Good teaching is most influential in early years, says study

The report, published in the current issue of the journal Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, analysed the progress of more than 73,000 children from reception year up to Year 6 (age 11) in maths, reading and vocabulary. The children's progress in every year of primary school was shown to be relevant to their attainment at the end of primary school, but their progress in the earliest years had the greatest value, particularly for numeracy and reading skills.
The children started school in 1999 and were tracked until 2005 using the Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (PIPS) project, which collects data on children's attainment and attitudes in schools in England.
The study concluded that good-quality teachers were key to educational effectiveness because most primary school classes have just one teacher. It also found that the effectiveness of a school in one year was unrelated to its performance in another year, suggesting that the academic success of a school 'is the sum of the successes of its teachers'.
Peter Tymms, one of the authors of the study and professor of education at Durham University, said, 'Where children had one good year during the first few years, the impact could be seen years later and the effect was cumulative - the more good years they had, the better children performed in tests at age 11. The quality of teaching is definitely the most important thing. Getting good people into work with young children is paramount, and it's very important that we focus on attracting and keeping them.'
The report recommended that policy makers focus more on the earliest years of schooling, and criticised SATs tests and league tables for encouraging schools to concentrate more on children's achievements in Year 6, when SATS test results are published.