2 July 2009
Home to school transitions for financially disadvantaged children: Findings from Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children
Diana Smart, General Manager (Research), Australian Institute of Family Studies
Abstract, slides and audio of presentation
Edited transcript
The following audio presentation is brought to you by the Australian Institute of Family Studies as part of our monthly seminar series in which we showcase national and international research related to the family.
The seminars are designed to promote a forum for discussion and debate. They are open to the public and free of charge.
Seminar facilitated & speaker introduced by Alan Hayes.
Diana Smart:
Thank you Alan.
As you heard, this research has been undertaken for The Smith Family and it wouldn't have happened without them. It's been a wonderful piece or research that we're very pleased to be associated with and I'd just like to acknowledge The Smith Family before I begin. The other people I would like to acknowledge are my co-authors on the report who did an absolutely fantastic job. So I'm reporting on their behalf.
This is the report (holds up copy of report) and it's downloadable from The Smith Family website. There are not many copies in print, but you can access it from The Smith Family website. So if you're interested that's the place to go.
So the home to school transition is a really major change for children. They face new social environments with new cultures, rules and expectations. They're quite small young people and they have to make friends with new people and make new relationships with teachers as well in a very different setting to the settings that they're used to. So these classrooms and playgrounds really are a different experience for many children and can be a challenging time.
We know that children differ greatly in their readiness for this transition. Previous research has shown that children who make a poor transition are more likely to repeat a grade or drop out of school, more often become involved in anti-social behaviour as teenagers, become teenage parents and are more likely to have difficult employment circumstances in adulthood.
So a good start to school is really important and it's vital that we find out how to help children make the best start they can.
I'd also like to acknowledge that I'm talking about it from the child's perspective today. We know that schools are a really crucial element as well and that what schools do to help children make this transition is terribly important. But I'm not going to touch on that, but I do want to acknowledge the role of schools before I launch into this particular piece of research.
This research is relevant to the current national and international focus on social inclusion. We're aiming to provide Australian evidence that can guide policies, interventions and prevention efforts to mitigate the effect of financial disadvantage on children. It also speaks to the current interest in the early years of life and the recognition of their importance for children in the long term.
I thought I'd begin by talking about what school readiness might actually be.
First, years ago, this was quite narrowly defined in terms of cognitive and learning capacities, but we now realise that there's a whole range of attributes and capacities that impact on children's readiness for school. So there's their physical health and wellbeing - their fine and gross motor skills, their growth, whether they have a disability; their social and emotional functioning - the sorts of social skills they've developed, the way they behave, their levels of aggression, hyperactivity, internalising problems; their language skills are very important, their comprehension, knowledge of letters and words and breadth of vocabulary and those early reading skills that some children come to school with; their cognitive skills and general knowledge, so their ability to reason, their knowledge of numbers and basic facts and their approach to learning itself - their enthusiasm for learning, their enjoyment of learning and their ability to attend. All of these are very crucial capacities that children need to make a good transition to school.
I'm not covering all five areas today but I am looking at the middle three - the social and emotional functioning of children, their language skills and cognitive abilities.
We had three key questions that we wanted to explore. The first of them was simply the question of whether children from financially disadvantaged families were less ready for school than other children.
The second question was to look more broadly and see what other child, family and environmental factors might help children make a good transition or be ready for school or not, and whether there were particular aspects that were relevant for children from financially disadvantaged families.
Our third question was what was the joint effect of family financial disadvantage and poor school readiness for children's school outcomes?
So as you've heard, this information is based on Growing up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. This is a very large study that's being initiated and funded by the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and is managed in partnership with our Institute and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
We've been following two cohorts of children - one cohort of babies and another cohort of four to five year olds from all areas of Australia, from all states and territories The study began in 2004 and is going to continue, I'm very pleased to say, at least until 2018 which will take the children to their mid-teens and late teens for these two cohorts.
We contact the families every two years and we obtain information from all parents, those who are living at home and parents who are living apart from the child, carers and teachers, and from six years on, the children themselves. Our main data collection technique is home interviews, but we also use questionnaires and telephone interviews and there are direct assessments and measurements of the children and we also link to data sources such as the Medicare records and other kinds of data sources.
Today I'm going to talk about the data from waves one and two for the four to five year old cohort.
We had four measures of family financial disadvantage. We used income in the lowest 15 per cent of the sample and the income range for the great majority of these families was between $83 and $236 a week. This was of course 15 per cent of the sample. We also looked at whether the families had experienced financial hardship - things like not being able to pay bills or rent or going without meals, and a similar proportion of families had reported this had occurred. The third indicator was the families' major source of income being from Government benefits or allowances and we had a similar proportion again who had experienced this. The last indicator was the parents' perception of the family as poor or very poor and less than four per cent of the sample reported this.
You may wonder why we use four different indicators and this was because we thought that the different types of indicators could impact on children differently. For example, it might be the case that financial disadvantage matters more if families feel under financial pressure.
We had multiple measures of the children's school readiness too. We used the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test to assess the children's language skills, the Who Am I Test to assess their pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills and parents reports of the children's social and emotional adjustment in the areas of conduct problems, hyperactivity, emotional problems, peer problems and pro-social skills.
Children with scores in the most problematic 20 per cent of the sample on a measure were classified as showing low school readiness on that indicator.
We also had multiple measures of the children's school progress at six to seven years and these were all by teacher reports. So teachers reported on the children's language and literacy skills, their numeracy and maths skills, their engagement in learning and their social and emotional adjustment in the same areas that parents had reported on.
Our first set of analyses looks simply at links between family financial disadvantage and school readiness without taking any other factors into account. From now on I'm going to use a shortcut and talk about the children as "financially disadvantaged children". I know that's not accurate, but it's just easier to say this than to keep saying children from financially disadvantaged families. So I hope you'll understand my shortcut and not take exception to it.
This first slide shows that many more children from financially disadvantaged families, shown by the dark brown bars, were experiencing language problems at four to five years than their peers, shown by the light brown bars. These are likely to put them at risk of a poor transition to school. The results were the same over all four areas of family financial disadvantage without around 40 per cent of children in these circumstances having poor language skills, 20 per cent more than the other children.
The symbols at the top of the bars are the 95 per cent confidence intervals and where these don't overlap this shows that there are significant differences between the groups being compared. So that's really quite a large difference in the area of language skills.
In the area of pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills there were still differences but these were not as strong. All showing that financially disadvantaged children were experiencing more problems in this area, with the exception of the last indicator, the perception of the family as being poor or very poor.
Looking at children's conduct problems, we see fairly strong differences between financially disadvantaged children and other children of around the order of 10 per cent with about a quarter of these children showing conduct problems and only about 15 per cent of the other children.
In the area of pro-social skills, we're showing the percentage who had low levels of these skills. We see a similar pattern, but less strong and again, on the indicator of the perception of the family as being poor or very poor, no significant differences.
To summarise these results, we can see that there were clear links between family financial disadvantage and children's readiness for school. However, they should not be overstated. In fact the majority of financially disadvantaged children were ready for school so family financial disadvantage was a source of risk but it was not destiny. Also we shouldn't forget the 10 to 20 per cent of children from better off families who also showed low school readiness. Absence of family financial disadvantage is not a guarantee. We need to look at a wider range of factor to understand why some children may be vulnerable to low school readiness and others are not.
Our second set of analyses looked at connections between a wide range of factors and children's school readiness and the factors covered areas of child development, family factors and other environment factors. This is one of the great strengths of the Growing up in Australia study - that it does have so many different measures of these aspects. It's unlike many other studies in having such a broad range of measures that we could call on to look at this question. As the results were very similar across all four indicators of family financial disadvantage, all our subsequent analyses just looked at income as our indicator of financial disadvantage.
So these were the factors that we included in our analyses. In terms of children themselves, their gender, their age, their persistent temperament style; in terms of parent characteristics, fathers - whether they were resident in the home, whether they were employed, mothers - whether they were employed, their age at the birth of the child, their educational level, the country of origin, indigenous background and mental health. In terms of family factors we looked at the parents' parenting style, their warmth, hostility, consistency and use of reasoning and the educational climate that families were able to provide. So these were things like reading to children, other learning activities like telling the story not from a book or singing songs with children and those kinds of activities, the number of children's books in the home, and the amount of TV watching that children did. We also looked at other out of home characteristics - the pre-school or child care experiences the children were having, the level of neighbourhood disadvantage using the ABS' SEIFS Index and whether the families were living in a metropolitan or non-metropolitan area.
I do apologise for this next slide which has got a lot of information on it and I'll work you through these.
This is a summary and you'll need go to the report for more details on the factors that were related to children's cognitive school readiness. The ones that are shown in red were risk factors that we identified and the ones shown in purple were protective factors that we identified. There is one green one shown which was a protective factor on one indicator and a risk factor on the other and I'll talk about that as we get to it.
You also see which particular aspect of cognitive school readiness these finding were in relation to. So we've got the language skills from the PPVT and the pre-literacy pre-numeracy skills from the WAI.
So when we included all these other factors in the analyses we found that family financial disadvantage remained a significant influence only in the area of language skills. The factors that were significantly related to child language and cognitive functioning were a less persistent temperament style over both areas, being older, and being a boy. In terms of mothers' characteristics - whether mothers were in employment, was protective and having a year 12 or higher education was also protective relative to not having these levels of education.
If mothers were less than 22 when the children were born, children were more likely to show low school readiness and also if mothers were from an indigenous background.
If mothers had been born overseas, children were likely to show low language skills, but were more likely to show good pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills. So that's a really interesting finding speaking to the particular language environment that perhaps the children were exposed to.
In terms of the parenting style - if parents were inconsistent in their dealings with children, this was a risk and the family educational climate was important especially around reading. So reading to children on fewer than three days a week was a risk factor as was having than fewer than 30 children's books in the home.
If children were not in child care or pre-school they were more likely to show low school readiness, whereas if they were already in primary school they were likely to show better pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills.
Being in a disadvantaged area was a risk but being in a rural area that was accessible to services was protective.
Now I'm going to move on to talking about the factors related to several aspects of social and emotional school readiness. There are also other factors that were important to one of these outcomes, but I'm going to summarise the ones that were common across several outcomes.
In these analyses family financial disadvantage was not a direct predictor. The children's persistent temperament style was important and boys were at risk of low school readiness on these social and emotional indicators.
If fathers were not resident at the home that was a risk and if mothers were in employment or had a university education, their children are more likely to show better school readiness.
If mothers were young when the children were born or had poor mental health, these were risks.
Here we see quite a number of aspects of parenting coming into play. So if parents showed higher hostility, lower warmth or were inconsistent, their children were more likely to show low school readiness. For hostility, looking at the odds ratios\, these were higher than all of the other factors. This was interesting because it wasn't the case that these parents were showing high levels of hostility, it was more the case that they were showing some rather than little or no hostility. So it's suggesting that even minor increases here in how parents are rearing children can have an impact.
The family educational climate in terms of how much TV viewing children were doing was important and again a disadvantaged area came out as an influence.
This next slide is a very telling one. We summed the number of family and neighbourhood risk factors present within families and then compared the disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged groups. There were striking differences as you can see. Four-tenths of better off families (that's the dotted line) had no or only one risk compared with only one-tenth of disadvantaged families. At the other extreme, looking at the families who had five or more risks, more than 40 per cent of disadvantaged families were in the situation compared with only 14 per cent of better off families.
I think this helps to start to unpack how disadvantage might affect children.
This next question is whether children from disadvantaged families experience particular risk or protective factors or experience them more strongly.
We conducted quite a large number of interaction analyses to look at this question and this is what we found - for cognitive school readiness, mother's being in employment was a unique contributor to language skills and being regularly read to was a more powerful influence for school readiness for children in this situation.
For social and emotional school readiness, parenting hostility was a unique risk for hyperactivity (that's only one of the areas that parental hostility was related to) and being in parent only or informal care was a more powerful risk for hyperactivity.
Being infrequently read to, fewer other family learning activities were more powerful risks for poorer pro-social skills.
So thinking of the number of analyses that we conducted, this was actually quite a small yield. It says to me that overall, similar factors were relevant to children from all environments in terms of impacting on their readiness for school.
So now I will sum up from this second set of analyses. We can see that there were many factors that seemed to contribute to a child's readiness for school. Factors related to the child, the parents, what's happening in the family and their broader experiences and the family's broader environment too.
As I just pointed out, the risk factors seem to be pretty similar across both groups and the effects of financial disadvantage had been moderated really by other parental and family factors and also the greater risk burden that disadvantaged families clearly carry.
So turning to question 3 and this is: what is the combined effect of family financial disadvantage and not being ready for school for children's later outcomes?
Okay, now these are the results for language and literacy problems at six to seven. Looking at children's language skills at four to five years on the left and their pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills on the right. The dark brown bars are those children from financially disadvantaged families who were not school ready. The second darkest brown lines are those children from financially disadvantaged families who showed adequate school readiness at four to five. The medium light brown bar is the other children who were not ready for school and the fourth one are the children who were ready for school who came from better off families. There are very clear stark differences between these groups.
So if you look at the two groups of children who showed low school readiness, their progress was much poorer than the other two groups. But these comparisons and these comparisons (speaker points to differing group profiles) are interesting too because they're the comparisons that allow you to look at the effect of family financial disadvantage and you can see that there are really quite large differences between children in these differing circumstances. The findings even more marked on the Who Am I - for the financially disadvantaged children who had low pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills, two years later we see that nearly 60 per cent were having problems with language at school. In comparison, close to 40 per cent of children from other families with low school readiness were in this situation.
This is a very busy slide, but I thought that this was an important one because I think children's engagement in learning is really important. Feeling that school is a good place to be, that they enjoy it and the work really sets the stage for children's later progress at school. If children are disengaged or disenchanted so early that does not augur well for them. So I have included this slide for you so that you can see what the results were like.
Again we see a very similar pattern, especially for those children who had pre-literacy and pre-numeracy difficulties at four to five.
So you see that school readiness is really a strong risk for later school progress, but family financial disadvantage is also a risk as well. Even for children who show adequate readiness for school, there are still differences between children from financially disadvantaged families and the other children.
The last figure I'm going to show you is children's hyperactivity at six to seven. Here we were looking at those children at four to five who showed hyperactive problems by parent report and the percentage who had hyperactive problems at six to seven by teacher report.
Again you see a similar pattern and don't forget these are two different people reporting on the children so it's significant that you see the same trend emerging with low school readiness being a risk but also family financial disadvantage.
So in conclusion here, for the third question, we can see that being ready for school is tremendously important for children and really something that we would want to maximise as much as we could. We can also see that family financial disadvantage influences children's school progress, both for those who showed low readiness for school but also for those with adequate readiness too.
There've been a number of models that have been proposed to try and explain the effect of financial disadvantage and these are not the only explanations that could be made. For instance, it's been pointed out to me that there could be genetic effects happening that we don't know about and haven't measured. But these are the two models that have the widest acceptance in the literature. The first of these is the investment model which says that family financial disadvantage limits a family's ability to provide intellectually stimulating experiences for their children. If we think about the factors that we found that were related to children's cognitive school readiness, there were quite a number of elements there that speak to this model - reading to children, mother's educational background and the sorts of educational climate that the families were able to provide.
The family stress model points to the pressure that financial disadvantage puts on families in their interactions and relationships. So if you think about the factors that we found relevant to social and emotional readiness, there were a number of factors that came out there that seemed to particularly point to this model. I'm thinking here of the parenting factors that we saw so strongly related to those outcomes.
But of course realistically, it's not either-or, and you can see that there are elements of both models that were related to both types of school readiness for children, although one seemed to be slightly stronger for the cognitive area and the other for the social and emotional area. Realistically it's probably all very important.
So what are some of the implications of these findings? Well I think the first clear implication is the greater vulnerability of boys. We mustn't go overboard here because most of the boys were ready for school and some of the girls weren't. But as a group, the 4-5 year old boys were slightly more vulnerable to making a poorer transition to school because of low school readiness. We really need to think carefully about boys and how we prepare boys for the transition to school. We need to think about the way we might teach them that's appropriate for them - things like providing role models and mentors and the sorts of backups that will really assist boys. So it really points to a greater effort with small boys in getting them ready for school.
The other area that was really very clearly important was children's capacity to persist. At its extreme, being unable to persist is a symptom of ADHD. But even at lower levels, if children are not able to persist or maintain their attention, this really puts them at vulnerability of all sorts of difficulties as we saw.
So again I think it's a case of thinking about what we do as parents, carers and teachers to tailor what we do with children to their levels of persistence so that we give them tasks within their attention capacities and we challenge them but we really structure their environment very well for them.
It was intriguing the differences that we found in the parenting factors. We could see that two aspects of parenting were tremendously important - consistency and avoidance of hostility seem to be very crucial.
A lot of parenting programs focus either on social behavioural aspects or relationship attachment aspects. The behavioural approaches tend to focus on managing children and developing techniques to handle their challenging behaviour, whereas the other approach tends to focus - and I'm being very simplistic here - on building the relationships and making sure that the interactions between parents and children are warm, sensitive and positive.
When we think about the parenting factors that were important, they speak more to the social and behavioural approaches as perhaps being slightly more relevant for children with low school readiness.
It was very clear that the family's educational climate was important - reading to children is important. I think we all knew that but it confirms it. High levels of TV watching were not a good thing for these children and that's also something I think we understood but it really is a reminder.
One of our UK fellow researchers who works in this area, Kathy Sylva, has said that 'what parents do is more important than who parents are' . This does speak to these findings and resonates strongly with me. I think it really applies very well to our study's findings.
We saw that children being in an educationally oriented child care or pre-school helped them be ready for school and we also saw that neighbourhood disadvantage was important too.
Finally, I'll look at what it means to be in a financially disadvantaged family for a child and whether there are particular things that we need to do or to take heed of. Well there wasn't much indication from these findings that we need to look at specially tailored approaches for children in these circumstances. No single factor had a dominant influence, so this suggested that we need really to attend to multiple areas of children's lives and their multiple contexts in helping them become ready for school. If we do this, if we look at the multiple risk factors we will still have catered for financially disadvantaged families because we saw that we have so many more of risk factors. They will fall into our catchment, but we don't need to necessarily direct our efforts only, or even hugely, to families in these circumstances.
It was also very clear that the sorts of interventions we should use need to address multiple areas. We need to help children become ready in terms of their skills for school, and we also need to help families provide the sort of climate and environment that will enable children to flourish.
I have come to the end of my presentation, but if you would like to know more about this particular report, here's the link and if you'd like to know more about this particular study, here is the link.
Thank you.
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