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We know more than ever about what helps young children’s learning and social skills. But can the child care strategy deliver it, asks Kate Coxon.

Early education matters and the higher its quality the more it enhances children’s intellectual and social development. Good outcomes for children are linked to early years settings that provide a strong educational focus, with teachers working alongside and supporting less qualified staff.

Two large research projects, the Effective Provision of Pre-School Education project (Eppe) and the associated Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (Repey) have identified the ingredients for high-quality pre-school education (see panel). But is the government’s child care strategy capable of delivering it?

Ofsted thinks so. In March 1998, when the child care strategy was announced, 74 per cent of provision was judged as good, but by March 2001, this figure had risen to over 93 per cent. In terms of increasing the number of places for three to five year olds in settings with a strong educational focus (nursery schools and classes) the strategy is certainly moving in the right direction. Director of the Sure Start Unit Naomi Eisenstadt points out that every four year old now has the offer of free nursery education, which will be extended to all three year olds from April 2004.

Free nursery education or free child care? The terms are often used interchangeably - but what is the difference? Sue Owen, director of the Early Childhood Unit at the National Children’s Bureau believes the debate has moved on. "There is no difference: most of us accept that everybody is educating and everybody is caring, but there is still a funding split between nursery education and child care, which isn’t helpful."

Most new places have been created in school nursery classes, but there is a catch: a "place" often covers just two and a half hours per day. This is a headache for parents at work. The Sure Start Unit is aware of the difficulties: "The task now is to try and tie this up with the needs of working parents, making sure that we don’t sacrifice quality," says Eisenstadt.

Quality remains the key concern for professor Iram Siraj-Blatchford, one of the authors of the Eppe research, who says there are tensions in the way early education is mixed up with the issue of child care for working parents. "There is a strong lobby within government for getting women into paid employment, but we need some more reflection on what represents good quality for children." She is anxious that quality may be overlooked in the rush to recruit staff and meet the child care strategy’s targets for new child care places.

The DfES cites the appointment of Lesley Staggs, the first national director of the foundation stage for three to five year olds, as evidence of how seriously it takes the early years.

The Eppe research found that while good quality can be found across all types of early years settings, outcomes for children were better in integrated settings which combine education and child care with other services such as family support. Integrated centres are high on the Department for Education and Skills’s agenda but universal provision is a long way off. However, Sure Start children’s centres that combine full child care with the delivery of the foundation stage, as well as parent support and employment advice, are being set up in deprived areas.

Eisenstadt adds that the government is interested in looking at ways of supporting all parents - not just those not working - to improve how they help their children learn.

Childminders are unhappy with their profile in early education research. "We’d like to see research such as Eppe focus on accredited childminders, who have undertaken extra training and are approved for the purposes of the nursery education grant," says Sue Griffin, training manager for the National Childminding Association. She also feels that many of the strengths of childminding, such as continuity of care in a local community and a familiar, domestic context for early learning are overlooked by researchers.

Policy seems research-driven but there are gaps. The Eppe research uncovered a huge variety in quality of early years settings, within and across the public, private and voluntary sectors. Some professionals are critical of the haphazard training structure for the child care workforce which has a number of routes leading to a bewildering array of qualifications - from Cache awards, NVQs, NNEBs to degrees in early childhood studies. It is hoped that the creation of a new children’s workforce unit, as outlined in the green paper Every Child Matters, will provide some answers to the training problem.

Sue Owen of the National Children’s Bureau says that the only way to ensure quality in early education is by tackling head-on the challenges of training, recruiting and retaining staff, problems which she feels are linked to the question of pay and working conditions. She is optimistic that the review of national occupational standards and the green paper will make a difference. "Staff need to be able to access qualifications that relate clearly to competences and could lead easily onto other careers, such as teaching. Currently, pay is not linked to training and qualifications."

It’s optimistic to expect people to study for qualifications and develop skills which will have no impact on their conditions of employment. If we want the benefits of a professional child care service, we’ll have to find the money to treat, and pay, those who provide it as professionals.

Parental involvement

Research published in October by the DfES found that children aged three to five whose parents participated in their early education through the Peers Early Education Partnership (Peep) achieved systematically five percentage points more in language comprehension than those who did not. Scores on numbers were higher by 7.67 percentage points.

- See www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR489.doc 

About the research projects

The Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (Eppe) project based at the Institute of Education and the University of Oxford is the first major longitudinal study of a national sample of young children’s development between the ages of three and seven. Between 1997 and 2003, over 3,000 children were selected and tracked from 141 settings. A sample of home children with no or minimal pre-school experience was used as comparison. In the associated project, Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (Repey), 12 of the Eppe settings that were considered excellent, as well as two reception classes, and 46 "effective" childminders were then used for in-depth case studies. For children aged three or four to school age, the research found that:

• Pre-school experience compared with none enhances children’s development.
• Adult-child interactions that involve "sustained shared thinking" and open-ended questioning extend children’s thinking.
• Good outcomes are linked to shared educational aims with parents and formative feedback with children.
• Quality was higher overall in integrated settings, nursery schools and nursery classes.
• Trained teachers were most effective in their interactions with children and less well-qualified staff were better pedagogues when supervised by qualified teachers.
• The home learning environment is only moderately associated with social class: what parents do is more important than who they are.
• For more information see www.ioe.ac.uk/cdl/eppe/index.htm