Aims:

i. Examine language and communication skills as risk and resilience factors in relation to populations at high-risk of educational underachievement.

ii. Determine the extent to which language skills play a role in educational outcomes at GCSE, once school characteristics and socioeconomic factors have been accounted for.

Hypotheses:

1) Language ability in early childhood will be a significant factor in explaining variation in educational outcomes, once school characteristics and socioeconomic factors have been accounted for.

2) Young people with language difficulties will be less likely to have positive educational outcomes upon leaving school.

Variables:

Exposure variable: Language ability (a composite measure based on WOLD comprehension and expression scores, Children's Communication Checklist scores).

Outcome variable: Educational outcomes at school-leaving age (GCSE or equivalent).

Confounding variable: school characteristics (school census data, for example: number of children eligible for free school meals), socioeconomic background (composite based on home ownership, overcrowding score, and maternal education), child characteristics (e.g. ethnicity, first language).

Method:

Secondary analysis of the ALSPAC data will examine the complex associations between language and educational attainment in order to understand which young people are at risk of educational underachievement in secondary school.

The research team will consist of Dr Sarah Spencer (applicant for the ESRC Future Research Leaders research funding) and Dr Yvonne Wren (academic mentor and advisor on the project). The project will form part of a wider research programme examining the associations between language and learning in secondary schools in areas of social deprivation (working with two school partners).

The ALSPAC data will be discussed with both the project policy steering group and a group of young people (participants in Stage 2) to further develop specific research questions and following analysis. This will ensure that findings are relevant for key policy questions and educational practice. The policy steering group will include representatives from: partner schools (senior management), the third sector (Mary Hartshorne, Head of Quality and Outcomes for ICAN, the children's communication charity), The Communications Trust (Wendy Lee, Professional Director), the think-tank Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS), and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (Mark Hope, RCSLT).

The project will employ a post-doctoral research associate (statistician) to work closely with the research team.

Analysis will include:

- filtering variables where distribution is such that they have no potential in the modelling process;

- grouping of risk and resilience factors based on existing research theory;

- grouping children into those who have and do not have profiles of assessments which indicate the presence of language difficulties;

- calculation of whether the presence of language difficulties decreases the likelihood of achieving five or more GCSE grades at A*-C grade or equivalent (a measure of good educational outcomes);

- running a series of univariable regression analyses to test the strength of associations between exposure and confounding variables with the outcome variable (school attainment);

- multivariable regression modelling to derive a final set of variables independently associated with educational attainment at the end of compulsory schooling.

This project will use the recently analysed language scores taken when children were aged 8 years. These include the built files from the Wechsler Objective Language Dimensions (WOLD). Sarah Spencer was involved in the process of analysing and scoring the WOLD samples, along with colleagues at the University of Sheffield and Dr Yvonne Wren.

Outcomes: Users of the research findings will be provided with a richer understanding of the role of language in educational attainment and how this interacts with socioeconomic factors. Target journal: British Educational Research Journal.