A new study published by the University of Luxembourg shows that children who spent time in nursery or preschool may outperform their peers in standardised primary school tests.
Pupils in the first year of primary school tend to score better in tests if they attended a pre-school or nursery setting, says a new study conducted by the University of Luxembourg.
The study looked at results from standardised tests over a period between 2015 and 2022, as well as conducting discussions with parents. The study encompassed results from around 45,000 pupils in Cycle 2.1, the first year of primary school. The tests cover core subjects such as mathematics, listening comprehension in Luxembourgish, and the first literacy steps in German.
Researcher Caroline Hornung says children from favourable socio-economical backgrounds scored better on the tests: "We also saw, when looking at early years education structures, that the combination of nursery and pre-school was conducive to a child's school performance, regardless of their socio-economical background."
Sonja Ugen, director of the Luxembourg Centre for Educational Testing at the university, added that a clear difference can be seen in pupils' language skills depending on the language spoken at home.
Children who speak Luxembourgish at home do not only fare better with the language at school, but also do significantly better in German, compared to children who do not speak Luxembourgish at home, even if they learned it at nursery or pre-school. "The automatic transfer, which we always assumed took place for language skills from Luxembourgish to German, did not happen for children who don't speak Luxembourgish at home."
Children should therefore be prepared to learn German before pre-school, or Spillschoul, concluded the researcher.
However, education minister Claude Meisch views it differently: "This actually confirms our approach to gradually move away from purely focusing on German literacy, and instead offer the option to learn literacy in French. We currently have four pilot projects running for French literacy. From our experiences in international public schools, this shows we can actually offer pupils better opportunities."
The current approach aims to ensure children in Cycle 4, in their fifth and sixth years of primary school, will all be on the same level when it comes to languages.
