The Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) project, funded by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE), is a substantial longitudinal study that assesses the progress and development of children between the ages of three and seven years. It investigates the contribution of individual and family characteristics on children's attainment, as well as the effect of different types of pre- school provision. The EPPE project has already published several reports and provided evidence to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Early Years Education.
 
Early influences
 
The research indicated family and child characteristics, along with the home environment, were powerful influences on children's attainment at three to four years. Childcare experience had more modest effects. Among the family influences, parental education and higher socio- economic status were strong indicators children's higher cognitive development on starting pre-school. Children from larger families (three or more siblings) tended to do less well on some measures.
 
Child characteristics were important. Girls tended to do better than boys on social skills and cognitive measures. Where children had previous developmental problems (e.g. slow to walk or talk) or were premature or of low birthweight, they tended to do less well on social skills or cognitive development. Previous behavioural problems were also associated with poorer social development.

The home environment was particularly important. Where children experienced more learning activities with parents (e.g. reading, painting/drawing, learning songs/rhymes, visiting the library, playing with letters or numbers) they did better in social and cognitive development. While more educated parents did more of these activities, the association was modest, so that some highly parents did little and some not-so-educated parents did a lot. The results indicated the effects of home environment were more powerful than those of socio-economic status or parental education. What parents do is more important than who parents are. There were also some modest effects of the childcare a child experienced before three. We found no evidence that the overall amount of childcare early in life was associated with children's development, however there were some effects with the type of childcare. Children with more experience being cared for by relatives (usually the grandmother) were rated as more cooperative and less antisocial --? whereas children with more group childcare experience showed higher cognitive scores but also were rated as showing antisocial behaviour more often.

When children started primary school we were able to consider what factors affected progress from three to five years of age. The family background was still important. Children eligible for free school meals did less well on cognitive measures. Socio-economic status and parental education were continuing to have an impact, and the home environment still showed powerful effects over and above those seen on children's development at three to four years of age.
 
Benefits of pre-school education
 
The study included a small group of children with very little or no pre-school experience. Such children are very few these days. These children differed markedly from the main part of the sample on family background, but after allowing for this, they were found to score lower on all cognitive measures. This result strongly indicates the benefits of some pre-school experience. However, the study could find no extra benefit of full-time over half-time pre-school attendance.

In considering specific pre-school centres, it was clear that some centres were having a distinctly better effect on pre-school progress than others, especially on literacy- related outcomes (e.g. pre-reading including phonological awareness). These pre-school centre effects are still being investigated as to the underlying characteristics associated with these better settings. It is clear that some pre-schools provide higher quality literacy and numeracy experiences than others in the same. The full story of pre-school effects is still unfolding and the outcomes will be reported at a later stage.

Research design

The EPPE project recruited 2,800 children selected randomly from 141 participating pre-school centres (nursery schools/classes, playgroups, private day nurseries local authority daycare and combined centres) in five regions England. In order to examine the impact of no pre-school provision, an additional sample of 250 children without pre-school experience was recruited from the Year 1 classes which EPPE children entered. In the study both qualitative and quantitative methods are used. Every child seen and assessed at three to four years on entering pre-school and their parents were interviewed. Observations were made at the pre-school and centre managers were interviewed. The children were seen again in their primary school reception class and will continue to be seen until the age of seven.

A parallel study is being carried out in Northern Ireland (Effective Pre-school Provision in Northern lreland - EPPNI). The data reported in this article relates to England. The EPPE and EPPNI projects are the first large-scale British studies on the effects of different kinds of Pre-school provision relating experience in particular centres and type of centre to child development.

For further details visit www.ioe.ac.uk/cdl/eppe.
 

Subscribe to Literacy Today