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Does Early Education Influence Key Stage 1 Attainment? Evidence for England from the Millennium Cohort Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Anitha George ,
Lucy Stokes  and
David Wilkinson
David Wilkinson*
Affiliation:
National Institute of Economic and Social Research
*
E-mail: d.wilkinson@niesr.ac.uk. This research was undertaken as part of the Indicators for Evaluating International Performance in Service Sectors (INDICSER) project, funded by the European Commission, Research Directorate General, as part of the 7th Framework Programme, Theme 8: Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities, Grant Agreement no. 244709. The authors are grateful to the referees of this paper for their helpful comments.
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Abstract

There is a body of evidence that shows that early education improves cognitive and social development for children while they are still attending, but the longer-term impacts depend on the quality of early education. Much of this evidence in England relates to a period when attendance rates at early education were around 60 per cent. Since then, early education has expanded through the guarantee of free provision for three- and four-year-olds, such that attendance at early education is now almost universal. This paper uses data from the Millennium Cohort Study to consider whether, in an era of near universal provision, early education is still associated with detectable improvements in outcomes for children. The analysis focuses on attainment in Key Stage 1 assessments when children were aged seven and finds that the overall impact of early education on Key Stage 1 attainment is modest, but that the impact is generally greater for those children who experienced poverty when they entered early education.

Keywords

Early Educationchild attainmentKey Stage 1Millennium Cohort StudyJ13
Type
Research Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 222 , October 2012 , pp. R67 - R80
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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