This project aims to shed light on the broad question of what types of early childcare can be most helpful for what types of children and in terms of what outcomes. Specifically, we focus on a cohort of children born in 1958 to assess the effects of attending nursery schools or classes, playgroups and LEA day nurseries and of early entrance to infant school on a variety of outcomes over the childs life, from cognitive development and socialization to educational attainment and labour market success.

In our methodological approach we first rely on extremely rich background data on child, family and neighbourhood characteristics to implement multiple-treatment non-parametric matching estimators. We subsequently exploit local variation in the public provision of nursery places in the relevant child population as an instrument for nursery attendance. To address the potential concern that LEAs investing in nurseries may also invest in other programmes that benefit children or have other characteristics that affect childrens development, we include a number of additional measures of LEA-level educational spending, policies and characteristics, as well as indicators of the quality of maintained nursery places themselves.