Does when you are born matter? The impact of month of birth on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills in England

Abstract

Executive summaryIt is well known that children born at the start of the academic year tend to achieve better exam results, on average, than children born at the end of the academic year. This matters because educational attainment is known to have long-term consequences for a range of adult outcomes. But it is not only educational attainment that has long-lasting effects: there is a body of evidence that emphasises the significant effects that a whole range of skills and behaviours developed and exhibited during childhood may have on later outcomes. There is, however, relatively little evidence available on the extent to which month of birth is associated with many of these skills and behaviours, particularly in the UK.The aim of this report is to build on this relatively limited existing evidence base by identifying the effect of month of birth on a range of key skills and behaviours amongst young people growing up in England today, from birth through to early adulthood. This work will extend far beyond the scope of previous research in this area -in terms of both the range of skills and behaviours considered, and the ability to consider recent cohorts of children -enabling us to build up a more complete picture of the impact of month of birth on children's lives than has previously been possible. In particular, we consider month of birth differences in the following outcomes: national achievement test scores and post-compulsory education participation decisions;  other measures of cognitive skills, including British Ability Scale test scores;  parent, teacher and child perceptions of academic ability;  children's perceptions of their own well-being, including whether or not they have been bullied;  parent and teacher perceptions of children's socio-emotional development;  children's engagement in a range of risky behaviours.We also consider whether parents respond differently to children born in different months of the year, particularly in terms of the investments they make in their child's home learning environment.To do so, we use simple regression models including month of birth dummies (i.e. a series of variables indicating whether or not a child was born in a particular month, relative to being born in September) alongside controls for a range of individual and family background characteristics. Our analysis pieces together information from three UK cohort studies -the Millennium Cohort Study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England -to enable us to consider month of birth differences in these outcomes from birth through to early adulthood. All three data sets contain rich information on the skills and behaviours outlined above. They have also all been linked to administrative data on national achievement test scores, allowing us to compare month of birth differences amongst cohort members of these surveys with those based on national cohorts.In line with previous literature, we find evidence of large and significant differences be...

The drivers of month of birth differences in children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills: a regression discontinuity analysis

“…The declining importance of a young person's month of birth on their educational attainment is consistent with previous work using linear regression methods (e.g. Crawford et al, 2007Crawford et al, , 2011. Indeed, the RDD method produces treatment effects that are not statistically different from those in Crawford et al (2011) using the same sample of children, though they are slightly larger in magnitude.…”

“…Moreover, under certain assumptions regarding the comparability of these tests, we will be able use these combinations to identify a lower bound of the age at test effect. Second, it will make use of a similar strategy to identify the drivers of the month of birth differences in a range of non-cognitive skills first documented by Crawford et al (2011).…”

Left behind by birth month

“…There are several studies investigating how age differences in class affects school performance, and there is convincing empirical evidence for the oldest students to outperform their younger peers. For instance, see Strøm (2004) on Norwegian data; Crawford, Dearden, and Greaves (2011) on British data; Jürges andSchneider (2011), Puhani andWeber (2007), and Mühlenweg and Puhani (2010) on German data. For differential probabilities across relative age of entering academic or high ability tracks, see, for example, Jürges and Schneider (2011).…”

“…This is important since several studies suggest that higher educated parents to a larger extent allocate more time and better support for the child when school performance drops. For instance, Crawford, Dearden, and Greaves (2011) find that parental investment increases substantially for the youngest relative to the oldest in class at the time when the child enrolls in school. Hence, children from more advantaged families may be less negatively affected of being among the youngest in class.…”

Wage differentials in Sri Lanka: the case of a post-conflict country with a free education policy

“…Socio-structural theories emphasize on the differentials of driving forces in relation to the administration of the education system of a country. These driving forces mainly include differentials in absolute age and years of schooling determined by the month of birth of an individual (Crawford et al, 2011).…”