Does Early Years policy put children first?
Article 3 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states:
“In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interest of the child shall be a primary consideration.”
UK politicians of all parties and ideological persuasions have stated repeatedly that they wish to invest in the early years in order to give children in this country “the best start in life”. However, when discussing the intended increase in subsidised childcare places over the next few years, with the eventual goal of 30 hours per week for all children from 9 months old, we hear an awful lot about the estimated benefits to the economy and to mothers and very little about the needs of children.
Putting to one side for the moment important questions about whether in fact the policy will lead to a net economic gain and whether most mothers do in fact wish to be relieved of their caring responsibilities, surely the most important question we must be asking is whether this cross-party policy agenda has the best interest of the child as a primary consideration? Beyond vague statements that formal childcare is “good for children”, what case has been made, what evidence has been presented, what statistics and meta-analyses have been cited, to support the claim that encouraging as many mothers as possible to put their babies into full-time formal care will be best for the children concerned?
If such studies existed, you can be sure we would have heard about them. It is rather difficult to prove a negative, but I will make an attempt. As a starting point, we can look at a policy briefing paper published in 2021 by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, a research service based in the UK Parliament which makes research and expertise available to MPs. This paper, called Early Education and Care, concluded that:
“In England the best available evidence indicates that some use of high-quality ECEC [Early Childhood Education and Care] is beneficial from age 3 for all children and from age 2 for disadvantaged children. There are limited data on children aged 0-2.”
In other words, when tasked with reviewing the “best available evidence” on childcare, the parliamentary researchers discovered that part-time childcare, as long as it is of high quality and the children are over age three, can be beneficial. It also found that part-time childcare can benefit children from a subset of the population, as long as it is high quality and that they are over age 2. For children under age 2, they have no idea what the impact is because there are very few studies on children under age two.
Needless to say, these findings do not support a policy promoting full-time formal childcare for all children from age nine months. However, it gets even worse. We must ask the question, some high-quality formal childcare for the over-threes has beneficial educational outcomes when compared to what? Compared to some low-quality formal childcare? Hardly surprising. Compared to informal childcare? Or are we talking compared to a mother who has decided not to work for a few years to focus on her child?
The briefing paper relies on two Department for Education studies for its conclusions about the benefits of childcare, the Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education project (EPPSE) and the Study of Early Education and Development (SEED). For those who don’t know, within the early years field EPPSE is considered the gold standard, definitive research evidence for the educational and socio-emotional benefits of formal childcare.
However, EPPSE cannot tell us anything about the differences in outcomes for children cared for at home by a parent and children who attended formal childcare, because it was not originally designed to do so. It was designed to look at different types of childcare provision, different amounts of childcare and what affects the quality of childcare. Although the study included a “home” comparison group, that is, a group of children who attended no formal childcare prior to school, this group was added in after the study had already begun and the researchers did not collect detailed information about the children. As such, as one academic observed, it is “possible that the differences between these sorts of children in later years were also present before pre-school attendance began and cannot, therefore, be ascribed to it”. The methodological problem was also noted in a report carried out by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which stated that any results relating to pre-school attendance need to be “treated with caution” because “the study has no baseline data on cognitive ability (at age three) for those who did not attend pre-school, which could lead to over- estimates of the effects”.
This is far more than just a technicality. Without a proper control group, any and all results relating to the differences in attainment between children who attended nursery and who did not are invalid. Why were these children not in nursery? Was it because they had additional support needs or an intellectual disability, or because their parents had mental health or substance abuse problems, or were they extremely poor or disadvantaged in some other way? We will never know.
It is of course possible that these children were at home being cared for by dedicated, stay-at-home mothers. But that is highly unlikely, not in the least because if that were true the study would have made a strong case for the superiority of professional over maternal care and this would certainly have been highlighted. As it stands, one has to look very hard indeed to find any information about the so-called control group, and any caveats about the reliability of the pre-school findings are buried in footnotes and appendices.
In an early report on the study, the authors did acknowledge that there could be “unmeasured factors” in the home group that might affect the comparison, writing that the “characteristics and attainment of the ‘home’ group vary significantly from those who had been in pre-school”, and that therefore “it is not possible to conclude with certainty that the much lower attainments of the ‘home’ group are directly due to lack of pre-school experience”. (Incidentally, in the final report the effect sizes were described as “relatively modest” which sounds quite different from “much lower”). And yet, that is exactly what the final report did conclude. Indeed, the study is STILL being cited in support of the claim that formal childcare improves the educational attainment of children from all backgrounds. Fancy that.
The second main source for the policy briefing paper, the 2020 SEED report, can be dealt with (slightly) more quickly. Also commissioned by the Department for Education, SEED is a major longitudinal study which looked at how different kinds of childcare experience relate to cognitive and socio-emotional development. The study’s overall conclusions were that “the effects associated with ECEC are small overall, making only a small difference to development, not always identifiable in practice.” Hardly a ringing endorsement of formal childcare, and we could simply leave it there.
Yet, once again, when we dig into the detail it gets more interesting. SEED included three groups of children; children being cared for informally by a friend or relative; children cared for by a childminder; and children cared for by a nursery. The only benefit measured was for children cared for informally by a friend or relative; the effects for children in the formal categories were either neutral or negative. To re-iterate, the small benefit of childcare they did find was not associated with formal childcare, but with care by a friend or a relative when compared to formal care. Most importantly, the study did not include ANY children cared for by a parent at home.
In sum, the “best available evidence” from England, commissioned by the Department for Education itself, tells us absolutely nothing about the relative benefits for children of being cared for by professionals or by a parent at home. Now hang on a minute, you might say: how can it be concluded that formal childcare is ‘good’ for children vis-à-vis care by a parent at home (the implication often being that it is better for their educational and social outcomes), when no studies (at least in this country, for the international research see here) have actually compared the two?
I’m glad you asked. Now can we encourage more people to ask this question? And maybe ask our MPs to answer it?
To be perfectly clear, I’m not arguing that childcare is bad for children, or that it can never have any benefits. The point is that in an area of policy ostensibly about children, the interests of the child are not only not a primary consideration, they are not considered AT ALL. They simply do not even feature in the discussion. There are a number of independent reports assessing the likely impact of the childcare policy on tax revenues and maternal employment rates. Where is the official assessment of the potential impact on the very people whose lives will be most affected, IF the policy is successful in its aim of encouraging mothers who would otherwise be caring for their own children to use formal childcare instead?
In the absence of any evidence one way or another, can we not make the reasonable assumption that some children will thrive in professional settings, and other children will be much happier in the care of a loved one? Can we not also make the reasonable assumption that in the vast majority of cases a child’s parents are best able to make that judgement?
There is a way to ensure that children come first: allocate the public funding available for the care of children to the people who have primary responsibility for the welfare of children and who are most heavily invested in their long-term wellbeing. Make childcare grants available directly to parents, to spend on professional services or to pay a relative or to use themselves if they so wish. This would give families meaningful choices and empower parents to act in the best interests of their children.
Let’s have Early Years investment that actually gives children the best chance of a good start in life, rather than pressuring families into a one-size-fits all system and simply hoping it will all turn out alright in the end.
Please challenge your MP to point to evidence that 30 hours of formal childcare per week from nine months old is good for child development for all children. The evidence must meet the following criteria to be considered valid support for this policy:
It must look at children from nine months old (i.e. not older children)
It must look at 30 hours per week of childcare (i.e. not part-time or some formal care)
It must study outcomes over the long-term (i.e. not just over months or a year)
It must look at a broad range of developmental outcomes (i.e. not simply cognitive measures)
It must compare children in formal care to children cared for by mothers who have chosen to be at home (i.e. not children who are neglected or in disadvantaged circumstances)