Published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, researchers on the study used the Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE)* dataset to study 2311 English children and found that children from a lower SES background had worse academic attainment in English and maths at age 11.
They discovered that children from a lower SES background experienced lower quality pre-school home learning environments, which impacted their ability to self-regulate, which subsequently affected their academic attainment at school.
The domino effect was clear with the quality of the pre-school home learning environment predicting children’s self-regulation skills.
Even when accounting for other variables, such as age and gender, socioeconomic disadvantage remained significantly associated with later academic attainment in English and maths at age 11.
