Analysis: Early education pilot for two-year-olds - No gain for some children
Offering free early education and care for disadvantaged two-year-olds has come up with only more evidence of the paramount importance of quality. Mary Evans looks at a revealing project.
High quality provision is just as important for the under-threes
The key role of quality as the lynchpin of effective early years provision has been underlined by an evaluation of the pilot project offering free places to the most disadvantaged two-year-olds in England. But the researchers found that only one-fifth of the pilot settings they assessed offered good-quality provision.
The pilot provided 7.5 to 12.5 hours of free early education and childcare a week to 13,500 disadvantaged two-year-olds, as part of the Government's drive to eradicate child poverty and improve the life chances of the most disadvantaged. It aimed to improve the children's social confidence, independence, verbal skills and reasoning ability.
However, the evaluation highlights the stark differences in what can be achieved in best-practice settings compared with their weaker counterparts. It shows that there was a positive impact on the language ability of the toddlers attending higher-quality settings and on the relationship between the parents and children. Yet on average, there was no significant improvement in the cognitive and social development of the children enjoying the free entitlement compared with a matched comparison group.
The researchers looked at three possible explanations for the pilot's lack of overall impact on the children's development. They concluded that the quality of the settings was the determining factor.
They used assessment scales ITERS-R and ECERS-R, which are seen as more rigorous than those employed by Ofsted, to measure the quality of 75 pilot settings (see tables) and rated just 16 of them as providing good quality. They deemed the majority as only adequate, with 1 per cent being below minimal quality.
These findings are in line with assessments of the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative, made using the same scales. This indicates that despite the Government's concerted and costly campaign to raise standards in the sector over recent years, the quality of early years provision for disadvantaged young children has not improved significantly since the NNI data was collected in 2004/2005.
'It is definitely a concern that there has been no real progress since the NNI study,' says principal investigator Sandra Mathers, from the Department of Educational Studies, Oxford University. 'If you are looking for positives, there has been a slight rise at the bottom end. They have been pulled up slightly. But the top end has not been extended, and these are the settings that are going to make the difference to children's outcomes.'
Range of quality
The evaluation says, 'Research on the impact of the quality of early childhood settings on young children's development suggests that low-quality settings can have a limited effect on children's development, or in the worse case, a detrimental effect, especially for disadvantaged children.'
The range of quality found by the study team across the sample settings was quite broad, going from below minimal, in certain aspects, to excellent. Children attending the higher quality settings made significant progress in their language ability.
According to the report, 'this suggests that had the pilot local authorities been able to secure more places in relatively high-quality settings, then the pilot would have had a considerably larger impact overall. A similar pattern is observed for parent-child relationships.'
Ms Mathers says, 'The overall finding of what the settings were best at was the interaction between staff and children. With the 75 settings we visited, what they were particularly good at was the warmth of the interactions between staff and children. That came out across the whole sample - how warm staff are with the children; how sensitive they are to their needs; how caring they are; the way they use behaviour management and are respectful of the children.
'If you are going to have a strength, that is the one you want to have. It is the one strength that parents value most highly.'
The study shows the pilot was popular with parents who associated it with a range of perceived benefits for themselves, their children and their families as a whole.
'The parents all agreed it allowed them time to do other things, which gave them a break,' says Ruth Smith of the National Centre for Social Research, which co-ordinated the evaluation. 'For some parents they felt it was a life-saver.'
Some parents believed their parenting skills and their relationships with their children improved during their time with their child in the setting, others felt they gained a better understanding of their children as individuals and of the stages of child development.
Staff training
But young children need more than a warm interaction. The study found areas of weakness in the provision of resources, activities and support to encourage the development of the children's language and communication.
'No practitioner offers low-quality provision because that is what they have deliberately decided to do,' says Ms Mathers. 'There is so much development going on at this age, but if staff who are working with the children do not have an understanding of that, it is a missed opportunity.
'Most research looks at children aged three to five. It was good this looked at the below-threes. It is important to see that quality is just as essential for this younger age range. It all comes back to the quality of the provision and the quality for the younger children.
'Practitioners need support. Training needs to be targeted to improve practitioners' understanding of child development and particularly the importance of language and communication, which is just as important, if not more so, with these younger children as it is with the older children.'
Ruth Smith adds, 'The evaluation showed that unless the quality is good, it is not going to have a huge influence on the child. Yet that was the main purpose of the pilots. Since then, Government thinking has shifted a little. They have increased the number of hours available because they want to focus now on supporting parents to return to work.'
The Government has already decided to extend the pilot to 15 per cent of the most disadvantaged two-year-olds in England from next month and has said that only settings deemed good or outstanding by Ofsted will be able to take part.
Although the study stresses that quality is imperative, the Government appears to be paying lip-service to the concept. It is allowing weaker settings some leeway that enables them to take part. It is giving local authorities the discretion to fund provisions graded as 'satisfactory' to offer free places as long as they can show they are raising their standards and working towards a 'good'.
It is not clear what more will be done to improve quality. But as Ms Mathers says, 'It would be lovely to think that next time we did a study like this, we would see that all the provision is of good enough quality that we can find them having a real impact.'
FURTHER INFORMATION
'Early Education Pilot for Two-year-old Children - Evaluation' is at www.dcsf.gov.uk/research
