Early Years Research Lab Seminar Series: Professor Claire Hughes

You are invited to our next Early Years Research Lab Seminar, on Monday, 4th November 2024.

The Early Years Research lab represents the Faculty of Education’s research strength in early years research, and the early years workforce.  Our vision is to work with research end-users and ECEC professionals to reduce educational inequalities and promote positive outcomes for all young children through universal and equitable access to and experience of quality early childhood education and care (ECEC).

Abstract

My interest in school readiness dates to an early London-based study of 4-year-old children with high levels of externalizing problems (top 10% on the Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire). Compared with control peers, these ‘hard to manage’ preschoolers displayed pervasive difficulties, including executive dysfunction, atypical mindreading, angry and antisocial behaviour towards peers, and lack of connected communication with caregivers.  My talk draws on more recent work (summarised in a recent book: The Psychology of Starting School, co-authored with Elian Fink and Caoimhe Dempsey), and has three parts.  I begin by outlining why executive function matters for school success and then consider how mindreading skills also make a difference to children starting school.  Then I turn the spotlight towards parents, who often overlook the extent to which the transition to school affects the whole family, and may also struggle to get a clear idea of the emotional highs and lows of a day at school; I end with a plug for a new picturebook (How I Feel About My School), which may provide a valuable conversational resource for parents and teachers working with young children.

Professor Claire Hughes completed her first degree and her PhD (on the topic of executive function in autism) at the University of Cambridge. A two-year post-doc in Paris allowed Claire to extend this work to demonstrate executive difficulties among first-degree relatives of individuals with autism. Returning to the UK, Claire worked for 6 years at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre in London, where she turned her attention to the social and cognitive difficulties displayed by ‘hard to manage’ preschoolers.

Since November 2000, Claire has been based at the Centre for Family Research in Cambridge, conducting longitudinal studies (funded principally by the ESRC) that examine the origins and consequences of individual differences in theory of mind and executive function for children’s social relationships and adjustment to primary and secondary school. Over the past decade, Claire’s work has become increasingly international, involving multi-site studies of the transition to parenthood (with collaborators in New York and the Netherlands) and cross-cultural comparisons of executive function and theory of mind, with a particular focus on East-West contrasts.

Claire’s current (ESRC funded) work focuses on the transition to school and aims: (i) to ensure that children’s voices are heard alongside the views of parents and teachers; (ii) to examine maternal and paternal experiences of their child’s transition to school; (iii) apply wearable devices and automated analysis to gather rich information on children’s linguistic environments and their potential importance for children’s success in the transition to school; and (iv) dovetail with a parallel study of children with Down Syndrome (DS) to compare experiences for families with neurotypical children and DS children. Recent philanthropic funding has enabled Claire to extend this school-readiness study to Hong Kong and mainland China.