Research Report: Study of Early Education and Development - Baseline Survey of Families

Authors Svetlana Speight, Ruth Maisey, Jenny Chanfreau, Sarah Haywood, Chris Lord, David Hussey, NatCen Social Research, July 2015

Published by Department for Education, July 2015

SUMMARY

The Study of Early Education and Development is being undertaken by NatCen Social Research, the University of Oxford, 4Children and Frontier Economics. The aim of the study as a whole is to provide evidence on the short- and longer-term benefits of the government's investment in early education. This report aims to map families' childcare use from birth to two and estimate the take-up of funded places for two-year-olds from lower income families. The researchers also wanted to explore the extent to which home learning environments and child outcome measures vary with families' childcare use and their level of disadvantage.

More than 5,600 families took part in a survey between October 2013 to November 2014, divided into the most disadvantaged, the moderately disadvantaged and the not disadvantaged. Most children were two years old at the time of the interview.

Fifteen per cent of children from the most disadvantaged families received formal childcare between one and two years old, compared with 36 per cent for all children in the study. Group-based formal provision, such as a day nursery or a pre-school, was more common than individual provision, such as a childminder, for all children. At age two the most common types of formal childcare overall were day nursery (25 per cent), nursery school (13 per cent), pre-school (13 per cent) and childminder (eight per cent).

Children from the most disadvantaged families tended to take up formal childcare places at an older age - 22.5 months - compared with those from moderately disadvantaged families at 16.6 months and non-disadvantaged families at 15.3 months. This suggests many of the most disadvantaged children started receiving formal childcare when they qualified for the funded provision. Almost half of children - 48 per cent - from the most disadvantaged families were receiving the government-funded two-year-old entitlement, while 10 per cent were receiving formal childcare but not the funded hours, and 42 per cent were not receiving any formal childcare at age two. The largest proportion of the most disadvantaged families receiving the two-year-old entitlement - 46 per cent - were using a day nursery with 23 per cent at nursery school and the same proportion at pre-school.

Families across all groups who did not use formal childcare were most likely to give personal preference as the reason but a substantial minority cited cost of childcare. Seventeen per cent of the most disadvantaged families said cost was a reason, 34 per cent of moderately disadvantaged families and 26 per cent of the not disadvantaged.

Among the moderately disadvantaged and not disadvantaged groups there was an association between attending formal childcare and higher scores in speech and language assessments, but this link was not present among the most disadvantaged children who attended childcare.