Born in Bradford researchers will be assessing pupils in reception classes across the district from September as part of the world’s biggest study into why children fall ill.

All four and five-year-olds – even those not part of the BiB study – starting school in the autumn term in Bradford will have literacy, movement and wellbeing checks.

Researchers will conduct hand/eye co-ordination tasks and vocabulary and letter recognition tasks and teachers will be asked to complete a short questionnaire on each child in their class.

The aim is to investigate how early life factors such as parenting, health and socio-economic position influences a child’s educational development; how early co-ordination and literacy are linked and how this affects later educational attainment and what child and parental characteristics are associated with emotional and social well-being, how this changes over time and how this affects cognitive development.

Ann Barratt, BiB family liaison officer said: “We are very excited about this new partnership. The researchers will see what letters and words children recognise at the start of reception and also how confident they are at tracing a pattern on a computer screen, which shows their level of hand/eye co-ordination.”

The BiB project was successful in recruiting about 65 per cent of all mothers who had babies in Bradford Royal Infirmary between 2007 and 2010, resulting in a cohort of 13,500 children whose lives will be tracked into adulthood.

In September 2011 the oldest 800 children started reception classes around the city and more than 3,500 BiB children will start school in each of the next three academic years, with the final 1,800 starting in September 2015.

In some schools the majority of children in reception will be part of the project and every child who is part of BiB will have their educational details linked to the BiB health data via their unique pupil number.

This will help researchers look at how things that happen in early life affect children’s educational development.

A pilot project in schools in Lidget Green, Allerton, Marshfield and Newhall Park Primary Schools has proved very useful for teachers as helps them identify and to plan for any individual children who are having difficulties, says the BiB team.