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SEED Sponsored Research: Children
starting school in Scotland
7 Overall Summary
7.1 The widespread use of the PIPS On-entry Baseline
Assessment has created a unique database that had not been
examined in detail from a Scottish perspective until now.
The research was divided into three parts and the main
findings in response to the three research questions are
outlined below:
7.2 What do children know and what can they do when they
start school in Scotland?
- There was a very large variation across children
with some reading fluently and adept at working with
numbers and others having difficulty counting a few
objects and not yet in a position to identify any
letters of the alphabet.
- Older children started school at higher levels to
the tune of about 0.05 standard deviations per
month.
- There was no difference in mathematics development
of boys and girls at the start of school. Girls had
higher scores for reading, vocabulary and phonological
awareness. The greatest advantage was for reading where
they were a fifth of a Standard Deviation ahead of the
boys. The standard deviations for the boys' scores in
vocabulary and mathematics were higher than for girls,
meaning that there were proportionately more boys with
extreme scores (both high and low) than girls.
- Children with an entitlement to free school meals
scored about a third of a standard deviation below
those who did not have such an entitlement.
- The amount of pre-school experience was almost
unrelated to the baseline scores. This contrasts with
the strong relationship found in the English data.
7.3 Do children starting school in Scotland have the
same age related development profile as children in
England, Western Australia and New Zealand?
- The developmental patterns of children starting
school in Scotland was very similar to children in
three other English-speaking countries. Children in
Scotland found the same tasks as easy or as difficult
as children in other countries. The correspondence was
very tight.
- When the age of the children at the start of school
was taken into account, the mean reading and
mathematics scores of the older children starting
school in Scotland were lower than expected. However,
the vocabulary scores of these older pupils were in
line with children of the same age from other
countries.
7.4 Is there an optimum age for starting school?
- Multi level analysis found that the age of pupils
when they started school did not influence the amount
of progress that they made in reading, mathematics
vocabulary and non-verbal ability between the start of
Primary 1 and Primary 3. Younger children were not
disadvantaged. Nor was there any significant
interaction with age, sex or socio-economic status.
These findings also applied to pupils' attitudes.
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