SEED: Report reveals benefits of ECEC at age three

SEED is a major study designed to help the Department for Education (DfE) provide evidence on the effectiveness of early years education and to identify any short- and longer-term benefits from this investment.

It is being undertaken by a consortium including NatCen Social Research, the University of Oxford, Action for Children and Frontier Economics.

The latest report, ‘Impact Study of Early Education Use and Child Outcomes up to Age Three’, focuses on the take-up of early education for funded two-year-olds and explores how early childhood education and care (ECEC) may be related to development at the age of three.

Starting with a cohort of 6,000 children, SEED aims to study children at the ages of two, three, four, five and seven to see how variation in ECEC experience may be associated with cognitive and socio-emotional development.

The latest report addresses two main objectives:
1.  To explore the impact of introducing free early education for disadvantaged two-year-olds on the take-up of early education for two- to three-year-olds in the year following the introduction of the policy.
2.  To study the associations between the amount of differing types of ECEC and child development, as well as associations between child development and aspects of the home environment.

Summary of the report’s key findings

Introducing funded early education from two years for disadvantaged families

In the year following the introduction of funded early education for the 20 per cent most disadvantaged two-year-olds  (which started in September 2013) and for the 20 per cent to 40 per cent moderately disadvantaged (brought in in September 2014), there was no clear evidence of an increase in take-up of early education in these groups. There is therefore no strong evidence of the effect of the policy in the first year following its introduction.

There was an indication of some increase in take-up of early education for the cohort of the 20-40 per cent group who were eligible for three terms of funded early education, as compared with the cohort eligible for two terms of funded early education. This increase was 4.7 hours per week.

The absence of clear evidence of an increase in the use of early education in the first year after the introduction of funded childcare for disadvantaged two-year-olds may indicate that local authorities and families needed time to adjust. Census data from the DfE (2017) indicates there is now an increased use of early education for eligible twos.

Other studies of the effects of policy change, for example, the National Evaluation of Sure Start, found it can take several years for a policy change to be evident.

The relationship between ECEC aged two to three and children’s cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes at age three