A good reception year teacher makes the biggest and longest-lasting difference to primary school education, an assessment of over 70,000 children from Durham University's Curriculum, Evaluation and Management (CEM) Centre reveals.
The research, presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference (BERA), suggests that while relative progress in each year of school is important, the earlier years are the most crucial. A modest boost in reception year is still detectable in the final year of his/her primary schooling at the age of 11, equivalent to a improvement of about a fifth of a level in a child's SAT test results. This can be added to by boosts in later years.
It also casts doubts on the current practice of schools focusing their best teachers on the later primary years in attempts to boost SAT test results used in Government league tables. A final dash to the finishing post at the end of Key Stage 2 might not result in the long terms gains that are so important for secondary education and beyond.
The paper's author Professor Peter Tymms, Director of Durham's CEM Centre explained the potential policy implications: “This work reinforces research which shows early years education is critical for children's later cognitive development and that while attention should of course be given to every year of education, more value should be placed on the most sensitive times, the first few years.