PEEP supporting parents as first educators
Dr Maria Evangelou

The evaluation of the Peers Early Education Partnership found that young children whose parents are involved in their early learning make "significantly more progress". Dr Maria Evangelou of the University of Oxford reports.

Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP) is a parent education programme developed in 1995 and implemented for all parents and their children from birth to five years, in four neighbourhoods in Oxford. The programme offers a structured curriculum for each age-group, covering areas such as 'listening', 'talking', 'numeracy' and 'self-esteem'. Weekly group sessions for parents and children led by a PEEP leader usually take place in pre-school settings. These group sessions aim to raise educational achievement, especially literacy, by supporting parents and carers in their role as first educators.

Research studies have shown that early childhood programmes are more likely to succeed where there is effective parental involvement. The evaluation of PEEP has reaffirmed this.

This study investigated the possible benefits to children's development of their parents participating in PEEP. It focused on the developmental progress of 149 children of similar age, three to five years, and other characteristics including language and thinking skills. A group of children whose parents participated in PEEP in 1998 was compared to a matched group of children whose parents lived in a similar community in Oxfordshire where PEEP was not available.

Parents were interviewed at the beginning of the study to establish if there were any differences between the two groups. Areas covered were home circumstances, daily home activities, and the child's health and family history. From the responses given it was found that the Oxford group had more single mothers, received more state benefits and attended more hours of playgroup. All three factors were taken into account when the data was analysed.

Similarly, interviews were conducted with the children's pre-school leaders to investigate the qualifications, staff-child ratios, pedagogy and resources of the pre-schools attended by both the PEEP and the 'comparison' children. No differences were found in quality of the pre-schools.

To track developmental changes in children as a result of participation in PEEP, children in both groups were tested at ages three, four and five. To set the baseline for measuring development from age three to five, the researcher assessed children's vocabulary, language comprehension and non-verbal skills, writing skills and social-motional development when children entered the study at three. At age four and again at age five when children entered school, they were again tested for: phonological skills, language comprehension, writing skills, vocabulary, letter knowledge (upper and lower case), their understanding about books and print, number concepts, social-emotional development, and self-esteem.

These assessments showed that children whose parents participated in PEEP scored significantly higher than their comparison peers on this battery of tests. These gains were found in the three-to-five-years age range in the following areas of intellectual development:

• vocabulary
• language comprehension
• understanding about books and print
• number concepts

In addition, children whose parents participated in PEEP had higher self-esteem than comparable children whose parents were not involved in it. The areas of self-esteem influenced by parental participation in the programme were feelings relating to cognitive competence and feelings relating to physical competence.

This evaluation study has shown that parental participation in PEEP when the children were three to five years old was associated with greater development progress for their children. This progress is related to aspects of the children's literacy, numeracy and self-esteem development. Children in PEEP felt more competent - cognitively and physically - than the comparison group where there was no formal parental participation in an equivalent programme. Given that 1) the children in the PEEP and comparison groups were closely matched and had comparable levels of development when aged three (at the start of the study), and that 2) the quality of pre-schools was similar in both areas, we can conclude that it is very likely that the differences between the two groups of children at the end of the study can be attributed to the PEEP programme.

This study has demonstrated that supporting parents as first educators through the PEEP programme has significant developmental benefits for their children.

References
M. Evangelou and K. Sylva (2003) The effects of the Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP) on children's developmental progress, London: DfES.
M. Evangelou (2001) Evaluation of the effects of pre-school intervention on literacy development in children, D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford.
K. Sylva et al (1999) An introduction to the EPPE project, London: DfEE and Institute of Education, University of London.

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