Early Childhood Matters

Evidence from the Effective Pre-school and Primary Education Project

Kathy Sylva, Edward Melhuish, Pam Sammons, Iram Siraj-Blatchford, Brenda Taggart, Kathy Sylva, Edward Melhuish, Pam Sammons, Iram Siraj-Blatchford, Brenda Taggart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135189853
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Early Childhood Matters documents the rapid development of early years education and care from the late 1990s into the new millennium. It chronicles the unique contribution of the EPPE research to our understanding of the importance of pre-school.

The Effective Pre-school and Primary Education (EPPE) project is the largest European study of the impact of early years education and care on children's developmental outcomes. Through this ground-breaking project a team of internationally-recognised experts provide insights into how home learning environments interact with pre-school and primary school experiences to shape children's progress.

The findings of this fascinating project:

• provide new evidence of the importance of early childhood experiences
• show how these experiences influence children's cognitive, social and behavioural development
• give new insights on the importance of early years education
• will be relevant to a wide audience who are interested in policy development, early years education and care, and 'effectiveness' research
• examine how the combined effects of pre-school, primary school and the family interact to shape children's educational outcomes.

This insightful book is essential reading for all those interested in innovative research methodology and policy development in early childhood education and care. It provides new evidence on good practice in early years settings and will have a wide appeal for students and those engaged in providing accredited courses of study at a range of levels in early childhood.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Why EPPE?

Kathy Sylva and the EPPE Team

This introductory chapter gives the research and policy context of early childhood education in the late 1980s and early 1990s leading up to the start of EPPE.

EPPE is Europe’s largest longitudinal investigation into the effects of pre-school education and care. The EPPE research examines a group of 2,800 children drawn from randomly selected pre-school settings in England toward the end of the 1990s; a group of ‘home’ children (who had no pre-school experience) were also recruited, bringing the sample up to 3,000. The developmental trajectories of children have been carefully investigated, with many ‘enjoying, achieving and making a contribution’ in the ways described so powerfully in the government’s Every Child Matters policy (DfES, 2003). But some children have struggled in their cognitive and social/behavioural development and EPPE explores the possible reasons behind the different trajectories. It does this by collecting information not only on the children but on the educational, familial and neighbourhood contexts in which they have developed. The families and educators of the children have been interviewed for detailed information about the education and care practices that children have experienced in both home and pre-school/school contexts. At the core of EPPE are questions about how the individual characteristics of children are shaped by the environments in which they develop. The view of reciprocal influences between the child and the environment owes much to the work of Bronfenbrenner (1979) whose theory puts the child at the centre of a series of nested spheres of social and cultural influence, including home and education.

The policy context

EPPE was first conceived as a way to chart the contribution of pre-school to young children’s cognitive and social development, especially to their development profiles at the start of school (at age 5) and their progress through Key Stage 1 (age 5–7). The newly elected Labour government in 1997 recognised the impact of social disadvantage on life chances and was keen to break the ‘cycle of disadvantage’ in which poor children received poor public services and went on to experience a range of difficulties over their life course. In 1998, the Prime Minister Tony Blair set forth the promise of his new government: ‘Provision for young children’s health, childcare, support – will be co-ordinated across departments so that when children start school they are ready to learn’ (Blair, 1998).

Before Labour’s new government, pre-school education in England, and in the UK generally, was patchy, with some services provided by the Local Authority Education or Social Services departments, some run by voluntary bodies such as the Pre-school Learning Alliance, and others provided by the private sector. The sector was poorly financed in comparison with pre-school provision in many European countries, particularly those in Scandinavia. These different forms of provision (see Chapter 2 for more details) had differing inspection arrangements and different kinds of staff, with those in the Local Education Authority appointing many trained teachers to work in nursery classes and schools while other sectors, such as playgroups, had different training and qualification structures. So, when EPPE began its research there was wide diversity of provision, only the beginning of a common curriculum (DfES Desirable Learning Outcomes, 1996), few recognised minimum ‘standards’, and a large un-met need for education and care for children aged 3 and 4, i.e. in the two years before entry to statutory schooling.

Since EPPE began in 1997 there has been a transformation of services for young children and families in England (Sylva and Pugh, 2005). There is currently a common entitlement curriculum for children between birth and age 5+ alongside fully specified and statutory ‘standards of provision’, all clearly laid out in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS, DCSF, 2008). Children and families recruited into the study were experiencing pre-school during the period of change due to the government’s new policy arrangements for young children and their families. Access to a free pre-school place was made available to the parents of all four year olds in 1998 and this was extended to three year olds in 2004. (It might be argued that children and families in the EPPE study were the first to benefit from the strong commitment to early childhood made by the Labour government elected in 1997.) And, although the EPPE children were the first to experience it, the policy ‘offer’ was constantly changing throughout the period of the EPPE research. In fact, Taggart argues in Chapter 11 that EPPE was researching the effects of early years policy at the same time as it was influencing its evolution through the opening years of the new century.

The early years of the twenty-first century saw even more initiatives for young children and families in England, particularly a major policy programme called ‘Sure Start’. Announced in 1999, this ambitious programme was targeted at children and families living in the 20 per cent most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. It aimed to help ‘close the gap’ between the life chances of rich and poor.

Sure Start was followed by the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative in 2003 (Mathers and Sylva, 2007; Smith et al., 2007), nurseries catering for babies and toddlers and located in disadvantaged neighbourhoods so that their parents could move into employment. Finally, the Children’s Centre programme was offered first in 2004 to families living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and then rolled out to all communities in England (by 2010). The EPPE children attended preschool or remained at home during a period of dramatic change.

The research context

The ‘transformed’ early years policy was based on sound evidence about the positive benefits of pre-school education, much of which was reviewed for government by Melhuish (2004). The most convincing studies on the effects of pre-school were experimental studies in which children were randomly assigned to an ‘intervention’ or to a ‘control’ group. Two well known examples of these carefully controlled studies were the Perry Pre-school study of the ‘educational’ High/Scope programme for 3 and 4 year olds (Schweinhart, Barnes and Weikhart, 1993) and the Abecedarian full-day ‘care’ programme for children from birth to school entry (Ramey and Ramey, 1998). Both used experimental designs in which children were randomly assigned to ‘treatment’ and ‘non treatment’ groups, and both studies reported impressive benefits of children’s long term developmental outcomes from experiencing group pre-school education and care.

The most recent research in the US on the effects of child care and education on children’s development was carried out by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD, 2002; Belsky et al., 2007). This large scale but non-experimental study focused on 1,100 children, recruited at birth, and followed to age 11. Pre-school experiences before the age of 5+ were shown to have small but positive effects on children’s development, although a few negative effects were seen for some children who had very early centre-based care (Belsky et al., 2007).

With studies such as EPPE and the NICHD, attention has turned away from establishing the simple effects of early education and towards an understanding of the familial and educational processes that underlie change in the developmental trajectories of young children. Brooks-Gunn (2003) shows how poverty, low education and low socio-economic status work together to create a home environment of low hope, low expectations and few of the kinds of parenting interactions that stimulate young minds. It is important for current research into the effects of early education to take into account aspects of the child’s home environment. Children’s outcomes are the joint product of home and pre-school and any research on the effects of early education will have to take into account influences from the home. This was a major element of the EPPE research.

Until EPPE there had been little large-scale, systematic research on the effects of early childhood education in the UK. The ‘Start Right’ Enquiry (Ball, 1994; Sylva, 1994) reviewed the evidence of British research and concluded that small-scale studies suggested a positive impact but that large-scale research in the UK was inconclusive. The Start Right enquiry recommended more rigorous longitudinal studies with baseline measures so that the ‘value added’ to children’s development by pre-school education could be established.

A few years after the Start Right Enquiry, Feinstein et al. (1998) attempted to evaluate the effects of pre-schooling on children’s subsequent progress, using a birth cohort sample. The absence of data on children’s attainments means that neither the British Birth Cohort Study (Butler and Golding, 1980) nor the National Child Development Study (Davie, Butler and Goldstein, 1972) can be used to explore the effects of pre-school education on children’s progress. These studies are also limited by the time lapse and many changes in the nature of pre-school provision that have occurred. Schagen (1994) attempted multilevel modelling of pre-school effects in large samples but he too did not have adequate control at entry to pre-school.

The EPPE project is thus the first large-scale British study on the effects of different kinds of pre-school provision and the impact of attendance at individual centres. In line with the recent American research, EPPE studied both the effects of pre-school experience and also the effects of family support for children’s learning at home. To understand children’s developmental trajectories it is necessary to take both into account.

Four questions are of particular relevance to policy:

1. What are the effects of pre-school at school entry?
2. Do early effects ‘fade’ over time?
3. Are the beneficial effects of early education different for children from different kinds of backgrounds?
4. Do different types of pre-school education have similar or different effects on children?

The EPPE research follows an ‘educational effectiveness’ design in which children’s developmental progress between ages 3 and 11 is explored, through multi-level models (Goldstein, 1995) in terms of possible influences. EPPE followed the ‘natural development’ of a large group of children to investigate those factors that may influence children’s development and identify their effects. These influences include individual child characteristics such as gender or birth weight, family influences such as parental qualifications or employment, the ‘home learning’ environment (HLE) created by the families to support children’s learning at home, and finally the educational context of the child’s pre-school or primary school. In addition to recruiting children who attended different kinds of pre-school, EPPE recruited children who had no formal, ‘group care’ at all (the ‘home’ group) and they were valuable because their development could be used for a comparison to the development of children who had attended pre-school.

The first phase of the EPPE study (between age 3–7 years) has shown the benefits to all children of attending pre-school (Sylva et al., 2004; Sammons et al., 2002; Sammons et al., 2003; Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2003). The second phase, when the children were 7 to 11 years (Sylva et al., 2008; Melhuish et al., 2008; Sammons et al., 2008a; 2008b) showed that the effects of children’s pre-school experience remained until they were age 11, in both cognitive and social-behavioural outcomes.

The emerging findings of EPPE documented the gains to children’s development that early childhood education could provide and influenced government policy, especially during the period 2002 onwards (Children’s Plan, DCSF, 2007; Taggart et al., 2008). EPPE suggested that some early experiences were better than others both at home or in pre-school settings, providing a sound evidence base for government policy (the development of and expansion of provision). Its qualitative case studies (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2006) were influential in identifying what is meant by ‘effective’ early education.

EPPE has now become the Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) and its children will be followed through Key Stage 3, their GCSE year and beyond to their post-16 choices (2013). This book, however, focuses on the pre-school stage of children’s development, with just a glance in Chapter 7 to the medium term effects of pre-school at age 11.

In this book we seek to provide an account of the research and its main findings, we also document its impact on policy and practice over more than a decade and explore some of the implications of the research for future development of services for children and families.

References

Ball, C. (1994) Start Right: The Importance of Early Learning. London: Royal Society of the Arts, Manufacturing and Commerce.

Belsky, J., Vandell, D. Burchinal, M. Clarke-Stewart, K.A., McCartney, K., Owen, M. and the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (2007) Are there long-term effects of early child care? Child Development, 78, 681–701.

Blair, T. (1998) Foreword. In H.M. Treasury, Modern Public Services for Britain: Investing in Reform. Comprehensive Spending Review: New Public Spending Plans 1999–2002. London: HM Treasury. Accessed on May 26, 2009 at: http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/ document/cm40/4011/foreword.htm

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Brooks-Gunn, J., Currie, J., Emde, R.E. and Zigler, E. (2003) Do you believe in magic? What we can expect from early childhood intervention programs. Social Policy Report, XVII, 1, 3–15. Society for Research in Child Devlopment.

Butler, N.R. and Golding, J. (1986) From Birth to Five: A Study of the Health and Behaviour of Britain’s 5-Year-Olds. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Davie, R., Butler, N. R. and Goldstein, H. (1972) From Birth to Seven. London: Longmans.

Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) (2007) The Children’s Plan: Building Brighter Futures. Available at http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/childrensplan

Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) (2008) Early Years Foundation Stage. Nottingham: DCSF Publications.

Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (1996) Nursery Education Desirable Outcomes for Children’s Learning on Entering Compulsory Schooling. London: Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority/DfEE.

Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2003) Every Child Matters. Norwich: HMSO.

Feinstein, L., Robertson, D. and Symons, J. (1998) Pre-school Education and Attainment in the NCDS and BCSI. London: Centre for Economic Performance.

Goldstein, H. (1995) Multilevel Statistical Models, 2nd edn. London: Edward Arnold.

Mathers, S. and Sylva, K. (2007) National Evaluation of the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative: The Relationship between Quality and Children’s Behavioural Development. London: DCSF. Accessed at http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/SSU2007FR024.pdf on 26 May 2009.

Melhuish, E. (2004) A Literature Review of the Impact of Early Years Provision upon Young Children, with Emphasis Given to Children from Disadvantaged Backgrounds. Report to the Comptroller and Auditor General. London: National Audit Offce.

Melhuish, E., Sylva, K., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I., Taggart, B., Phan, M. and Malin, A. (2008) Pre-school influences on mathematics achievement. Science, 321, 1161–1162.

National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) (2002) Early child care and children’s development prior to school entry: results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. American Educational Research Journal, 39(1), 133–64.

Ramey, C.T. and Ramey, S.L. (1998) Early intervention and early experience. American Psychologist, 53, 109–120.

Sammons, P., Sylva, K., Melhuish, E.C., Siraj-Blatchford, I., Taggart, B. and Elliot, K. (2002) The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project: Technical Paper 8a – Measuring the Impact of Pre-School on Children’s Cognitive Progress over the Pre-School Period. London: DfES/Institute of Education, University of London.

Sammons, P., Sylva, K., Melhuish, E.C., Siraj-Blatchford, I., Taggart, B. and Elliot, K. (2003) The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project: Technical Paper 8b – Measuring the Impact of Pre-School on Children’s Social/Behavioural Development over the Pre-School Period. London: DfES/Institute of Education, University of London.

Sammons, P., Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Siraj-Blatchford, I., Taggart, B. and Hunt, S. (2008a) The Effective Pre-School and Primary Education 3–11 (EPPE 3–11) Project: Influences on Children’s Attainment and Progress in Key Stage 2: Cognitive Outcomes in Year 6. London: DCSF/Institute of Education, Univer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Why EPPE?
• Chapter 2: The EPPE settings in the context of English pre-schools
• Chapter 3: The EPPE research design: An educational effectiveness focus
• Chapter 4: Why children, parents and home learning are important
• Chapter 5: Quality in early childhood settings
• Chapter 6: Does pre-school make a difference?: Identifying the impact of pre-school on children’s cognitive and social behavioural development at different ages
• Chapter 7: Do the benefits of pre-school last?: Investigating pupil outcomes to the end of Key Stage 2 (aged 11)
• Chapter 8: A focus on pedagogy: Case studies of effective practice
• Chapter 9: Vulnerable children: Identifying children ‘at risk’
• Chapter 10: A linked study: Effective pre-school provision in Northern Ireland
• Chapter 11: Making a difference: How research can inform policy
• Chapter 12: Re-thinking the evidence-base for early years policy and practice
• Appendix 1: How children were assessed at different time points throughout the study
• Appendix 2: The Home Learning Environment at different time points
• Appendix 3: The EPPE Technical Papers/Reports/Research Briefs
• Appendix 4: Social/behavioural dimensions at different time points ( items as sociated with dimensions )
• Appendix 5: The Multiple Disadvantage Index
• Appendix 6: Results from analyses of pre-school effects compared with those of family income and parents’ employment status
• Glossary