22 months: the problems start soon after birth. According to the DCSF, “the social class gap in attainment opens up by 22 months” and “an FSM child has around 3 times worse odds of achieving good school outcomes than a non-FSM child at every critical point in their education after age 5” (2009a).
7-36 months: Risley and Hart researched into the early life of American children by looking at the upbringing of 42 new babies from a wide range of social class backgrounds. They concluded that by the end of their observation, some babies had heard over 33 million words while others only 10 million.
“This was our most surprising discovery: that the size of the differences between families in the amount of talk to babies is so enormous- and that those differences add up to massive advantages or disadvantages for children in language experience long before they start school”
Age 3: DCSF point out that “at age three, children from lower income households have lower vocabulary scores” and that this continues through the various Key stages. For example, compared to FSM pupils, non-FSM pupils have three times the odds of achieving the expected level in reading and writing at Key Stage 1 in English; 3.5 times the odds of achieving the expected level in science at Key Stage 3 and 3.2 odds of achieving an A*-C grade in maths.
Research from Australia (Smart et al 2008) provides evidence that working class children suffer from poor school readiness. The effect of this stays with them throughout their schooling and leads to them underachieving at the point of school leaving. I wonder how many of our NEET (not in education, employment or training) young people have a similarly poor start in life!
More discouragement
In the context of this paper, it is necessary to point out that the poorer and disadvantaged families were the ones who not only had spoken fewer words but were also more likely to speak discouragement to their children. Risley and Hart (2006) found that some babies had heard over 500 thousand affirmative statements about their actions from their parents while others would have heard less than 60 thousand.
The film Precious provides a depressing tale of an obese black teenager who is pregnant with a second child by her own father while living in poverty with her violent mother. What stood out for one reviewer was not the film’s ferocity and sexual abuse, but the mother’s constant haranguing; she told her daughter that she would never succeed in anything beyond claiming welfare. “She did not just chip away at her self-esteem, she bulldozed it to dust” (Perry 2010).
[box type=”info”] Click here if you are interested in buying a copy of the main report from where this extract has been taken or the sister paper on Resilience and Self-efficacy [/box]