Connecting viewpoints on school readiness and child wellbeing

Recent years have seen growing recognition from both researchers and practitioners of the importance of child wellbeing for children’s success at school. Focusing on children in the early school years (Reception and Year One) and applying novel multi-informant methods, our first aim is to enrich our understanding of the conceptual overlap between measures of school readiness / child well-being. We adopt a broad definition of wellbeing that encompasses children’s ability to flourish as well as feeling happy and settled at school. We assess children’s flourishing through caregiver and teacher reports, as well as direct observation and child self-report measures. Including children's own views is an innovative feature of our proposal, child self-report measures have been used successfully with adolescents and older school-aged children but are rarely used in the early school years. Our multi-informant approach is also valuable because there is evidence that parental ratings on the SDQ are more sensitive than teacher reports to effects of social disadvantage. By bringing together datasets on neuro-typical children and children with Down syndrome, we also aim to identify similarities and contrasts in this overlap for these two groups.