Evaluating the Impact of Nursery Attendance on Children’s Outcomes

The aim of this research project is to uncover the impact of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) on children’s outcomes in the UK. This question is addressed in the context of dramatic increases in public spending in this area from the late 1990s; most particularly the introduction of the free entitlement to part-time early education from age 3; hereafter the “free entitlement”. The project has two arms; the assessment of the impact of different quantities of ECEC and the investigation of the impact of differences in the quality of ECEC. In both cases the outcome of interest is children’s educational attainment in primary school.

In order to make a compelling case that we are measuring the causal impact of the quantity of ECEC on children’s later educational outcomes we seek to exploit variations in access to nursery that occurred as a consequence of Government provision of the free entitlement. We have administrative data on outcomes and are able to match this with information on access to the free entitlement. Blanden et al. (2016) makes use of variation in access to the free entitlement generated by variations in the speed of the roll-out of this policy across different areas in England. Blanden et al. (2017a) exploits variation in access to the free entitlement generated by age-based eligibility rules, again focusing on English data.

We also wish to understand the association between children’s outcomes and the characteristics of the provision they attend. We do this by matching data on children’s educational achievement with information on the ECEC setting where the child receives the free entitlement in the year before (s)he goes to school. We are interested in examining childcare ‘quality’ in as far as we can measure it in the data, and this is proxied primarily by information on Ofsted ranking and staff qualifications. Results are reported in Blanden et al. (2017b). This study is not able to benefit from any quasi-experimental variation in the setting children attend, but our regression approaches are designed to reduce the influence of parental choice and move us as close as possible to picking up the influence of the setting.
We have developed the project beyond our initial proposal by combining our data on quality with the age discontinuity approach. Blanden et al. (2017a) tests if the benefits of accessing an additional term of the free entitlement vary according to the characteristics of the settings that it is received in. In this way we are able to explore the interaction of the quantity and quality of ECEC for children’s outcomes.

All three elements of the project are focused on children’s receipt of or eligibility for the free entitlement. Taken as a whole, the project delivers valuable new evidence on the effectiveness of the free entitlement. Given that the Government spent around £2billion a year on the free 15 hours entitlement for three and four year olds over the period we examine (Department for Education, 2013) and have very recently increased this provision to 30 hours for working parents, this focus is policy-relevant and timely.