Growing Up in Scotland: changes in language ability over the primary school years

Footnotes

1. More detailed information about the SSLN can be found here: http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/School-Education/SSLN

2. Equivalent to National 4 / Intermediate 1 / Standard Grade General.

3. Equivalent to a Higher or above.

4. http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Education/Schools/HLivi/schoolmeals/FreeSchoolMeals

5. More specifically, the results are representative for all children in Scotland in Primary 6 in 2014/15 who were born between June 2004 and May 2005 and who lived in Scotland when they were 10 months old.

6. The median score is the midpoint of the vocabulary scores recorded for the GUS children - i.e. half of the children will have recorded higher scores than this value, and half will have recorded lower scores than this value.

7. Further details of the analysis undertaken are provided Appendix C.

8. Note that where variables have been banded, this has been done to create varied categories large enough to support the analysis whilst reflecting the variation of the responses within the full variable.

9. https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/About/Methodology/UrbanRuralClassification

10. GUS data were collected in 2009/10 before free school meals were rolled out to all children in Primary 1 to Primary 3 introduced in 2015.

11. Full details are provided in Appendix A.

12. Around the time the cohort children turned 8 years, when most children were in Primary 4, parents were asked about the period since their last GUS interview which was undertaken when the cohort child was aged just under 6 years, i.e. when most children were in Primary 2. Further details are provided in Appendix A.

13. Only children with valid vocabulary scores at both time points were included in the analysis (36 children with a valid vocabulary score at age 5/Primary 1 were excluded from the analysis because there was no valid vocabulary score at Primary 6). Furthermore, data were weighted using the GUS longitudinal survey weight, meaning that only cases which have taken part in every face-to-face sweep of GUS up to and including sweep 8 were included. In total, 2726 children were included in the analysis.

14. Reducing the statistical boundary to 10% allowed the inclusion of a small number of factors where the significance value was close to the typical 5% level. Full analytic outputs for the linear regression models for each of the factors listed in Table 4-1 are provided in Appendix C.

15. Full results are provided in Appendix C.

16. Details of the analysis undertaken are provided in Appendix C.

17. Pianta RC. (1992) Child-Parent Relationship Scale. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia.