Assessments at ages 3 and 5 are strong predictors of GCSE results in English language and maths, a new study has suggested.
Almost half (48 per cent) of students who fail to secure standard passes in these core subjects were identified as falling behind by teachers at age 5, findings published today have shown.
And the researchers behind the work say the education system is currently failing a “forgotten fifth” of pupils, who, after 12 years of schooling, leave without the “basic literacy and numeracy skills needed to get on in life”.
The findings are part of a three-year research project led by Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, and Dr Sam Parsons from the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies.
The researchers used data to investigate the educational trajectories of 11,524 pupils born in England in 2000 or 2001 who went on to take their GCSEs in 2016 or 2017.
They found that 1 in 5 (18 per cent) of those students did not achieve a grade 4 in both English language and maths, and just under half of those - 48 per cent - had not reached expected levels in early years communication, literacy and language and maths development scales when they started school at age 5.
And more than 1 in 4 (28 per cent) had been directly assessed as “delayed” in the Bracken assessment of school readiness at age 3.
Professor Elliot Major said that “the forgotten fifth” of pupils leaving school lacking basic English and maths skills was “one of education’s biggest scandals”.
“Our research lays bare the unravelling tragedy for the 100,000 teenagers who, each year, leave schools without basic skills”, he added.
“Government attempts to address this challenge will fail without high-quality support for children during the pre-school years and greater efforts to identify, diagnose and, most importantly, respond to children falling behind at early stages of schooling.
“We should also consider introducing a basic threshold qualification for functional literacy and numeracy skills that all school leavers would be expected to pass.”
Dr Parsons said: “What is striking about our analysis is that the association between earlier assessments and later outcomes is barely attenuated by the wide range of family background and individual characteristics we are able to include in our analyses.
“Poor performance in the early years together with socioeconomic disadvantage are clear risk factors for poor performance in GCSE English language and maths examinations, which are, in turn, increasingly crucial for post-16 transitions.”
In its White Paper earlier this year, the Department for Education said it was setting the ambition for the average GCSE grade in English language and maths to rise to 5 by 2030 - up from 4.5 in the last set of exams before the pandemic, in 2019.
The White Paper said: “Achieving our ambition of increasing the national GCSE average grade in both English language and maths by 0.5 is estimated to be worth £34 billion for the wider economy, for a single cohort in 2030.”
The DfE has been contacted for comment.
