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SEED Sponsored Research: Children
starting school in Scotland
1 Introduction
This report focuses on two areas: the cognitive
development of children starting school in Scotland and the
impact of age of starting school on later attainment and
progress. The first area is tackled by describing what
children know and can do when they start school and how
this is related to the age, sex, social background, special
needs and first language of those children. The focus is on
cognitive development and although we acknowledge the
importance of personal, social and emotional development,
this report does not deal with such measures other than
attitude indicators in the second section.
The general pattern of what children know and can do
when they start school in Scotland is then compared to
three other countries. A good number of international
studies, for example TIMSS, PISA and PIRLS, have looked at
the attainment levels of pupils after several years of
schooling but by looking at Scottish children starting
school in comparison with children in other countries, this
adds weight to the possibility of a more broadly based
international study of children starting school and extends
recently published work with specific reference to Scotland
(Tymms et al; 2004 and in press).
Similarly, the age of transition to school from
pre-school/home settings is an under-researched yet very
important area. Although there is considerable interest in
the age of children starting school and many articles and
papers have been written on the subject (for example,
Tizard and Hughes, 1986; Tymms, 1998), no broadly based
quantitative studies have thrown light on the issue in
Scotland.
In this report we use data from the Performance
Indicators in Primary Schools (PIPS) On-entry Baseline
Assessment (BLA) to consider the cognitive development of
children starting school in Scotland and to compare the
results with those from children from the other
English-speaking countries. We also look at the age of
children starting school in Scotland and relate this to
their mathematics and reading achievement scores in P3.
More specifically, the research analysis responds to these
questions:
1. What do children know and what can they do when
they start school in Scotland, and how does this
profile vary by age, gender, home background,
pre-school experience, first language and special
needs?
2. Do children starting school in Scotland have
the same age related development profile as children in
England, Western Australia and New Zealand?
3. Is there evidence of an optimal age for
starting school in Scotland?
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