The findings from the Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning showed that children's skill in copying shapes, such as a circle, square, diamond or triangle, was even more indicative than their use of vocabulary in pointing to future achievement.
Centre director Dr Leon Feinstein and researcher Kathryn Duckworth found that 'positive development in copying ability' between three and a half and five years old was related to success in reading and maths when the children reached ten. Their report, Development in the Early Years: its importance for school performance and adult outcomes, also found that this skill was 'strongly associated with highest educational qualifications and the measure of income at age 30'.
They concluded, 'This suggests that the copying score is a very good indicator of long-term cognitive success and that improvement in the pre-school years in the abilities underlying this test score are very important in school success.'
However, they also found that children of low socio-economic status (SES) from more deprived backgrounds, who scored highly in the copying test, did not attain such high levels in terms of education, career and income level.
'This suggests a failure of family and school contexts to build on the early cognitive development of bright children from low SES groups and may be a crucial and under-recognised difference between children from disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds and a key reason for social immobility,' said the report.
Kathryn Duckworth said that if a child did not perform well in the copying test, it could show up 'developmental difficulties' that might not be picked up by a vocabulary test or by observation.
The research was based on data from the UK 1970 Birth Cohort, a nationally representative longitudinal study which has tracked children born from 5 to 11 April that year through to adulthood.
The research can be found at www.learningbenefits.net.
