Left-handed children do less well at school than their right-handed peers but can expect to earn slightly more in adulthood, research suggests.

A study of more than 10,000 children born in the 1990s, found that left-handed children perform slightly less well in IQ tests and the national curriculum tests taken at age 11 and 14.

The gap in performance showed no sign of diminishing as children get older. But the size of the effect is modest. Typically, left-handed children had test scores one per cent below those of their right-handed contemporaries.

While there is some disadvantage to being left-handed, particularly for girls, the researchers found that main problems concern children who do not have a dominant hand early in life.

Professors Paul Gregg, Carol Propper and Katharina Janke from the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at Bristol University noted that children with ‘mixed-handedness’ had lower development, which first appears in the early years but remains present at age 14, particularly for girls.

“Our results suggest that schools could use mixed-handedness as a marker for children who are likely to need greater intervention.

“As tests for mixed-handedness are simple to administer, they would be a cheap way of identifying children who otherwise might slip behind their peers,” the authors conclude.

The researchers suggested that non-right-handed children experience problems early in life, because they have not fully adapted to being in a right-handed world, but that once they adapt they do better.

But it found that this applied mainly for boys, who “in terms of earnings as adults, do better than their right-handed counterparts.” This earnings premium was absent for girls.

The researchers controlled for other factors that might have caused a gap in cognitive development between left- and right-handed children, such as family income and size, parents’ handedness and child’s birth weight.

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