Understanding how children’s socio-emotional wellbeing contributes to academic success has never been more important. In a new study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, we aim to investigate links between different aspects of school readiness as well as between parents’ teachers and children’s viewpoints.
We’d like to invite your family to join the study - but please do read all the information below before you decide to take part. While there are no immediate benefits of taking part, we hope our findings will help future children making the transition to school. If you are happy for your child to be included in the activities outlined, please complete this webform (click here) to complete a consent form.
(A pdf copy of the participant information shown below can be found here).
We aim to track 500 children from Reception into Year 1, using individual child sessions (administered via zoom) and interviews / questionnaires with teachers and (if possible) filmed peer play in order to:
(a) gather a rich picture of changes over time in children’s social relationships, cognitive skills and well-being, and
(b) investigate similarities and contrasts in how children, parents and teachers view the transition to school.
We hope that this work will prove valuable in informing future Early Years education policies.
Study activities, facilitated and filmed by trained research assistants/PhD students with experience of working with children, include:
- A 30-minute zoom-based set of simple games designed to test children’s developmental skills (e.g., memory, language, self-control) and gather their views about school. Tasks will be delivered in bite-size pieces, interspersed with parent-child play using games that we will send each family before the session.
- A 10-minute school-based peer-play session involving a freshly cleaned ‘Mobilo’ set. We will send each family a copy of the video-footage as a small thank you. These videos may be valuable for teaching (e.g., workshops for teachers), but will only be used for this purpose with explicit parental consent.
Family support is key to children’s success at school, but little is known about how this transition affects families, or the role of parent-school communication in supporting children’s school readiness, or how families can help children progress from Reception to Year 1. We would therefore like one parent per child to complete a short (10- to 15-minute) online questionnaire, designed to capture information about adult wellbeing, parents’ ratings of family relationships and children’s strengths and difficulties, as well as background family characteristics. To supplement the measures in our child sessions, we will ask teachers to complete brief ratings of child skills and social relationships.
Below is a summary of the parts of the study, to be delivered both in Reception Year and Y1.
|
Participant |
Setting |
Description |
|
Parent |
Online |
Short survey on parent wellbeing, family relationships and child adjustment |
|
Child + Parent |
Zoom call at home |
|
|
Child + Friend |
School |
Peer-play Game |
If you are happy for your child to be included in the activities outlined above, please use this webform (click here) to complete a consent form. Please note that you can withdraw your child from the study at any time without giving a reason and without consequence by emailing Claire Hughes at ch288@cam.ac.uk.
One of the goals of the study is to ensure that the findings help to improve teachers’ awareness of family and child perspectives of specific issues around the transition to school. With this goal in mind, we hope to use a small number of the videos for teaching purposes (e.g., workshops for trainee teachers). Please complete this webform (click here) if you are happy for us to use pictures / video clips in our teaching.
The assessments we do are not clinical or diagnostic tests, however if in our debrief session with yourselves you have any concerns we can signpost you to other resources and help.
All the data, images and videos collected from these assessments will be stored securely using the University Secure System. The data is classified as Level 2: Medium Impact Data, and only the University System Administrator and the research team will have access to the data. We will keep information collected in confidence. This means we will only tell those who have a need or right to know. Published reports based on these studies will not mention individuals. Your child’s file will be given a unique code number rather than a name for us to identify it. Only the research staff directly involved in the study will have access to this information. The data will be shared with members of the reserach staff outside of the University of Cambridge via encrypted hard drives. The data will be securely stored in this form for five years.
In addition, we will ask you whether you also agree to images/video from your sessions being used as illustrative examples in scientific journals or used for public engagement purposes such as on our website, at public science events or for parent education/information purposes. Videos used for this purpose will not contain your child’s or your family name. If you are not comfortable with this use, we will, of course, respect that; you can still take part in the study without agreeing to this illustrative use of the materials. The consent form (click here) will give you various choices about the use of this material (e.g. limited to academic and teaching purposes or broader sharing with the media etc) so you can make your wishes clear.
We will be using any personal information you give us in order to undertake this study and the University of Cambridge will act as the data controller for this purpose. The legal basis for using your personal information is to carry out a task (i.e. academic research) in the public interest. Your rights to access, change or move your information are limited, as we need to manage your information in specific ways in order for the research to be reliable and accurate. If you withdraw from the study, we will keep the information about you that we have already obtained. To safeguard your rights, we will do our best to only use the minimum personally identifiable information possible.
Personally identifiable data will not be made available outside of the study team except in exceptional circumstances. We have a wider responsibility to people taking part in our studies and the general public that, in rare and exceptional cases, places limits on our duty of confidentiality. For example, if there are serious concerns about participant’s or another person’s welfare, we have a duty to act on that.
Please click on the link for further general information about the University of Cambridge’s use of your personal data as a participant in a research study (click here).
They will be kept securely for a minimum of 10 years in the Department of Psychology in accordance with good research practice. At the beginning of the study your child will be given a unique study number and all electronic data from the visit will be password protected and identified using the study number. Results from groups of individuals, without any means of identifying the individuals involved, may be presented at conferences and written up in journals. Non-identifiable data may be shared with other researchers or the public as part of collaborations, joint projects or open access provisions.
The study results will be presented at conferences and published in scientific journals. Your family’s confidentiality will be maintained throughout. No identifying details about your child will be presented or published without prior consent.
At the end of the study the data will become “open data”. This means that it will be stored in an online database so that it is publicly available. This data will be thoroughly anonymised by removing any personal information that could identify you, such as names and addresses, before submission. This process is integral to the research process as it allows other researchers to verify results and avoid duplicating research. Data are made available on a website, free of charge, to anyone interested in the research, or who wishes to conduct their own analysis of the data. We would therefore have no control over how these data are used.
Identifiable data regarding your family and personal contact details, and video/photo data collected as part of the study will be stored securely using the University Secure System and only the University System Administrator and the research team will have access to the data. The data will be shared with members of the research staff outside of the University of Cambridge via encrypted hard drives.
Lockdown measures and social distancing rules imposed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have led to changes in the way we interact with others. In order for you to participate in this study we need both your family and our research team to feel comfortable and confident interacting with one another. In response to COVID-19, we have brought multiple aspects of this study online, including child Zoom sessions and online parent and teacher questionnaires. We do however hope to still visit your child in school for a peer play session with another study child in the class. For this part of the study, we have put together a Covid-19 mitigation protocol (click here) about the steps that we will take during school visits to ensure everyone’s healthy and safety whilst taking part in this study.
These practical measures include:
(i) regular checks prior to the visit to ensure that the research team and yourselves are symptom free
(ii) maintenance of social distance where possible, and when not possible we will wear face visors and masks
(iii) regular hand washing and the use of hand sanitiser
(iv) deep clean of all equipment prior to entry into the school.
Professor Claire Hughes at the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research (ch288@cam.ac.uk) has overall responsibility for the study or you can email the Cambridge team at readyornot@psychol.cam.ac.uk and the Birmingham team at ready.or.not@contacts.bham.ac.uk.
Other study Principal Investigators include Dr Hana D’Souza at the University of Cambridge Department of Psychology, Dr Rory Devine at the University of Birmingham School of Psychology and Dr Elian Fink at the University of Sussex School of Psychology. The study is being conducted in partnership with Cambridgeshire Personal, Social, Health and Education (PSHE) and the LonDownS Consortium.
As a thank you for taking part in our study, families will also receive a multi-outlet voucher after the 2nd session. In addition, each child will receive a small gift after each Zoom session and the opportunity to take part in an art competition. For children who take part in the school-based peer play session a copy of the video will be sent to parents as a small thank you.
Every two months from March 2021 to January 2023, we will be holding workshop events for participating schools in which experts in child psychology and education will give brief (15-minute talks) on topics of interest to early years teachers. We will upload the video recordings of these 15-minute talks on our website and make them available to all our study families (find the recordings here). By this summer, we aim to upload talks on the following topics:
- Understanding Children’s Worry
- What is the Differences between Wellbeing and Mental Health in Childhood?
- Mental Health in Struggling Learners
- Children’s Learning and Wellbeing are not two sides of a seesaw
- Children’s Connection to Nature and Why it Matters
- Supporting Young Children’s Outdoor Risky Play
Talks later in the year will include the following topics:
- Children’s Developing Mindreading Skills
- Mindreading in the Playground
- How Families can Foster Flexibility and Focus
- Why Flexibility and Focus Matters for School Success
- Shared Picture Book reading
- How Spatial Reasoning Supports Early Numeracy
- Understanding Maths Anxiety
- Neurodiversity in the Classroom
- Bilingual Children’s School Experiences
- Children’s Multicultural Friendships
- Building Bridges between Schools and Families
- Teacher-Child Relationships
By the end of the study we will produce an illustrated e-book about the emotional highs and lows of a young child’s day at school, which we will share with all our study families.