Competent Learners on the Edge of Adulthood: A summary of key findings from the Competent Learners @ 16 project

4. The continuing effects of early childhood education

Earlier studies in the Competent Children Competent Learners project found that children’s cognitive and attitudinal competencies benefited from quality early childhood education.

The age-16 study found that aspects of the students’ early childhood education (ECE) still had associations with their performance 11 years later. The associations were generally weaker than they had been at age 14.

THE IMPORTANCE OF QUALITY

We found that high-quality centres had a positive, long-lasting association with students’ literacy, numeracy and logical problem-solving competencies, and also with their social skills.

These associations applied irrespective of their mother’s qualification or their family income. In other words, high-quality ECE centres were still providing lasting benefits for the participants in our study 11 years later, regardless of their background.

In the past, we found five measures of quality in early childhood education which had enduring effects on students’ performance. These five measures of quality continued to have an effect at age 16. They are:

• staff responsiveness
• staff guiding children in activities
• staff asking children open-ended questions
• staff joining children in their play
• providing a print-saturated environment.
  

THE EFFECT OF OTHER ASPECTS OF ECE

In earlier studies we found associations between competency after age-5 and the students’ experience of early childhood education, in particular:

• the age at which they first started ECE
• the total length of their ECE experience
• the socioeconomic mix of the final ECE centre they attended.
  

However, by age 16, only the last of these three experience measures was still associated with competency levels. We found that young people who had attended centres with children from mainly middle-class families were less likely to have social difficulties than those who had attended centres with fewer middle-class families. This association existed regardless of the student’s own background.

IMPLICATIONS

Our findings are consistent with a growing body of international research showing that children benefit from ECE experience and, in particular, from quality interactions with staff. We have found that these benefits can extend well beyond childhood.

This body of research underlines the importance of providing children with high-quality staff-child interactions. It follows that helping ECE centres to provide these types of interactions should be a priority at both planning and policy levels. One key rule of thumb could be the question: ‘Is this use of time/resources likely to improve/sustain the quality of child-staff interaction?’

Other international research provides useful information about ways to support quality staff-child interactions. These include:

• providing training that helps staff understand how young children learn, and the ways in which they can support the learning process by building on children’s interests, and deepening their thinking and their use of language
• having staff-child ratios that allow staff to know children as individuals, and to work with children in ways that help them develop confidently
  
• having staff stability.
  

Parents with pre-schoolers can also use these findings to help assess the quality of the ECE service they are thinking of using. A brief guide to quality is included in the box.