Evaluating the impact of early years educational reform in Wales to age seven: the potential use of the UK Millennium Cohort Study

Abstract

Early years education has received considerable attention in recent years, particularly as a result of longitudinal studies that demonstrate the importance of the first few years in a child's development and educational experience. In 2004, a new approach to early years education, the Foundation Phase, was introduced in Wales. This is a major flagship policy of the recently devolved Welsh Government, and marks a radical departure from the more assessment-driven competency-based approaches to early childhood education that existed prior to the Foundation Phase. Studying approximately 2000 children in Wales who are part of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), all born in 2000-2001 we investigate the potential impact of the Foundation Phase pilot on a range of key academic and well-being outcome measures. Compared with other children, those attending a Foundation Phase pilot school tended to have lower scores in a number of academic assessments at age seven and lower subjective well-being, in terms of their attitudes to learning and well-being at school. We consider these surprising, yet concerning, results in the context of the methodological limitations to this analysis and propose how the MCS can be further used to substantiate these findings.

The Reliability of Free School Meal Eligibility as a Measure of Socio-Economic Disadvantage: Evidence from the Millennium Cohort Study in Wales

“…The inclusion of interaction terms in the model between eFSM and the other socio-economic characteristics does not find any significant relationships either. The apparent absence of a strong relationship between these common measures of socio-economic disadvantage and cognitive outcomes in Wales has been demonstrated before in other studies using the MCS (Taylor et al, 2014). This contrasts slightly from similar analyses for children in England where there are social class and income gradients in cognitive outcomes using the MCS, but they are greatly reduced after controlling for parental education (Sullivan et al, 2013;Taylor et al, 2013).…”

“…Within the NPD, this indicates which children were formally recorded as eFSM and provides teacher assessments of their achievement at the end of the Key Stage 1 (KS1) National Curriculum (in Year 2). It should be noted that this does not include 76 children in Wales who participated in the pilot stage of the Foundation Phasea new curriculum for 3-7 year olds, piloted in 22 primary schools across Wales (see Taylor et al, 2014 for more information). To summarise, for the purposes of this paper only children living in Wales at age 11 ('sweep' 4) are included in the analysis, all of whom were born during the academic year 2000-2001.…”

Successful futures? New economy business logics, child rights, and Welsh educational reform

“…Drawing on the experiences of Italy and Scandinavia, the Foundation Phase curriculum represents a landmark educational policy divergence from England (Taylor et al, 2015). Despite this achievement, of note is Wales’ performance on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), wherein an increase of GCSE performance difference between England and Wales was found (Burgess et al, 2013).…”