The new findings suggest that children's speaking skills have more impact on their writing abilities.
The research also found that children's achievement at Key Stage 1 related to their abilities across a wide range of early learning goals, and in particular, that children's scores in the literacy goals have little effect on their success at primary school.
It found that children who score above average at Key Stage 1 score highly in the early learning goals for dispositions and attitudes and social development.
The research results were obtained by the Liberal Democrats under the Freedom of Information Act.
Liberal Democrat spokeswoman Annette Brooke said, 'There are serious doubts over whether highly prescriptive literacy goals are necessary. They should be removed from the curriculum pending the results of an independent review. Ministers have always given the impression that they were confident that these goals benefit children's learning.'
The research involved a sample of 203 children. It was commissioned by the National Assessment Agency (NAA) from London University's Institute of Education and carried out last summer. The results were not published because they were 'inconclusive', the NAA said.
The DCSF analysis compared the results of 48,000 children of Foundation Stage Profile Assessments in 2005 and Key Stage 1 in 2007, and found there was a direct link between the two sets of results (News, 26 June).
It highlighted that children who did well in communication, language and literacy assessments were highly likely to do well at Key Stage 1.
However, the NAA report found that the two early learning goals 'attempts to read more complex words, using phonic knowledge' and 'begins to form captions and simple sentences, sometimes using punctuation', did not seem 'crucial to high performance' at Key Stage 1.
A DCSF spokesperson said that the report was not published because it was 'a very small-scale piece of internal analysis by the NAA, looking at only six schools, and explicitly says that no conclusions can be drawn from its data', while the DCSF's analysis was more comprehensive and clearly showed that children who achieved well in the Foundation Stage Profile, especially in communication, language and literacy, went on to do well at KS1.
