Formal childcare boosts Foundation Stage Profile scores

Dr Kirstine Hansen of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at London's Institute of Education, research director of the Millennium Cohort Study, analysed the Foundation Stage Profile results of 10,600 children, born in 2000 and 2001, whose development is being tracked by the study.

She found that children who are exposed to any kind of formal childcare are at an advantage in all aspects of development by the end of their first year at school.

'It would be worth policymakers exploring how, and why, these practices help children to develop to see if they offer any levers for assisting disadvantaged children's development,' Dr Hansen said.

Children from lower-income families with parents who were less highly educated did not do as well as those from more well-off families with higher parental education and not living in social housing.

Maternal education was also a significant factor in all outcomes. Dr Hansen said, 'If your mother does not have five A to C GCSEs, whether you are a boy or a girl, you will be six and a half months behind children whose mothers have a degree.

'If you're a parent with low educational qualifications, you can offset that disadvantage by sending your child to formal childcare and reading to your child every day. For example, if you are a mother with fewer than five GCSEs if you read to your child every day you make up a 2.5 month gap and if you send your child to formal childcare you also make up 2.5 months, which means your child will have almost caught up.'

Effectively, this would mean that a child would only be 1.5 months behind a child whose mother had attended higher education.

Dr Hansen added, 'Encouraging parents to read to children is a very cost-effective way for Government to help improve educational attainment. It doesn't reduce the gap in development, because this advantage will also apply to children of better-off and well-educated families as well. But in absolute terms, encouraging parents to read to their children and attending formal childcare will improve an individual child's situation.'

For those children in childcare before they were three years old, it gave them a two and a half month advantage on their Foundation Stage profile scores in both mathematical development and communication, language and literacy.

The advantage to children of attending formal childcare was similar to the gain caused by parents who read to their children daily at the age of three.

At the end of reception, a child whose parents had read to them every day when they were three had a 2.5 month advantage in mathematical development and a 2.8 month advantage in communication, language and literacy.

Overall, girls were two months ahead of boys in their mathematical scores and four months ahead of boys in their CLL scores. In creative development, girls were nine months ahead of boys.

Dr Hansen acknowledged that daily reading to children could be an indicator of more general parenting behaviour that benefits child development. But she said the finding should be examined further to see if there were ways of helping disadvantaged children before they start school.

Further information

The survey is in 'Children of the 21st Century (volume 2): the first five years', available from http://www.policypress.co.uk

OTHER KEY FINDINGS FROM THE MCS

- An analysis of 12,000 five-year-olds found that 36 per cent of black African children were overweight, compared with 21 per cent of white children and 17 per cent of Pakistani children

- Overall, 23 per cent of children were overweight at the age of three and 21 per cent at the age of five

- Five-year-olds who had never been breastfed were more likely to be overweight (23 per cent)

- 18 per cent of five-year-olds who breastfed for a minimum of four months were overweight

- At the age of five, 23 per cent of girls were overweight, compared with 19 per cent of boys

- 26 per cent of five-year-olds in the north-east were overweight, compared with 18 per cent of five-year-olds in the south-west

- Living in a lower income family and having a less well-educated mother were other contributing factors to being overweight at the age of five

- 88 per cent of parents in England get their child into their first choice primary school