SEED: Government-funded study highlights value of early years education for all

Childminder settings were found to improve children’s language development between the ages of two and three, while children who spent time in nurseries were found to have improved social and emotional development and get on better with their peers.

The findings published by the Department for Education today come from the longitudinal Study of Early Education and Development (SEED), which has been tracking 6,000 children from the age of two.

The latest report is based on findings from a group of around 4,580 children who were still in the cohort at the age of three.

The researchers looked at the associations between children’s time (hours per week) in ECEC aged two to three and children’s outcomes at the age of three.

The study examines group settings and individual settings, both formal and informal.
The report’s author, Edward Melhuish, professor of human development at the University of Oxford, and Birkbeck, University of London, told Nursery World that it was clear from the research that ‘the great majority of children’ were benefiting from being in early education and childcare.

‘Right across the social spectrum, no matter how rich or poor, there were benefits for all children,’ he said.

The findings show that the amount of ECEC children received between the ages of two and three was associated with differences in cognitive and socio-economic outcomes at the age of three.

Positive impacts were found regardless of a child’s household income and the level of disadvantage in the area where they lived.

However, given the low starting point among disadvantaged children, ECEC ‘may be of particular importance to this group’, the report said.

The report concludes that ‘higher language development at age three was related to use of individual ECEC between ages two and three, in both formal ECEC with childminders and informal ECEC with friends, relatives, neighbours and nannies.

‘In addition more favourable socio-emotional outcomes at age three were associated with formal ECEC in both a group (e.g. day nurseries, nursery classes or schools and playgroups) and individual setting (e.g. childminders).’

There was one negative finding for a very small proportion of children -  3 per cent of children in the study - which found that children that spent more than 35 hours in group care a week at the age of three had greater social problems and less self-regulation.
However, further analysis showed this was particularly found in children that had started group care in the first year of life.