Early family risk, school context, and children's joint trajectories of cognitive ability and mental health

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Cognitive ability and mental health are both important aspects of child functioning, each shows gradients between advantaged and disadvantaged families, and each has long-term effects on a range of outcomes. They are also inter-twined, although there may be some children who fare better on one rather than the other. This project will 1) explore the hitherto uncharted patterns of their parallel unfolding, in the general population, from the early years to the end of primary school; 2) relate these patterns to the resources and risks in the family setting in early childhood; 3) link them to later (adolescent) outcomes, and 4) explore the role of primary school in this parallel unfolding and in reinforcing or compensating for the roles of individual characteristics and early family risk in this parallel unfolding. The project will use state-of-the-art statistical tools to exploit data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and the schools, in England, which the children attended. We will follow more than 19,000 children born in 2000/01 and surveyed at ages 9 months, and 3, 5, 7, 11 and 14 years.We will take information on cognitive ability (measured, primarily, with the British Ability Scales) and mental health (measured with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) from MCS at ages 3, 5, 7 and 11. Early family risk (i.e., infancy to age 3) will be summarized by factors such as socio-economic disadvantage, maternal depression, low parental involvement, household chaos, poor parent-child interaction, single parenthood and low parental education. We will look at age 14 adolescent outcomes, such as academic performance, substance use, sexual behaviour, antisocial behaviour, bullying, peer victimisation and subjective well-being. The primary school context will reflect school composition (the demographic and social make-up of the student body), its 'quality' (measured by the school compositional variables of school-level achievement and school-level pupil absenteeism) and whether lessons are organized into ability groups. To preserve confidentiality, special arrangements will be made to access and analyse the data from schools. In the first part of our work, we will show the average time trend (growth trajectory) of cognitive ability and mental health and the overall longitudinal association between these two outcomes from ages 3 to 11. This will also allow us to investigate how cognitive ability and mental health in childhood may affect each other. We will also look for any specific groups with distinct patterns of change or growth. Secondly, we will explore the role of early family risk in these trajectories. A third part of the study will be on the role of these trajectories in adolescent outcomes. Fourth, we will explore the role of the school context both in these trajectories and in closing or, conversely, widening the gaps between higher and lower risk families.The results will contribute to the debate about whether failure to address children's mental health difficulties limits their making the best of intellectual abilities; will contribute evidence on the relative importance of cognitive ability and mental health for children's school achievement, and about how far schools redress or widen differences in children's life chances. Our project will create knowledge but also capacity. We will enhance the capacity to analyse the MCS and similar data sources through the involvement of graduate students and the training courses offered. We will also liaise with the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (the owner of MCS) to enhance MCS through adding data on children's schools. We will strive to communicate our findings to a wide range of non-academic audiences by actively engaging with the media, offering free training to non-academic users of research, and publishing non-technical research briefings and overview papers.