ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between information about the children's homes, taken from the pre-school interview, and their reading, writing and maths skills at the end of nursery. The most striking finding was that very few home variables were related to children's progress in reading and writing over the three years of infant school. Commonly used measures of social disadvantage, such as family income or single parent status, were not significantly related to children's progress, either in any individual year or over the three-year period. When children's Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) vocabulary scores were added into the analysis, the proportion of the variation in maths scores explained rose to 22", and parental theories of educational success were no longer important in explaining differences between children. Children whose parents believed that educational success was most influenced by the characteristics of the child, rather than of the family or the school, had lower scores than other children.
