Childcare and early years

Since the 1970s, many countries have established free or highly subsidized education for all preschool children in the hope of improving children’s learning and socio-economic life chances and encouraging mothers to join the labor force. Evaluations reveal that these policies can increase maternal employment in the short term and may continue to do so even after the child is no longer in preschool by enabling mothers to gain more job skills and increase their attachment to the labor force. However, their effectiveness depends on the policy design, the country context, and the characteristics of mothers of preschoolers.

Expanding access to pre-school education and childcare services has been a key policy on the agenda of many governments for over 30 years. Several motivations have been at the heart of these policies.

In this report, we present long-run series of spending per student in England across the four main stages of education (early years, schools, further education and sixth forms, and higher education).

Journal article looking at the relationship between mother's mental health and childhood behaviour using the Millennium Cohort Study

In this new work, the researchers compared what happened to the labour market outcomes of mothers and fathers as their children moved from being entitled to a free part-time nursery place (offering 15 hours of free childcare per week) to a full-time place at primary school (which effectively offers parents 30–35 hours of free childcare per week).

The success of universal preschool education depends crucially on the policy parameters and specific country context.

This article examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviour of two of the oldest and most widely cited US early childhood interventions evaluated by the method of randomisation with long-term follow-up.

This briefing note is the first output in a programme of work seeking to understand the gender wage gap and its relationship to poverty. Section 1 sets out what we mean by the gender wage gap, how it differs according to education level and how it has evolved over time and across generations. Section 2 provides some descriptive evidence on how the gender wage gap relates to the presence of dependent children and the employment outcomes associated with that.

We assigned two cohorts of kindergarten students, totaling more than 24,000 children, to teachers within schools with a rule that is as good as random. We collected data on children at the beginning of the school year and applied 12 tests of math, language, and executive function (EF) at the end of the year.

Placement in out-of-home care (OHC) indicates serious childhood adversity and is associated with multiple adverse outcomes. Each year 0.5% of children in England live in OHC but evidence is lacking on the cumulative proportion who enter during childhood and how this varies over time. We measured the proportion of children born between 1992 and 2011 who entered OHC, including variation in rates of entry over time, and explored the determinants of these changes using decomposition methods.

The determinants of human capital formation during the early years of life: theory, measurement and policies.

This study compares twins, where one has suffered a health shock and the other has not, investigating how the family evens out the outcomes for the children.

This paper examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviors of two of the oldest and most widely cited U.S. early childhood interventions evaluated by the method of randomization with long-term follow-up.

Early childhood development in the Slums of Cuttack , Odisha, India Baseline report

The socio-economic gradient of child development: cross-sectional evidence from children 6-42 months in Bogota