Health and Education Interactions

Using data from the Born in Bradford birth cohort we are exploring the relationship between being born pre-term and educational attainment. Previous research suggests that children born severely prematurely are more likely to suffer educational problems but there has been less research into how children born moderate-to-late preterm (32-36 weeks) are affected. Also, in cases where a child is born preterm it is less clear which factors are important in determining whether this will negatively affect them. For example, in our first study we found that children born premature, who were consequently pushed into starting school a year earlier, were much less likely to show good progress at age 5 (after one year of schooling) than their peers – even compared to other children also born prematurely. In further research we are now exploring whether additional environmental factors, such as having siblings or being born prematurely due to being part of a multiple birth (e.g. twins) influences the risk of adverse development associated with being born prematurely.   

Working with colleagues from Stanford University in the US, we are building on exciting work recently coming out from several international birth cohorts, which has highlighted the importance of “genetic nurture” – the potential for parents’ genetics to have an impact on their child’s educational outcomes via the environments they create for their children to grow up in. In our first study of this issue, using data from 2,077 pairs of children and their mothers within the Born in Bradford cohort, we have found find that mothers with more education-related genes are healthier and more financially stable during pregnancy and that these prenatal conditions explain 28-31% of the associations between maternal genetics and children’s academic and developmental outcomes 4-7 years later. We are now building on this work with further studies that seek to further develop our understanding of the pathways through which parental genetics may influence childhood development.

This project is primarily focussed on children’s sensorimotor ability and its development over time. Such abilities have strong associations with a range of tasks necessary for the classroom (e.g. handwriting), and subsequently affect academic achievement both directly and indirectly. Using data from the Born in Bradford cohort, we are looking at various sociodemographic factors which influence children’s sensorimotor ability at various time-points over the course of development. These include one’s ethnicity, and socioeconomic position (SEP), and how these variables interact with each other. Additionally, using various modelling techniques, my research aims to understand how we can better measure children’s sensorimotor ability, and capture one’s SEP most accurately.