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SEED Sponsored Research: Children
starting school in Scotland
3 Representativeness of PIPS data
The PIPS BLA was used in 10 out of 32 Scottish
authorities in the academic year 2002-03. In order to draw
conclusions based on the PIPS data it is necessary to
determine whether these 10 authorities were representative
of Scotland as a whole. To do this we analysed three
different outcomes of assessments carried out in each of
S4, S5 and S6 for each of the academic years 2000-01,
2001-02 and 2002-03, as set out in Table 1 (Summary of
Outcomes Used to Determine Representativeness of
Sample).
Table 1 Summary of Outcomes Used to Determine
Representativeness of Sample
Year group | Outcomes considered |
S4 | Percent of S4 roll gaining 5 or more awards
at level 3 or better |
Percent of S4 roll gaining 5 or more awards
at level 4 or better |
Percent of S4 roll gaining 5 or more awards
at level 5 or better |
S5 | Percent of S4 roll gaining 1 or more awards
at level 6 or better in S5 |
Percent of S4 roll gaining 3 or more awards
at level 6 or better in S5 |
Percent of S4 roll gaining 5 or more awards
at level 6 or better in S5 |
S6 | Percent of S4 roll gaining 3 or more awards
at level 6 or better in S6 |
Percent of S4 roll gaining 5 or more awards
at level 6 or better in S6 |
Percent of S4 roll gaining 1 or more awards
at level 7 or better in S6 |
These figures, aggregated by authority, are available
on-line from
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/stats/bulletins/00295-00.asp.
The results were averaged amongst authorities using PIPS
and amongst all authorities, weighted by the number of
children on the S4 roll, and the averages compared. A
summary of the scores is shown in Figure 1
(Representativeness of Sample) for data from the academic
year 2002-03; the data from 2001-02 and 2000-01 show a
similar picture.
Figure 1 Representativeness of Sample
The differences between the authorities using PIPS and
authorities as a whole were small, less than 1% in all but
one case, and typically 6% of the standard deviation of the
averages for the individual authorities.
We can therefore be confident that the education
authorities using PIPS in Scotland are representative of
Scotland as a whole.
Having determined that this is the case, the remainder
of this report is in three parts. The first (
Section 4) looks at the cognitive
development of children starting school in Scotland in
2002, where data were available on 8652 pupils. In Section
4 we identify the extent to which this profile varies by
age, gender, home background, pre-school experience, first
language and special educational seeds.
In the second part (
Section 5) we compare the
starting points of children starting school in Scotland
with three other countries. In Part 3 (
Section 6) we use data on 1289
children from their start of schooling in the 2000 academic
year and their matched results from testing in 2003, when
they were in Primary 3, in an attempt to find evidence of
an optimal age for starting school in Scotland.
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