Gaps in cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes between disadvantaged children and their peers emerge early and persist. While research has mainly focused on economic disadvantage, other factors like family dysfunction, the quality of the parent-child relationship and the home learning environment may also contribute to developmental gaps in the earliest years of life.
Understanding the relative impacts of different forms of early disadvantage on child outcomes can help tailor support systems to better address each child's needs.
We used data from the Study of Early Education and Development (SEED), a longitudinal study following 5,642 children in England, to investigate the relationship between different forms of early disadvantage and children's cognitive/socio-emotional development. We also looked at the role of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in moderating the effects of disadvantage.
What’s in the report
- Using measures of the home learning environment and the quality of parenting we constructed a measure of ‘home disadvantage’ identifying children with challenging home environments. Information on family income and benefits was used to create a measure of economic disadvantage.
- The two types of family disadvantage have differing relationships with child development. Home disadvantage primarily affects socio-emotional outcomes, whereas economic disadvantage primarily influences cognitive outcomes.
- Children experiencing both types of disadvantage have considerably poorer outcomes across all measures, compared to non-disadvantaged children.
- Disadvantaged children have more to gain from receiving more, and higher quality, ECEC than their peers from less disadvantaged backgrounds. The type of disadvantage a child faces is important for understanding the relationship between ECEC use and later cognitive and socio-emotional development.
- For home disadvantaged children, the use of higher quality ECEC between the age of three to the start of school is linked to improved non-verbal cognitive abilities at ages five to six.
- For economically disadvantaged children, specific aspects of ECEC quality (those supporting shared thinking and early literacy) are linked to improved non-verbal ability and better socio-emotional outcomes respectively.
- For doubly disadvantaged children, higher ECEC quality relates to improved socio-emotional outcomes.
- Higher quality was found in early years settings with a larger number of places, a narrower age range, more highly qualified managers and staff, a lower rate of staff turnover, a higher frequency of staff CPD and those with a training plan and training budget in place.
Findings/recommendations
This set of results demonstrates that a wider perspective on disadvantage that includes consideration of the home environment may be useful in formulating policy for early childhood services in England. Once a more effective and consistent strategy to learn more about home environments is developed, initiatives to improve the home environment for children can be better targeted.
As disadvantaged children benefit more from high quality ECEC than non-disadvantaged children, additional funding and guidance for staff development should be directed in particular to ECEC facilities that provide primarily for disadvantaged children.
Improvements in ECEC quality can be made through policy and legislative action on structural aspects of ECEC, which are shown to be linked to process quality. In view of the increased costs involved, changes could be targeted particularly for ECEC used by disadvantaged groups.
Edward Melhuish
