We believe that various factors will be important for helping children get the most out of their education. Specifically, we look at cognitive skills, mental well-being, brain networks and aspects of the home and school environments. Identifying these will help us understand how children overcome problems at school, and how to help them. Our work could help shape government policies about the education of children

We have developed a series of games that measure different cognitive skills. These are delivered on iPads. Each child will compete the games at their own pace, whilst wearing headphones. The games are combined with age-appropriate questions about life outside school, attitude to school, mental wellbeing, and their approach to learning. We also have a short maths and reading assessment (3 minutes each). Altogether the session should take about 50 minutes . We find that children enjoy doing these and get excited about taking part in research. We will ask the school for information on the child’s age, gender, race, first language, KS1 SAT results and whether they receive free school meals. We will also ask teachers to rate their impression of behaviour at school and progress with reading and maths. We will return to the school two years later, where this process will be repeated. This is important as we want to see how these factors change, and which of these changes are most important for how children do in school.

Results for each child are kept strictly confidential, and will not be shared with the school. We identify by a code number only, and any personally identifiable information will be kept on a highly secure computer, which is not connected to any network or the internet, and kept in a locked area.
The dataset will contain scores from hundreds of children, all of this will be anonymised. This will be used by the research team as well as other researchers with similar research interests – provided they have appropriate permissions to use the data.
We will put together regular summaries of our findings in our news-letters, which will be available for interested families, carers and education professionals. This webpage will also be updated. We also aim to publish our findings in scientific journals.

This study has been ethically reviewed and approved by the Cambridge Psychology Research Ethics Committee (CPREC). This is a panel of separate senior academics, clinicians and lay members of the public, who have scrutinised and reviewed all aspects of our project to ensure ethical compliance. You can contact the panel through the link above. Our project reference number is ‘PRE.2017.102‘