Excerpt from abstract

This paper explores the contribution of the demographic characteristics, early years home learn-ing environment and pre-school to children’s social/behavioural development. While much existing research relates aspects of children’s environments or experiences to social development, there has been little work that is with a large enough longitudinal sample, with suf™ ciently detailed data, to delineate the independent long-term effects of demographics, home and pre-school. This paper contributes to the literature by present-ing ™ ndings from the Effective Pre-school and Primary Education (EPPE) Project, a longitudinal study on a representative sample of 3000 children in the UK. While the study has extensive longitudinal information on cognitive, educational and social/behavioural development, this paper will focus on the predictors of social/behavioural development at age 11.The home learning environment and pre-school are important predictors of social/behavioural development and the interaction of these effects is also explored.