Socio-economic status and early schooling in the French context from 3 to 6 years old: Effects on academic and emotion abilities

The study investigated social disparities from the start of schooling in two academic domains (mathematics and language) and in emotion abilities. A total of 571 kindergarten children from 3 to 6 years old were tested and compared in function of their Socio-Economic Status (SES), operationalized by the social position index (Rocher, 2023). As expected, the results indicated a main effect of SES for each domain, with advantage for high SES children. The effect of grade level was also significant, but did not interact with SES, suggesting that although schooling improved children performance, it did not significantly reduce the size of the SES gap. These results serve as a reminder that it is essential to preserve a system of early schooling. However, more efforts are needed to strengthen the education system’s capacity to reduce socioeconomic inequalities and thus, support learning and emotional development of children, particularly those of lower socioeconomic status.