Pre-School Education and Attainment in the NCDS and BCS

This paper considers the effect of how children pass time before entrance to school on attainment in primary school. We find in NCDS data that children perform marginally better at seven and eleven if they spent time with their mother, or at a pre-school, rather than in informal care. This holds when one controls for parental education, social class, and assessed parental interest in the child's education, as well as the quality of the peer group. In the BCS, however, time spent in nurseries effected no improvement in maths at ten as compared to time in informal care and pre-school children were performing much worse in reading. This worse performance was traceable to reduced vocabulary at five. Pre-school children were more advanced in copying at five relative to children in informal care but, while copying is a good predictor of scores in both maths and reading at ten, this advancement had been offset by then.