Millennium Cohort Study age 11 survey enters its third month of fieldwork

The Millennium Cohort Study has entered its third month of fieldwork for the age 11 survey. Over 4,000 interviews have been conducted with cohort families and more than 500 questionnaires have been returned from the children’s class teachers.

The children are having their height and weight taken and are completing some assessments with the interviewers. They are also filling in their own questionnaire.

This is the fifth time the millennium children and their families across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will be visited.

The age 11 survey, carried out for CLS by Ipsos MORI, will shed light on how the millennium children have grown and developed between the ages of 7 and 11. The survey will gather information about their height and weight, their activities and aspirations, their educational development and how they feel about the move to secondary school. It will also provide insight into the family life of this generation’s children. The children themselves partake in an interview, as well as completing various assessments and a questionnaire.

Previous surveys have taken place when these same children were aged around nine months, 3 years, 5 years and 7 years old. The data from the first four surveys is available from the UK Data Archive. Data from the age 11 survey will be made available in 2013.

The Millennium Cohort Study has been tracing the lives of over 19,000 children born in 2000-2001. It has provided new and important insights and policy-relevant findings on children’s physical and cognitive development, and in particular how that varies across children from different backgrounds. The study aims to continue following the cohort children into adolescence and adulthood.

For more information on the age 11 survey, visit www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/mcs2012.

To access MCS data, visit the UK Data Archive.

Is your child a cohort member? Visit the Child of the New Century members’ site