Educational Achievement to age 11 in Children Born at Late Preterm and Early Term Gestations

Objective: To investigate the effects of being born late preterm (LPT, 34-36 weeks’ gestation) or early term (37-38 weeks) on children’s educational achievement between 5 and 11 years-old. Design: A series of observational studies of longitudinal linked health and education data. Setting: The Born-in-Bradford (BiB) birth cohort study, which recruited mothers during pregnancy between 2007 and 2011. Participants: The participants are children born between 2007 and 2011. Children with missing data, looked-after-children, multiple births, and births post-term were excluded. The sample size varies by age according to amount of missing data, from 7860 children at age 5 to 2386 at age 11 (8031 at age 6, and 5560 at age 7). Main Outcome Measures: Binary variables of whether a child reached the ‘expected’ level of overall educational achievement across subjects at the ages of 5, 6, 7 and 11 years. The achievement levels are measured using standardized teacher assessments and national tests. Results: Compared to full-term births (39-41 weeks), there were significantly increased adjusted odds of children born LPT, but not early term, of failing to achieve expected levels of overall educational achievement at ages 5 (aOR:1.72,95% CI:1.34 to 2.21) and 7 (aOR:1.46,95% CI:1.08 to 1.97) but not at age 11 (aOR:1.51,95% CI:0.99 to 2.30). Being born LPT still had statistically significant effects on writing and mathematics at age 11. Conclusions: There is a strong association between LPT and education at age 5, which remains strong and statistically significant through age 11 for maths but not for other key subjects.