23 to 0.45.
We also ran this analysis using a logit model, which produced very similar results.
As a robustness check we also ran the analyses using different cut-off rates—15 and 20% and found a similar pattern of results.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Heather Joshi, participants at the ESF conference in Sweden in 2008 and members of the National Equality Panel for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks too to the anonymous referees and the Editor Janne Jonsson for suggestions which improved this paper.
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Hansen, K., Jones, E.M. Age 5 Cognitive Development in England. Child Ind Res 3, 105–126 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-009-9055-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-009-9055-5