Nursery World - Special report: Millennium Cohort Study

Children from disadvantaged families have been found to fall behind in development, but can the difference be corrected? Mary Evans reports. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds can lag up to 12 months behind their more privileged peers in cognitive development by the age of three and be far less ready for school, says a recent a UK-wide study.

The challenge facing Gordon Brown in combating child poverty is underlined by the second survey of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) tracking nearly 16,000 children born between 2000 and 2002. It shows a gulf by the age of three between the children of the best-educated, most prosperous parents, and those living in poverty whose parents have no qualifications.

Children classified in the first MCS survey as having one or more delays in the development of gross and fine motor skills at nine months achieved worse scores in the assessments at three years.

'We know that not all children who are behind now are always going to be behind,' says Kirstine Hansen, research director of the MCS. 'There has been some work in the past that shows that some children are remarkably resilient despite a bad start in life.

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