What a five-year-old knows predicts their Grade 9 maths: Ontario follows 25,000 children

Ontario has run a rare experiment in patience: it measured 25,000 children at kindergarten — their physical well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and general knowledge — and then waited a decade to see what those early readings foretold. The answer, from University of Toronto researchers Fatemeh Ameli, Magdalena Janus and Eric Duku in the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, is: a great deal. Kindergarten readiness strongly predicted mathematics achievement all the way to Grade 9, with language and cognitive readiness the strongest signal of all. Children who started behind tended to stay behind — which is precisely the hopeful part: the gap is visible at five, when support is cheapest and most effective, not at fifteen, when it is neither.

SDG 4 · Quality education — Mechanism: institutional program