The study published by the Institute of Education found that poverty has a lasting impact, so that children who are born into poverty still suffer the consequences at the age of seven, with lower scores in assessments, including reading, vocabulary and picture recognition, than children of the same age who have never been in poverty.
The most detrimental effect was among children who had been born into poverty. On a scale of 0 to 100, a child who has been in persistent poverty will rank ten levels lower than a child of the same age who has no experience of poverty in their early years.
The study is based on data of nearly 8,000 children from the Millennium Cohort Study, who were born in the UK between 2000 and 2001.
Researchers examined whether children were in poverty at the age of nine months, three years, five years, and seven years old.
Children were considered to be in persistent poverty if their families were poor at the time of the current survey and all previous surveys.
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