THE 2021 FESTIVAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE RUNNING 1-30 NOVEMBER 2021
Early years inequalities in the wake of the pandemic
What’s on offer?
This online event, chaired by Carey Oppenheim, will start with a presentation of some of the most recent evidence available on inequalities in the early years of childhood and the impact that the pandemic has had and is likely to have on them. The presentation will be followed by a debate between various early years policy experts about how best to address inequalities within the current spending envelope.
What’s it about?
There are important inequalities in the development of children well before they start school. By forcing nurseries to close and dramatically altering the lives of most families with young children, the pandemic may have exacerbated existing inequalities and possibly created new ones.
Who’s leading the event?
Speakers:
Sarah Cattan, IFS
Ryan Shorthouse, BrightBlue
Eva Lloyd, University of East London
Rebecca Montacute, The Sutton Trust
Open to
Anyone interested in finding out more about what we can do to reduce inequality.
Early years inequalities in the wake of the pandemic
hello everybody um
i'd really like to welcome you all to
this seminar today
um and to our expert speakers and panel
and we have here dr sarah catton dr ava
lloyd ryan short house and dr rebecca
montecute and
i'm delighted to be here at this 2021
festival of social sciences with the ifs
to share what is a really important
discussion
on early years inequalities in the wake
of the pandemic i'm kerry oppenheim i
work at the nuffield foundation leading
a project called the changing face of
early childhood which explores how young
children's lives have changed over the
last 20 years and what the research
suggests about policy and practice
priorities to improve young children's
lives so this is super useful for me and
i hope it will be for you
and prior to that i was the first chief
executive of the early intervention
foundation which some of you all know
now is absolutely the right moment to be
having this discussion
families with young children are
stepping back into some aspects of
normal life
that were prior to the pandemic
um many but fewer are back in early
years settings and in reception
seeing wider family and friends but
doing that with the legacy of a huge
disruption in their learning their
communication skills their emotional
well-being and for some financial
insecurity since the pandemic broke
and we are and they are still facing
great uncertainty and anxiety
in terms of public responses to covid
babies and young children have not been
in the limelight
and we've had a decade of where there's
been substantial reductions in fronting
for families with children with young
children in particular but the recent
budget has announced some important
steps forward investment in child care
and early years entitlements and the
best start for life and family hubs
issues that we might return to in the
discussions
um the task we've been set today
is how to best address early childhood
inequalities within the current spending
envelope
so we thought we'd experiment and do a
quick before and after poll
on what you think the government's top
priority to address early is an
inequality should be
so you'll find the link to the poll
underneath the video on the website and
youtube and if you haven't already voted
please do so
during sarah caton's presentation and
we'll reveal the results of the before
poll before we go on to the panelists
and have our wider conversation
so
our first speaker is dr sarah catton
known to many of you she is associate
director and co-lead at the education
and skills sector at the institute for
fiscal studies
her research focuses on the role
of human capital and educational policy
in reducing inequalities during early
childhood
during the pandemic she's run a
real-time study on children's home
learning experiences and she's currently
working on a project looking at the
impact of the pandemic on the child care
market
so
over to you sarah
thanks very much gary um thank you for
this introduction
[Music]
so
in this short presentation
i'm going to provide some background for
the discussion to come about how to best
tackle early inequalities in the wake of
the pandemic
i'm going to briefly summarize some of
the evidence to date on the impact of
kovid 19 on the lives and development of
babies and young children and this
really will not be an exhaustive review
of the evidence nor even
exhaustive discussion
of all the issues we need to consider
but rather a chance to outline some of
the key dimensions through which the
pandemic has affected
young children and given the theme of
the
events on inequalities in the early
years
i will pay particular attention to the
ways in which the pandemic has affected
young children from more endless
advantage backgrounds in unequal ways
and discuss implications of that for uh
inequalities in their early development
so we wouldn't be discussing this topic
if we didn't believe that early
childhood was a key period for the
development of children
there is much evidence to show that
during the first five years of life
children are particularly sensitive to
the experience and the environments that
they are exposed to and these
experiences are very much shaped by the
family by the home environment but also
by
experiences outside of the home uh for
example in formal child care and
education
and the nature and quality of these
experiences during those formative years
are important
for building children's school readiness
and more broadly for helping children
fulfill their potential throughout their
lives
and so for these reasons the early years
are often seen as a period of great
opportunity but also a period of great
vulnerability for those children exposed
to
poor unsafe and already more
disadvantaged environments
these inequalities in children's
experiences early on are thought to play
an important role in driving the gaps in
development that we see between children
for more and less advantage backgrounds
these gaps emerging very early on and
very much existing before the pandemic
hit
so this disadvantage gap or the
developmental gap between more and less
advantaged children has been documented
in many ways i know this point all this
evidence really points to the fact that
it is substantial
for example data from the department of
education in 2019
um
collected on pupils at the end of
reception
shows that disadvantaged pupils those
eligible for free school meals were four
and a half months behind this their
non-disadvantaged counterparts and this
gap uh increases with the age
and in the two decades before the
pandemic um there were signs in the late
2000s early 2010s that actually this
disadvantage gap was uh starting to
shrink but actually since 2017
there have been
indications that it started increasing
again
so it is very much against this
background of high inequality and
potentially widening inequalities that
the pandemic hit and brought
radical changes to the lives of babies
young children and their families
and
many argue that those changes will widen
those inequality have widened and will
continue to widen those inequalities
further
without urgent action so the pandemic
combined a public health crisis with an
economic crisis and together these
created a radical shock to every aspect
of young children's ecosystem starting
with their families and extending to
their care and education system
and so in the rest of the presentation
i'm going to reflect on the many ways in
which coving 19 has affected families
with young children and the care and
education system and how it's affected
them
how it's affected young children
unequally you will notice for example
that i will not talk uh much about the
health system and how that has been
disrupted for young children um but this
is obviously a very important issue in
its own right
so first focusing on the impact of kovid
on families
kovid has had a health impact a social
impact and an economic impact in terms
of health although the effects of the
virus have been reported to be fairly
mild for most young children many of
whom are actually asymptomatic the risk
to carers is greater especially older
ones and especially individuals with
prior health issues who on average tend
to be more concentrated in disadvantaged
households
in terms of the social impact so for
many months
social distancing measures
that have been introduced to contain the
spread of the virus have disrupted
family routines and prevented much of
the interaction that children would have
with
friends and extended family
and including informal child care
arrangements
then the economic impact obviously
cannot be understated so by shutting
down entire sectors of work and
disrupting work arrangements the
pandemic has created a massive economic
shock leaving many families especially
low income
ones with lower income and greater
uncertainty about their future earnings
and employment
having children at home for longer
because of school and nursery closures
has also increased expenditures on items
such as food and heating and those have
been most difficult to bear for poor
families with young children
so reductions in income combined with
increases in expenditures have meant
increases in food poverty among
low-income families and less income to
spend on children's
education and development
and even if policies such as the inferno
scheme have prevented many families from
experiences more drastic changes to
their income in the short term the
pandemic has still created a lot of job
in security which some argue have just
as damaging consequences on families as
job loss
so all these changes have created many
new sources of stress for parents and
there is much evidence that parental
mental health has worsened especially
among low-income families
but children as a result of these
changes have also been spending more
time with their parents
for some it may have allowed for more
opportunities for play and bonding
between children and parents but for
other families it may have been an
additional source of stress
among the many other worries created by
the pandemic
so while overall we would expect the
experiences of the pandemic for families
to have been quite varied with
relatively mixed consequences for child
development families where parents were
in low paid
jobs and living in more precarious
conditions
before the pandemic have certainly been
hit the hardest
putting the development of their
children at the greatest risk
now turning to the education and care
system for young children
the pandemic has also completely shaken
up that system
during the first lockdown between march
and may 2020 nursery
nurseries were closed for most children
and even if they reopened faster than
schools did and never closed again
nursery attendance drastically dropped
in the earliest phases of the lockdown
and uh it has not recovered to free
pandemic levels um to date
and insights about this can be gained
from various sources of data
so um there is data on the number of
children age zero to four attending
earlier settings um that was collected
by the department for education on this
slide i showed the proportion of all
zero to four year olds attending an
early year setting between april 2020
and may 2021 and as you can see
obviously that proportion very much
dropped uh very early in the pandemic
and it has sort of slowly picked up with
the dip again you know during the third
lockdown
but still as of at the end of this graph
so may 2021 it was still below the
estimated pre-pandemic level and
actually the latest estimates from the
dfe as of november 2021 suggest that
still one out of 10 children expected to
attend an earlier setting um is not
we can also gain some insights about the
groups of children that are more likely
to be missing out
on their early education by
looking at how the take-up for different
free entitlements
has been changing among eligible groups
so as you know the free entitlement for
two-year-olds is an entitlement of 15
hours of free care for the 40
most disadvantaged two-year-olds
in contrast the three and four-year-old
entitlement
is an entitlement to 15 hours of free
care for all three and four year olds
and so on this graph you can see that
the take up of these entitlements uh
among eligible populations um
was lower in january 2021 than it was in
january of the five previous years but
we can also see that the drop in the
take-up of um is is much more pronounced
for the entitlement of the two-year-old
uh of the for the two-year-olds than for
the three and four-year-olds and so this
would suggest that um
disadvantaged children are the ones to
be most likely to be missing out on
their early education and care
uh as a result of the pandemic and this
may be particularly problematic for
inequalities in their development given
that um
these are the children that are often
argued to benefit the most from a high
quality early education outside
the home
so there are various reasons why this
may be the case those reasons having to
do with both the demand for child care
and the supply for child care being
affected by the pandemic
in the current project on the impact of
kovid on the childcare market that i'm
conducting with eva lloyd and several
other researchers we're actually trying
to
investigate what are the determinants of
these changes in
childcare attendance
so far the evidence we have gathered
would suggest that
the
demand for childcare is affected by the
public health situation corroborating
some other evidence that parents
actually respond to their perception of
the risk associated the risk of
infection associated with sending their
children to nursery
obviously another big factor is the
parental economic situation and we see
uh in the analysis that we've conducted
that attendance is lower uh in areas
with higher fuel rates and unemployment
rates and so going forward given the
uncertainty about the economy economic
recovery and the possibilities of
further lockdowns it may be a long time
until attendance go back to pre-pandemic
levels especially in more deprived areas
of course this depressed demand is
having consequences for providers and
increasing financial pressures on
providers some of which had already been
present very much so before the pandemic
so if for the moment we haven't seen
massive numbers of nurseries shutting
down following the pandemic there is
evidence that closures may have been
happening more
at least in rural areas
the pandemic has also been reported to
have had detrimental effects on nursery
workforce morale and mental health and
this will contribute to exacerbate
difficulties
that nursery leaders
already had in recruiting and retaining
quality stuff
so while it is too early to tell
what the long run impact of coving 19
will be for the babies and toddlers of
the pandemic the picture we have painted
so far would suggest that it may widen
inequalities in the development of
children between those coming from more
and less advantage backgrounds
because of the pandemic the main measure
of school readiness the early years
foundation stage profile was not
collected four cohorts
[Music]
uh um
finished their reception here in 2020
and 2021 so we don't have a consistent
series to look at how school readiness
has changed at least on this particular
measure but there is emerging evidence
coming from other indicators of child
development that would suggest that
there has been already a detrimental
impact of the
pandemic on child early child
development so for example
data collected as part of the healthy
child program
uh on indicators of development at age
two to two and a half shows that the
proportion of children at or above the
expected level of development
was lower in
2021 than it was in 2019 with the
greatest declines being
around communication and language of
children and personal social and
emotional development of those children
several surveys of parents
school leaders nursery leaders are also
also showing
increased concerns about the development
of young children and their school
readiness for example this study from
the education
endowment fund
shows that concerns among school leaders
back in september 2020
suggested that
particular concerns
around the communication and language
development of young children and around
their personal social and emotional
development
so this uh emerging evidence creates
obviously cause for a serious concern
that the pandemic will widen
socioeconomic inequalities in the early
years and this will obviously have
knock-on effects for schools who already
have their hands quite full dealing um
and helping children who were in school
when the pandemic hit
catch up on their learning uh the extent
to which these
effects will be mitigated will obviously
depend on the practices and
interventions all the new uh that are
put in place in nurseries schools and
through the welfare system really to
help families recover from the crisis it
will also depend on the speed at which
children may be able to catch up
from the learning they have missed
during this time and as you will have
noticed a lot of the issues i have
discussed in this presentation in
relation to early years inequalities are
not new and in many ways the pandemic
has only exacerbated them and made the
policy response
even more pressing but in some ways the
pandemic has created
also some new challenges and so in
thinking about this and this raises the
questions of whether old ideas to tackle
the inequalities are still relevant
and how they need to be adjusted to
address those new challenges brought by
the pandemic
thank you
thank you very much um for that sarah
and and it's really
um illuminating and and worrying and and
we'll come back to to some of those
issues that you've raised
in our discussion and
shall we have a quick look at the um
poll
um greg if you could share um uh what
people's initial view was of their their
priority
okay so let's just have a quick look
um i'm just trying to get my
screen
up
okay
so it looks as if um
uh so the sort of top
priority
is is interestingly by making early
education and care free for
disadvantaged children from the age of
one i mean we're not talking about huge
differences
and then followed by by quality
so
thank you very much for that we will um
come back to that i mean it's it's it's
30 i think 37 of you participated so um
but it's very useful to have that
insight and we'll come back to you
um
uh
at the end so let me now introduce um
our second uh uh a second speaker and
first pass um dr eva lloyd and she is a
professor of early childhood at the
university of east london and visiting
professor at the university at
university college london
at uel she's also director of the
international center for the study of
the mixed economy of child care
and eva's research focuses on the
marketization and privatization of child
care and its relation to its relation to
child poverty and social exclusion she's
also currently involved in a research
project looking at the impact as a
pandemic on the child care market
so many thanks eva and over to you
thank you carey
we know that early childhood education
and care provision
has the greatest benefits for children
growing up with disadvantage
so the emerging
findings from the study the sarah that
sarah and i are both working on about
the various impacts of the pandemic on
the
attendance of children
of young children in early year settings
and the reduced take-up overall
are particularly worrying and of course
those are addressed in sarah's
conclusions
and i would like to take this
opportunity to make three points
i uh i will try very hard to that to
make those points relate to being within
the current spending envelope i can't
promise but i hope to displace them from
financial pragmatism here and first of
all i want to say that of course the
participation of disadvantaged children
in early years prevent provision
pre-pandemic was already hampered by
pre-existing structural problems with
the system a marketized system
and
carrie oppenheim herself and nathan
archer recently described that as a
dysfunctional market failing those that
need it most i couldn't have put it
better myself and they say that in one
of the reports have just come out from
the novel foundation the role of early
childhood education and care in shaping
life chances
so it's a mixed market of private for
profit private not-for-profit and public
providers
and within that market over half of
places are delivered by the private for
profit chains
and note that
as far as the early education
entitlement is concerned two and three
more you know by far the majority of two
and three-year-old children get their
early education within that market
a study also funded by the nuffield
foundation
in to the nature of that market
is about to be published it's the report
is called acquisitions mergers and debts
the new language of child care
and i'm also a member of that research
team
so
i can tell you the outside i think a
root and branch review of the whole
system is needed
and i've written about that in various
places recently
and it's also interesting that those
pre-existing problems were identified by
the national audit office
in a report that was published on the
6th of march 2020. now that was a little
unfortunate perhaps because it may not
have received the attention it deserved
but the report supporting disadvantaged
families through free early education
contained five recommendations which
hone in on a lot of these weaknesses
and i want to take you through one of
them which says the department should
work with local authorities to develop a
better understanding of the approaches
that work best in increasing take-up of
the entitlements by disadvantaged
families
now that is needed now more than ever
of course a well-functioning and an
effective
early childhood system that
meets its objectives
does depend on an integration with wider
family and public health policies and
that's why my first point my first
suggestion is that it is an absolute
priority
that the we introduce a return of
face-to-face meetings between health
visitors
and parents of under fives
for the five mandatory health checks and
if at all possible for more
of course you could say but that will
include all families but you know the
importance of the role of first midwives
and then health visitors in identifying
disadvantage
and the importance of the health visitor
role in signposting disadvantaged
families to early years provision and
arguing the case
for two-year-olds going there for
instance
now my second point relates
to
the other side of the package namely the
uptake of additional child care hours by
working parents for children under two
four two year olds and three year olds
and four year olds additional to the
early education entitlements
and my focus is on the fact that
the help that the government provides
with the fees
is done via retrospective payments
you know so parental child care
subsidies come after parents have paid
the fees upfront and have acquired a
proof of payment
and that goes for parents who get
support through tax-free childcare and
for parents who get support on the
universal credit so let's focus on
universal credit well from both cases in
2018 the treasury committee on childcare
already said in its report that it was a
fundamental flaw in the system it hasn't
changed in fact it's got slightly worse
because in january of this year the high
court ruled that this practice of proof
of payment
was unlawful
it was an interesting case brought by a
single mother
who once i won the case that
she needed no more than an invoice
rather than proof of payment otherwise
she really couldn't go on working
you know if she didn't get her universal
credit payments but of course the
department for working for pensions
appealed and the appeal was hurt in july
and the court of appeal decided in favor
of the secretary of state for work and
pensions the proof of payments had a
reasonable foundation and was therefore
justified now the crux of the debate the
legal debate was around whether this
way of paying the money discriminated
against women because the majority of
single mothers certainly are women
but i think the crux of this is that
this policy discriminates against
disadvantaged families and therefore my
second point would be that i think that
both hmrc and the department for working
pensions should reconsider the proof of
payment rule and accept invoices as
sufficient for claiming contributions to
child care costs at least then on the
universal credit
so reinstate the original high court
judgment
now i know providers may not like this
but i think there are risks but not
dangerous attached to this change for
providers and providers are actually
quite well versed in getting rid of
parents who run up debts or try to run
up debts
and this really looking at this matter
reminded me again about the change in
the proportion of child care support
through benefits and the tax system
and
as compared to the change that has taken
place over the last decade in the
support to the tax system and the early
education entitlements and christine
farquharson has written in a brilliant
2019 briefing for the institute for
fiscal studies on early years funding
and she notes how spending through the
tax system was up 85
while spending through the benefit
system had fallen by 44 in the last
decade this is for me one of the crucial
things that needs to be addressed and my
suggestion about the retrospective
payments is just part one small piece in
the jigsaw of trying to address this and
my final policy recommendation then goes
to tax-free child care which of course
is for better-off parents although more
and more parents with young families of
course are being reduced to having to
apply for universal credit
and
since its introduction in 2017 this has
had a very low uptake
so
officer national statistics told us in
2019 that at that point there were 4.6
million uk households with working
parents with dependent children and half
of those 2.3 million had one child under
5.
and yet by march 2021 only 282 000
families were using tax-free child care
that does cover the
year in which the pandemic started but
it has always remained like that
another study from the
institute for fiscal studies for hmrc
looked at the reasons that might be
behind that and cautiously suggested
that the tax-free childcare system's
complexity and parents lack of
confidence with that complexity and so
on
might explain the low uptake i think
it's really urgent that we simplify
applications for tax-free credit
because they are highly complex and i
mean absolutely if i look at those forms
they make me hyper
ventilate
so
i think my 10 minutes are probably just
about up
so i
will stop here
and say that i look forward to
discussing these questions further with
you when we have our
discussion at the end of the
presentations thank you
thank you so much for that over um both
the
surveying of the issues and the clarity
and three very practical proposals
um about things that we can prove you
know improve
uh
in in the shorter term so we'll we'll
definitely come back to it
um moving on um ryan uh our second our
second panelist is ryan shorthouse
founder and chief executive of bright
blue uh an independent think tank for
liberal
conservatism and ryan's research focuses
on education and social policy he was
previously researched fellow for the
social market foundation where he
designed innovative policies on child
care
public service reform higher education
and health
ryan's also senior visiting fellow at
king's college london and a trustee of
the early intervention foundation where
we had quite close concert and the
daycare trust
and so ryan over to you and thank you
great thank you carey and um and thank
you for introducing me and inviting me
to speak um
here today on a very important topic
because i think the political focus
has definitely been amongst covered
learning loss amongst school children
and we now have good evidence around
that two to three months on average the
learning loss
and particularly affecting deprived
children and younger children
um
and the government also has you know a
solution around that the national
tutoring program where they've invested
billions in it so kevin collins the
education
uh commissioner did resign of course he
wanted the government to go above and
beyond that by extending the school day
but my point is this that around school
children and the learning loss
uh there is an evidence base around it
about the extent of the learning loss
and there is evidence around the
solutions that can help and the
government has acted on that
that's not the case with the early years
although there is of course as we've
seen in the ifs presentation from sarah
today some nascent evidence around uh
that uh learning loss the extent of the
learning loss amongst under fives and
the healthy child program for example
does show that on a
variety of cognitive and social outcomes
we are seeing a decline
in abilities um for two to two and a
half year olds
over
the period 2019 to 2021
so but above and beyond that i do think
the evidence base needs strengthening i
know there are various organizations
trying to do that to look at the impact
of covid on learning outcomes and i
think particularly for older preschool
children looking what the impact is
particularly for three and
four-year-olds where there is no
universal take-up of early years formal
child care uh what the impact of nursery
closures was on on on their development
but also i think just like with school
children we need to um for those of us
who are passionate about early years
need to be presenting
a set of
remedial actions to help rectify this
learning loss just as those um
in the school children education sector
have been doing so what programs will
help uh with catch up covert catch-up
how much funding is needed who are the
political figures like sir kevin collins
for
education recovery
who will really push for it
and we need to think about those
programs both for formal child care but
also for um you know parental
interventions as well and family hubs
what sort of initiatives and programs do
we need to remedy the learning loss so
getting the evidence on the learning
loss
and then pushing for the remedial
policies i think should be a priority
for those um in the early years world
and and this is crucial because um you
know obviously the pandemic has worsened
the inequalities in early years but we
know they've existed for a long time
and we know that for changing the
trajectory of child outcomes long term
it's not necessarily
the only window we shouldn't be
deterministic about infancy um you know
not not least for parental stress and
mitigating that but also there's good
evidence for example from sarah jane
blakemore at the ucl the teenage years
are also a kind of critical window for
shaping
uh brain development but we do know from
the evidence that the early years is the
most critical if not the only
part leon feinstein's evidence around
you know by the age of five child
outcomes uh closely strongly correlated
with educational outcomes at the age of
26 and obviously james heckman's work um
in the us on the kind of complementarity
of skill formation the earlier you start
the more progress that you get in the
long term and considering the evidence
around uh the impact of higher education
on individual and social outcomes and
the impact that the early years has on
educational trajectory it for me it's
you know this is the most important part
of the education process and we should
be investing much more in it
so above and beyond the remedial
measures that i think are needed around
covert learning loss
what more can help um reduce the
inequalities and we've already seen from
the ifs presentation today that we did
see a reduction in these inequalities in
school readiness what the government
calls school readiness between 2007 to
2012 and then it's increased again
um
a little since 2017.
um the government admittedly i think
seems to have woken up a little bit more
in early years um you know after a
decade where children's centers have
been scaled back and closed down i think
wrongly considering there's stronger
evidence that's emerged
on the impact of children's centers on
positive impact on child and parenting
outcomes not least from the ifs where
people who were participating in
children's centers less likely
to be hospitalized and obviously that
also accrued savings to the health
service as well
um so after a decade of kind of
political neglect i think we're starting
to see some turnaround and andrea ledson
i think should be congratulated for that
through her
work
around kind of the healthy start review
and of course the budget has given more
funding for improving early years
training
for more money for providers to deliver
the early years for entitlement uh and
also for family hubs which are basically
children's centers but renamed and
slightly uh a re-prioritization
and i think it's great that they're
investing in family hub stroke
children's centers again i mean it's not
just good for children and parental
outcomes but also for the leveling up
agenda and one part of that is around
civic activity and social infrastructure
and i think children's centers and
family hubs are a major part of that
because children are often the social
blue they are often a trigger for
parents to come together and interact so
if you want more civic activity then
these sorts of things are really crucial
for that so there's good momentum that
andrea has created which she deserves
praise for
i think her focus is very much on the
first 1001 days rather than all under
fives
and i think it's really important as
well that we definitely focus on the
most
evidence-based interventions to
supporting
uh children in the early years
so what can we what what sort of
policies
might help um strengthen early years now
i think there's obviously a range of
services and interventions which are
crucial i'm going to just focus now on
preschool education
which is obviously one part of that and
and as i said at the beginning for me
preschool is not just a service an
important service for working parents
but is the most important service most
important part of the education system
and we need to be thinking about that
much more so i think there are three uh
kind of issues that need tackling
affordability quality and sustainability
um
and on afford on affordability i think
admittedly that has been the focus of
successive governments as they've
widened out the early years for in front
for entitlement the number of hours the
eligibility
made universal credit child care subsidy
more generous now 85 percent and also
introduced tax-free child care for
higher income parents obviously the
take-up is quite low
with that um but i think that has been
very much the focus of the government
and my view is that any additional state
subsidy should now really be focused on
quality and improving the quality of the
workforce the not brown review did show
that child care remains at low status
low paid profession um so what do we
need to do to really build up um
the
the quality and think about that and
then finally on sustainability there is
a lot of churn in the market
lots of new openings lots of uh closings
and that's including during the pandemic
but that's been going on for some time i
think the market is very localized it's
very contingent on parental
circumstances in a local area
therefore it's very difficult for uh
providers to achieve a kind of network
of different uh child care settings to
create economies of scale
you know as eve has said a lot of child
care providers are in the pvi market but
they're very small um you know not many
are chains
and as such
um you know it's it's very vulnerable
and fragile and localized the market and
and therefore it's hard to have
sustainability
so what might help so on quality um i
would suggest um
that the kathy silver evidence suggests
that staff qualifications are the most
important thing so how do we get
talented people into the early years
setting how do we make it a place that
the most talented educators want to come
to liz trust looked at a kind of teach
first scheme for early years educators
that's gone quiet how can we um
revitalize that what can we learn from
what was done before to really boost the
amount of talent talent coming in what
about salary supplements uh the
government's got that now for maths and
science teachers for school-aged
children working in the most deprived
areas could we think about salary
supplements to attract
the best educators into early year
settings and then how do we retain and
attract good quality staff uh as as well
um and you know is worrying for example
from the nuffield foundation presenting
evidence uh that the average
qualification level level three uh has
dropped over the last decade amongst the
early years workforce how do we build
that up again i mean my view is and i
know this is quite controversial but the
issue around ratios uh my understanding
of the international evidence is that
ratios just like with school-age
children um staff to child ratios that
is is less important than staff
qualifications and quality within reason
of course if you do one uh provide one
carer to 50 children then obviously
that's a problem um
but the uk has particularly strict
ratios i'd be up for relaxing those to
some extent if providers spend more
money on uh
retaining and attract attracting high
quality staff i think that's something
that we should seriously look into
considering my understanding of the
evidence
on affordability i think uh child care
could be made affordable overnight to
everybody um if we introduce income
contingent child care loans just like
with uh as
students who want to access university
this wouldn't replace existing child
care support through the early years for
entitlement uc
and tax-free childcare it would be
additional to it it would be voluntary
so nobody's forcing parents to take it
it would be income smoothing
because you would only pay
once you're in work and earning above a
certain amount
and lots of parents are now going into
debt already to pay for child care this
would smooth the child care costs over a
longer period thus making i think more
sustainable
um and you can design it in a way i
think which would be fiscally neutral so
if an interest rate was applied to it
you could charge higher income parents
more to compensate for low income
parents who maybe don't meet the salary
threshold for repayment and therefore
don't pay as much of it back but i would
seriously consider it because i think
i've done polling on it parents from of
under fives across all social groups um
tend to be in favor of a majority and
would be interested in taking up and
also
the late tessa jiao when she was running
for london mayor really pushed this idea
uh
as a solution so like i say not to
replace existing funding but to be
complementary and i think that would
make child care affordable uh overnight
for for parents which brings me to my
final point and i know i'm i'm i'm
running out of time so just very quickly
on sustainability i think the market the
demand for child care needs to be
thickened so it's less vulnerable and
fragile to local parental circumstances
i think child care loans would do that
it would make it would
make sure that the demand is less
fragile
but in the end i do think and again this
is probably quite controversial we
should be moving to compulsory preschool
education
for three and four-year-olds taking the
early years for entitlement maybe for
the two-year-olds as well um
uh
you know i think the school starting age
or the education starting age is quite
arbitrary i think the evidence is strong
enough of it of its impact uh to make it
compulsory but of course to do that we
need to make it universally affordable
and to make sure that there's quality
provision everywhere and then we're in
that position i do think that we should
be moving to compulsory preschool
education this is not to undermine
stay-at-home parents i would do it for
15 hours a week kathy silva's work seems
to suggest that's optimal for child
development anything above that doesn't
seem to value ad
so i would make a compulsory and then of
course if parents want to stay at home
look after their children there's many
more hours above 15 hours a week to do
that so there's some policy ideas i
think for addressing the inequalities
that have emerged from the pandemic and
then beyond thank you
many thanks ryan for that and plenty of
food for thought there
um some really interesting proposals
that i hope will be able to come back to
in the discussion
um uh so so thank you for that i'll move
quickly on
um
to um becky um
so uh becky
montague is a senior research fellow and
policy manager at the saturn trust
she's authored a number of reports on a
wide range of issues related to social
mobility and educational inequality
including inequalities in the early
years
the impact of the pandemic on low-income
students some paid internships and
inequalities and access to higher
education
so
and actually also recently been involved
in a which i think you're going to talk
about particularly uh looking at options
on the 30 hours
policy in relation to early years so
over to you becky many thanks for
joining us
great thank you so much
and thank you so much for inviting me to
speak
so i'm going to start to just uh talk
through a bit of the evidence that the
sutton trust has found in terms of the
impact and what we know so far
on the impact of the pandemic on the
early years and specifically on kind of
poorer children and what we can
ascertain from that so far from our own
research
so first off i'd echo a lot of what's
previously been said
what we've tried to do to add to the
evidence for that is we carried out some
polling both of parents
and of primary schools senior leaders to
try to get a better understanding from
their point of view of what the impact
has been on preschool-aged children
so first off as you'd probably guess a
lot of parents are really worried about
the impact that the pandemic has had on
their own children
so we found that 64 were worried about
their child's development or well-being
during the pandemic
and then in terms of schools and what
schools are seeing we did this polling
in june this year asking senior leaders
to look back for this cohort of young
people that entered reception in
september 2020 so had been impacted by
the pandemic what were they seeing in
terms of school readiness compared to
what they would expect in a normal year
so we found that over half of them said
that fewer pupils were school-ready
than what they would usually expect and
that in schools with the most deprived
intakes this was actually 67
so
we need a lot more evidence and a lot of
the the future uh kind of research
people have already mentioned is going
to really add to this and better our
understanding on what the impact has
been but it does really seem that at the
moment there is a you know a big impact
in terms of what these schools are
seeing
and that that impact is unequal and as
we would expect for all the reasons
talked about at the beginning that
families have had really different
experiences in the pandemic that the
home learning environment will be really
different
there are good reasons to think that
young children from poorer families will
have had a larger impact
then in terms of what that actually
means to the schools going forward those
senior leaders are worried about lots of
the
kind of associated impacts so
59 worried about the increased strain
that it could have on teachers over half
on the long term impact on children's
attainment and 42 are worried about the
potential for increased staffing costs
to be able to deal with that lack of
school readiness as those kids go
through the school system so this is
something that is going to have an
impact likely on these children
throughout their time in education so it
is really important that we act early to
be able to actually
prevent that from being a kind of
longer-term impact where we can for
those children
also really importantly the clear
majority of the senior leaders that we
polled 93
said they felt that more time in early
years provision before children start in
reception helps to support school
readiness and 71 said they felt that it
helped considerably
so making sure that children have access
to as we've heard already that kind of
high quality early years provision
before they start at school is really
important
so
i'd absolutely echo the points that ryan
made previously about this generally not
being as much of a political issue so
far is what we've seen in schools and
absolutely agree that it should be
something that is really being thought
about um in part of the pandemic
recovery
and i'd like to make a case for why i
think the 30 hours is a really good
place to do that um partially because of
the age range we're talking about three
and four-year-olds that those are people
who over the next few years today's
one-year-olds two-year-olds
three-year-olds will be going through
that system if you changed it at this
point and where those very young
children have been impacted by the
pandemic that is the point that we have
the opportunity to make a change whereas
if you were to do things say in changing
provision for today's one-year-olds
quite quickly you'd be getting to the
point where you're not having fingers
crossed depending on what happens with
the pandemic next people that have had
those really kind of severe pandemic
impacts going through the system
but also because the current that yowa
policy is just simply
very unfair in terms of who's able to
access it
and so at the moment for those who
aren't aware
when young children are two years old
they are able to access if they're from
a disadvantaged family 15 hours of early
education child care per week so that is
us
as a society recognizing that those
young people live in challenging
circumstances and it would be beneficial
for them to have additional hours
but then when we get to the ages of
three and four that focus shifts so
rather than disadvantaged children
getting more hours they are actually now
able to access fewer hours because of
the 30-hour entitlement and the way it's
designed so there are requirements
around working families for people being
able to access it they have to meet
certain criteria around their working
hours
and i'm going to give another shout out
to um christine from the ifs who did the
economic modeling on this
but she found from looking at who's able
to actually claim the entitlement in the
existing
criteria that just 20 of families in the
bottom third of the earnings
distribution are eligible for the
existing entitlement
so we wouldn't accept this for schools
we wouldn't say that at school age it
would be acceptable for the state to
provide
more hours of kind of funded school time
for richer families but that is exactly
what we're doing in the early years and
we think that that is a major mistake
in terms of the evidence to actually
make a change for this well
first off and obviously this is you know
correlation not causation but we know
that since the the uh 30-hour entity
month was actually brought in the
gradual slowing of um and kind of
closing of the attainment gap in the
early years has actually started to
widen out again
and we know that there's good evidences
has been discussed that time in quality
earlier settings is beneficial for
children's outcomes now i want to
address directly the point that i made
in terms of the number of hours and
whether or not they are you know more
than 15 hours is needed
first off the point i'd make for that is
that while the kind of headline policy
is called 15 hours per week 30 hours per
week in reality it's not that many hours
because it's only during kind of school
term time not the summer holidays so 15
hours per week is not actually 15 hours
per week every week of the year and 30
hours per week is not 30 hours every
week of the year
in terms of the exact number of hours
that would be beneficial to be honest we
don't have good enough evidence at the
moment and i think more research here
would be really helpful
but we as part of this fast art project
conducted a really large literature
review looking at the existing evidence
and it seems that somewhere between 15
and 25 hours from the over the age of
two is beneficial as long as it's of a
high quality and that the really
negative impacts tend to be seen over 35
hours
so in terms of getting us to
the majority of children having the same
number of hours of entitlement
and having an a number of hours that's
likely to be beneficial i think that is
a really clear case for extending the
30-hour entitlement because it won't
actually be 30 hours in terms of what
they're accessing per week
and also just politically realistically
i don't think you're going to get a
situation where the government will take
away ours from parents who already have
them
whereas i think you could get a
situation where that current entitlement
is extended and extended to those
poorest families
so i think politically realistically
perhaps fewer hours would be okay but i
just don't see that you're going to get
an actual reduction of that in terms of
the actual policy so
extending and making the 30 hours
universal i think would be the best way
to go they are already doing this at the
moment in scotland it's just about to
happen it's like in the process of
happening at the moment and i think
looking at that and seeing what the
impact of that is will be really
important
now again christine did some modelling
to look at the costs of this and there
is a lot of uncertainty around this
because it depends a lot on take-up and
whether or not people take up new
entitlements at the same level that
they've taken up previous entitlements
or not
um but on the kind of central scenario
that she modeled she estimated that it
would cost about 250 million per year to
be able to make it universal by 2024-25
so
you know that does sound like
a lot but to keep in mind that the
existing entitlements actually cost 735
million so to be able to bring people
into that entitlement it's actually not
that large an increase on the existing
spend
and there are ways to do it cheaper you
could just bring only deprived children
in and that would cost about 165 million
a year again with that
uncertainty around the exact amount of
the cost
um and you could reduce eligibility on
the top end so if you brought it down to
a per parent cap of 50 000 a year you'd
save about 100 million a year so there
are ways to make it cheaper but
if you did do that i think you'd lose a
lot of the benefits first off to kind of
just about managing families who really
could benefit from this kind of
provision but if you extended at the
bottom end and cut off at the top end
there would be still some of those
people in the middle who wouldn't be
eligible if we say used the existing uh
two-year-old disadvantage criteria
but also that you just make it a lot
more complicated for families and one
thing even within existing funding i'd
really advocate that people could do
is just make it less often that people
have to reapply for the entitlement and
that could really help but i think
making it universal could be really
beneficial to take up as well thank you
thank you very much and becky
um i we're we yeah we're quite tight for
time and we really like to um draw on
other people that's really interesting
and very useful and interesting to hear
um the arguments for for the 30-hour
change particularly in the light of the
pandemic so just to remind people and do
vote um anytime between now and the end
of our session and then we'll have a
quick look at the poll
and please do use um a slider for any
kind of questions that you have
uh that we can um ask the audience
uh uh ask our panelists to respond to
um
i wanted to um i wanted to just ask
um
i mean i think ryan you put some some
some really interesting and challenging
kind of question uh kind of proposals up
i'd be interested
to know um
uh perhaps starting with sarah about how
you know how you respond to um the
proposals
that that ryan has raised in relation to
him you know the balance about improving
quality
some of the the idea around loans in
relation to
uh trying to improve affordability
um and and interestingly sort of the the
issue around compulsory provision once
we get to
a stage that the quality
uh that you know if quality is good
enough and there is universal provision
sarah would you would you just um share
any any thoughts that you have
yeah i'd be happy to share any sort of
immediate reactions like to this uh i
thought this uh this idea of the the
income contingent loans like was
actually really interesting it's
very much sort of um you know
i think take seriously the idea that you
know early education is an investment uh
for families to make in their children's
like human capital and um that families
may be constrained like financially some
families are constrained financially
from making that sort of investment and
this is you know a really important
issue and that sort of system i think
could uh definitely sort of solve that
um i'm wondering if there are examples
of countries that um have this sort of
system that we could uh sort of learn
from one sort of immediate issue i was
thinking about and i'd love to hear
ryan's sort of um thoughts on that is
again around the issue of take-up and
whether
uh we might again sort of see you know
the gaps that we already see
um you know between
sort of families that are a bit more far
removed like so from the system and sort
of feeling a bit uh reluctant you know
to take on some debt uh for the
education of their children and and how
we could sort of work around those
issues to provide reassurance and to
really work on like you know the
information that we're providing to
these families so that this is a
successful policy
ryan would you like to respond to that
yeah i mean it's very good points um i
mean there is internationally there
isn't any other examples unfortunately
i hope we can be a pioneer but who knows
um and then on the second point around
um
sort of debt aversion amongst their
income families which you're right is is
a problem
um and we need to think very carefully
about it i don't want to get massively
into the debate around student loans but
there is
there's obviously evidence
showing that if children
young people at the age of 18 get the
grades they tend to go to university
there isn't the debt aversion however
there may be debt aversion
earlier on which impacts
how they view their education trajectory
and maybe the feeling that they're not
going to go to
um university so we do need to be
careful about that but of of course what
i'm proposing is not a mortgage style
loan it's an income contingent loan and
therefore if a parent is not earning
enough they don't pay it it's
progressive in that sense they're
protected um but you know
i can bang on about that for hours on
end but i still get that there will be
some sense of this debt aversion and
there's problems with that also in the
student loan model so we need to think
very carefully about how we communicate
thank you yes
i think it's really interesting about i
mean um ava you had you know some points
about how to
um
address some of the issues on how we
subsidize
child care and and some species in the
system that that actually feel like
they're quite resolvable
um and and so i wonder what is there a
way of doing some simplification
of the funding of the sort of demand
side for child care
um that you know could include a look
you know a look at loans but also
looking at
whether we're using the funding in the
best possible way because it's highly
complex
i don't know what um
either what you think about that or or
others want to respond to
well i
don't want to repeat my point about
retrospective payments i think
most well-functioning systems across
europe expect parents to to pay income
related fees you know although of course
within the eu we've now got the
recommendation accepted of the child
guarantee
which will mean that poor children or
children at risk of poverty get all
their public services free you know and
um well we're not in the eu anymore but
um
but i think that there is something else
at that point that ryan made about the
the
loans which is to do with the way we
view the system and we view children
within their system you know i think the
early childhood education and care
system makes a contribution to the
public good you know to the well-being
of society as a whole and the well-being
of the economy
and
the
uh the approach with the loans
that does seem to go back to children as
entirely a private responsibility of
parents you know don't have them if you
can't afford them type of things so
that's what i'm worried about i do think
the system should be more generous
we can't easily go back on the fact that
a proportion of it is free you know but
and in most european countries at least
one year if not two are free
yes although i mean ryan you make very
clear that this is on top of
existing payments for for entitlement so
i guess it's about balance between
public and private
uh
uh funding of early years in child care
but but it's a it's a point well made
um
i also wanted to um ask you you know um
sarah you get this very kind of
comprehensive well you know really
interesting um uh analysis of the impact
of covert on on young children and there
was really consensus across the the
panelists about
and the significance of the impact is
there anything else that we should and i
think you raised it in your in your last
slide sarah
is there anything else
that covet is thrown up which actually
makes us rethink
how we should respond are there other
particular things about kobit which
which actually you know where where the
pre-existing things we thought about in
response
to the challenges of inequalities in the
early years are not sufficient
maybe becky you might want to start with
that
i will say one of the things that's
concerned us as we're coming out of the
pandemic is the number of providers
who've ended up closing because of the
economic pressure
and i think given the importance of the
early years there is this question of
you know how can you have this system i
guess where private providers are able
to just end up collapsing if there is
some kind of emergency like this or even
has been has been talked about kind of
local pressures
and what does that say to us more
generally about how importantly we're
thinking of the earlier system
that it is able to have that happen but
also now how do we address that because
it has happened
yeah
um uh is there some
some way of kind of increasing the
security for those very wrong
particularly for those vulnerable
providers and where they are any any
other
any of you want to come in on very sarah
i can see you dean
yeah
um
yeah i just perhaps wanted to go back to
something i mentioned quickly um during
my during my presentation which is you
know this evidence sort of emerging that
um maybe the strongest impacts of kovid
are on the emotional and um
you know social development of children
and so although that's always been you
know an important like a domain i think
of development there has been a lot of
focus on like you know academic
achievement and sort of school readiness
even though school readiness obviously
includes emotional social and personal
development you know there's been a lot
of focus on like you know numeracy
and language skills and i think
perhaps for older children and for
adults the pandemic has i think
strengthen the case for
uh well-being for caring about
well-being for
um you know caring about mental health
i'm not i don't know if the sort of the
policy solutions have already you know
been developed enough but i think for
you know very young children perhaps i
think the pandemic is also um
shining some you know new light i think
on this very very important uh domain of
development and it isn't clear you know
i think um
that
early education and care can completely
be the solution uh to this issue it also
has a lot to do with what is going on in
the home the parent parenting practices
and this is where i think we should
really be thinking about you know more
family support sort of interventions
like family hubs uh that have been um
you know mentioned in by our panelists
you know as playing potentially a very
important role uh to strengthen
that aspect of child development
yes i think that that that really
resonates with me and i um
and i so i wonder whether
um
uh how far could family hubs or other
sorts of interventions
um start to to take a more sort of
rounded view
um in terms of supporting supporting
young children as they're trying to sort
of settle into into into the early years
or
um do other people have have a
particular view about what we should be
doing
if if i may come in i i really think
that the issue that has already been
raised by ryan about the
workforce becomes absolutely crucial
because whether it's a children's center
or a family hub or a private for profit
day nursery it all depends on the
quality of the workforce
and the lack of turnover and so on
whether the children actually benefit
from
participating in the services on offer
so this again in the limits of what we
can do here today this is a very big
topic
but it is absolutely crucial
um just an example ireland has just
announced in its latest budget and they
had a comprehensive spending review as
well
but it will
pay core funding to provide us
you know with a specific purpose of
raising the
pay and conditions of
the staff working there you know which
is
bad like it is here but we are you know
across the board we have in the the
private sector compared to the schools
where the smaller proportion of our
children get part of mostly part-time
early education two three and four
four-year-olds four-year-olds in school
um you know we have
some of the lowest paid workers
in our economy
yeah so sort of stability the stability
of the workforce is being as sort of as
a fundamental
uh starting point but then i guess
there's an an interesting question about
the
the kind of range of skills and training
and support
um
uh and and the relationship i think
between the early years sector the early
early early years in education childcare
and what goes on at home
but i do think
family hubs are potentially depending on
how policy develops potentially a way to
to do some of those things bring some of
the learning from surestart and our time
i'm afraid is really vanishing and we've
really just begun
and
i think if i don't um i think we should
just go back to the poll to see whether
those people have been listening to uh
your wise and and i think really
thoughtful contributions have have made
any change in their priorities so
um greg
could you share with us both what people
said originally and what what they're
saying now
okay
so that's the that's that's what that's
what they said at the beginning
uh and and show us
okay
so that's interesting
um we've got a clearer yes so we've got
more people saying that this very very
this this first stage of life
uh uh of the children who are
disadvantaged from the age of one making
early education and care free for this
particular group
oh it's changing it's changing as we
speak
is 35
and then the others fall below so it's
it's just interesting we didn't talk
that much about this oh still changing
we didn't talk that much about that very
early face but it is interesting to
reflect that actually the um the best
start the children in andrea andrew
edison's work
um
didn't address child care because that
was out of scope and i think there's a
real great case for the importance of
thinking about how these services work
together
uh uh whether they're integrated in
terms of children's centers or family
hubs or just much better coordination
and that we think about things across
the place it's still changing so i think
we're gonna have to stop
um
uh in terms of the poll i think it's
just quite nice to see uh what people's
views are
thank you um to all of our speakers um i
think the thing that stands out very
strongly for me is
it just
is to re to reiterate this this
incredibly important phase of life and
that then pandemic has
um shown us
in a sense just how important it is and
that we do really need to think about
how do we both build the evidence base
and elevate
uh this in in public debate so that as
we think about how we come out of the
pandemic we use both our existing
tools and new ways of addressing those
inequalities those very worrying
disadvantages that we see
uh happening in terms of children's
development at this really critical
stage and i think there was you know
that seemed to be a consensual view
across the piece
uh and we'll need further discussions
just to decide and and talk about
priorities
but thank you to all of you and for your
time and for the discussion and
we'll continue the conversation