Polly Toynbee: helping children break the class divide

Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee cites an American study titled "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children" to show how class differences are cemented in the first three years of a child's life based on the number of words spoken to it, and the ratio of encouraging to discouraging statements made. One interesting statistic: children of middle-class professionals at the age of three have larger average vocabularies than the parents of children on welfare. And the implications of this study are that no amount of money spent on improving language in schools will suffice without very early intervention: by the age of three, it is often too late to correct the imbalance.