Time on Educational Activities at Home and Educational Progress in Infant School

S ummary . This paper reports on the amount of time 6‐year‐olds in inner London engage in educational activities at home, and links these results with earlier research on the association between parental help with reading and children's reading progress. The activities data were collected using a time budget approach. The median child in this sample read aloud at home about 20 minutes per week, and received about 40 minutes per week total “teaching” in reading, writing and maths outside school. Black (Afro‐Caribbean) children read aloud more than white children, girls read on their own more than boys, and the more educational qualifications the mother had, the more time the children spent on all the measured educational activities. Associations between reading activities at home and reading attainment at the end of year 1 ranged from 0.13 to 0.27 but associations with progress were small. However, children who spent more time with books at home did make greater reading progress during year 1. Implications for understanding social class differences in educational attainment and for designing intervention studies are discussed.