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This study examines the impact of multilingualism and socioeconomic status on academic performance within the UK, utilising a dataset of 3,213 pupils from the National Pupil Database who also took part in the Study of Cognition, Adolescents and Mobile Phones (SCAMP). We employed multilevel modelling to analyse the relationship between language experience, socioeconomic status and Key-Stage 2 (KS2, ~ 11 years) and Key-Stage 4 (KS4, ~ 16 years) performance in English, Mathematics and Science. Findings reveal that multilingual learners initially encounter academic challenges at KS2, particularly in English and Science, yet they achieve comparable results with their monolingual peers by KS4, overcoming early setbacks. Notably, simultaneous multilinguals not only catch up but excel beyond their monolingual counterparts by KS4, demonstrating the significant long-term academic benefits of early multilingual exposure.Further analysis indicates that multilingualism mitigates the adverse effects of low socioeconomic status, with pupils from these backgrounds making substantial academic strides between KS2 and KS4 compared to monolingual peers. This challenges prevalent misconceptions about multilingualism in education.These findings underscore the need for educational policies that harness linguistic diversity to foster academic equity and success, emphasising the crucial role of language experience and socioeconomic factors in shaping educational outcomes.
Filippi et al. (Sat,) studied this question.