Early Years Evidence in Action - Gove's regrets, Technoference, the UK's low spend on early childhood education and care and more! Issue #4

Hello and welcome to my monthly newsletter - your 7 essential reads about research and practice in the early years. Views personal.

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1️⃣ Regrets? I've had a few

Whatever your view of Michael Gove, I’d argue that he’s one of the more thoughtful and candid senior ministers from the last decade or so.

In a wide-ranging review of his time as education secretary in SchoolsWeek, he’s clear about the mistake he made in taking money away from wider services to support children.

Q: What do you think you got wrong in your time?

A: In my desire to focus on schools overall we de-emphasised some of the other support for children. It was right to say the focus must be on schools as academic institutions and raising attainment and narrowing the attainment gap. But some of the other work that children’s services departments do – and that you need to put around children – we didn’t emphasise enough initially… there was too sharp a turning away from some of the things that Ed [Balls] and his team had put in the children’s plan.

So how's that played out?

Pretty badly. According to a report from ProBono Economics, between 2010-2011 and 2021-2022 combined spending on early intervention services in children’s services has fallen by more than 45%. That's led to significant reductions in early intervention services like Sure Start, which supported families to get children off to a good start and prevent small issues becoming big problems. Recent analysis by the IFS found that Sure Start improved children's health and boosted academic outcomes.

Meantime, total expenditure on late interventions has risen by almost half (47%). Late interventions are the services which come into action when things have gone seriously wrong - like child protection or taking children into local authority care.

As a result, Pro Bono report, we are spending more on children's services overall - but the increase is mostly eaten up by those late intervention services.

'In 2021-22, children’s services funding was typified by this approach, with more than £4 in every £5 of the additional £800 million going into late intervention services.'

It's like the choice between spending money to put railings around a high balcony.

Or spending it on ambulances at the bottom to try and fix the people who've fallen and hurt themselves.

2️⃣ ‘Technoference’: the effects of passive screentime on children’s early language development?

In a recent paper, researcher Mary E. Brushe and others make the important point that 'having a language-rich home environment is critical to children’s language development, which promotes school readiness and success throughout the educational system.’

So what's the impact on that 'language-rich home environment' when children are passively watching screens?

There's still a lot we don't know, and there are important nuances in their study. But the headline findings are clear, and add to growing concerns.

Brushe and colleagues report that 'for every additional minute of screen time, children heard fewer adult words, spoke fewer vocalizations, and engaged in fewer back-and-forth interactions.’

They continue: 'For families who follow the current World Health Organization screen time guidelines (eg, 1 hour per day at 36 months of age), the present results indicate that children could be missing out on approximately 397 adult words (ie, 6.62 × 60 minutes), 294 vocalizations, and 68 conversational turns every day. According to the present study, as well as international estimates, children on average are exceeding these screen time guidelines. Replacing 1 hour (60 minutes) with the mean screen time children were exposed to at 36 months of age in this study (172 minutes), children could be missing out on 1139 adult words, 843 vocalizations, and 194 conversational turns per day.'

That's a lot of conversation to miss.

➡️ What can we do about this problem?

The researchers have a clear recommendation: it's time to raise this issue with parents and carers, and help them to reduce the time that their children spend on YouTube and other apps. They argue that 'interventions aiming to promote early use of language should include support to manage screen time’.

With thanks to Alex Quigley for sharing this research with me.

3️⃣ Do we have the right measures to identify young children at risk of mathematical learning difficulties?

Short answer: no.

In an important and detailed review of 41 mathematical assessments and 25 screeners for children aged up to 8, here are some of the findings Laura Outhwaite and others report:

1. the majority of the identified measurement tools have not been evaluated for aspects of reliability and validity most relevant to education measures
2. only 15 measurement tools met the common acceptability thresholds for more than two areas of psychometric evidence
3. only four screeners demonstrated an acceptable ability to distinguish between typically developing children and those with or at-risk of mathematical learning difficulties
4. only one mathematical assessment and one screener met the common acceptability threshold for predictive validity
5. only 11 mathematical assessments and one screener were found to concurrently align with other validated measurement too

➡️ What's the solution to this problem?

The researchers conclude that ‘Improving measurement quality is vital to raising methodological standards in mathematical learning and development research’

4️⃣ How much does the UK spend on early education and care, compared to other OECD countries?

Not enough, according to a recent OECD report.

‘In early childhood education, expenditure per child in the United Kingdom is well below the OECD average (USD 7 462 compared to USD 12 749) and is among the lowest of all OECD countries for which data are available.’

The UK system is not only worse-funded than most other countries'.

It's also more unequal.

The OECD comment that 'in the United Kingdom, as in most other OECD countries, children aged 0-2 from families in the bottom income tertile are less likely to participate in childcare than children from the top income tertile (32% compared to 59%). The difference of 27 percentage points in participation between children from families in the top and bottom tertile is larger than the OECD average of 19 percentage points.’

Finally, as well as being unequal, early childhood education and care in the UK is particularly expensive for families. ‘According to the OECD Tax-Benefit model, which calculates childcare costs and benefits across OECD countries, net childcare costs for a dual-income couple on low earnings with two children aged 2 and 3 would be at least 24% of their average wage in these countries, compared to an average of 11% across OECD countries with available data.’

➡️ What should the UK do?

The OECD argue in favour of more investment in 'high-quality early childhood education and care given its tremendous potential benefits for children, families, societies and economies'

5️⃣ How did Ofsted gradings for early years compare to the 'one-word judgement' of schools' overall effectiveness?

Ofsted have got rid of one-word judgements. Instead, they'll only grade the individual judgement areas in reports, like Quality of Education or Behaviour and Attitudes.

So it's interesting to see how the overall 'one-word' judgement given to schools last year compared to the specific judgement for early years.

Using data on published inspections for the 2023/24 academic year published by Ofsted, I found that early years tends to be graded more favourably than schools' overall effectiveness.

In the table below, you can see that whilst 424 schools were judged 'Outstanding' overall, 620 schools had their early years provision judged 'outstanding'.

The lower number of 'good' judgements for early years almost certainly reflects the larger number of 'outstanding' judgements given.

On the other hand, whilst 379 schools were judged to 'require improvement', Early Years was only judged RI in 184 cases.

➡️ Why might this be?

On face value, this could tell us that early years is often higher-quality than the rest of the school's work.

Or maybe Ofsted inspectors are less certain of what to look for in early years, and so they're more likely to award a higher grade?

My money's on the second.

6️⃣ Write from the beginning

Write from the beginning is an innovative project led by UCL East and East London Research School.

Through a series of delightful vignettes and photos, you can find out more about how the project worked towards its 2 aims:

1. To develop strong hands for writing

2. To share and write stories

7️⃣ UK 2040: ambitious recommendations for the early years

UK 2040 addresses 2 important questions:

1. what are the greatest issues facing the education system?
2. What interventions might best help to address them by 2040?

Their new report, Education: the ideas, sets out some ambitious thinking for the early years. I think the recommendations around Professional Development and career progression are particularly eye-catching.

The report recommends the development of 'a new national progression map. This would outline clear progression pathways, provide a single source of information on career possibilities and establish the associated qualification requirements at each level. The map would set out available training routes and indicate how they can be accessed from different entry points (which is important because of the wide range of qualification levels and work experience).'

Here's a top-level outline of what that might look like:

The report further recommends that this system 'would include a new induction period for Level 3 qualified practitioners, underpinned by an Early Career Framework for early years, and options at each stage to move into specialist occupations (for example, becoming a lead for language), into leadership positions (such as nursery managers) and into graduate teaching roles (with Early Years Teacher status). The map would need to account for the needs of practitioners within setting-based providers and provide support for childminders.'

It's an ambitious, well-considered and accessible report - definitely worth a read.

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