ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the various social characteristics of the target children and their families. It focuses on the issues to do with family relationships, social class and race/ethnicity starting from the target child and comparing the sample with parents in the locality from which the schools were selected. The chapter seeks to disentangle 'family' processes, to elucidate the parts played by the different individuals within the family/household during the child's transfer into secondary education. It is interested in establishing the continuity or change in family-households over the target child's lifetime as a measure of the significance of these family patterns in the child's and the parents' lives. It is also interested in the child's educational development and so parents were asked whether or not the target child had been to any preschool groups before starting school and, if so, what sort of group had been attended.
