Literacy news
Year-wide gap for the poor
18 Feb 2010
Recent research commissioned by the educational charity, the Sutton Trust, has found that children growing up in the poorest families are almost a year behind middle-income families in their vocabulary levels by the time they start school.
The research was based on 12,500 British five-year-olds in 2006 and 2007 in the Millennium Cohort Study. It found that just under half of children from the poorest families were read to daily at the age of three, compared with eight in ten from the richest families. This lead the researchers to conclude that good parenting and a supportive home environment were the most important factors leading to better test scores at the age of five.
Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Sutton Trust, said, “these findings are at once both shocking and encouraging – revealing the stark educational disadvantage experienced by children from poorer homes before they have even stepped into the school classroom, but also the potential for good parenting to overcome some of the negative impacts that poverty can have on children’s early development.”
The full report: Low income and early cognitive development in the UK is available from the Sutton Trust website.
(Article taken from Nursery World magazine)
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