Understanding the take-up of early education entitlements

Why do some children miss out on early education, and what can be done to help? This is the question that a new study, funded by the Nuffield Foundation and delivered by the Centre for Evidence and Implementation, Coram Family and Childcare and UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities with Ivana La Valle seeks to answer.

This project will develop new evidence on how the take-up of early education entitlements varies across different families and areas in England, and highlight examples of best practice in supporting take-up. The research aims to have a practical impact by giving practitioners and policy makers the evidence they need to support more families to take up their early education entitlements, both locally and nationally.

Early education is vital to giving young children the best possible start, offering an important opportunity to develop and learn before school. Early education can help to reduce inequalities between disadvantaged children and their peers, and can provide a crucial boost in attainment lasting all the way through to GCSEs. There is a wealth of evidence to support this essential fact – simply put, formal education in the early years really matters.

It was with all this in mind that policymakers developed the early education entitlements for all 3-4-year-olds and disadvantaged 2-year-olds in England. These schemes seek to improve outcomes and narrow the development gap that is present at birth and  continues to grow. However, a substantial number of children do not take up their full entitlement and therefore lose a vital chance to maximise their learning in the early years.

We frequently hear about the innovative interventions that local authorities are making to support families to increase take-up, and a recent study led by our team highlighted the key role played by local authorities in supporting all families to continue accessing early education during the pandemic. But there is not yet a shared understanding across England about the key barriers and facilitators, and hence the best ways to enable children to take up their full early education entitlements.

Existing research in this area has identified some potential barriers, including complex application processes and a lack of awareness about eligibility for funded hours, which some interventions are designed to try to overcome. However, these previous studies have not considered the full range of local factors that can have an important impact. This is a missed opportunity, particularly given that the local context is vital for understanding wide geographical variations.

This lack of clarity also means that local authorities have to take a trial-and-error approach to increasing take-up. Local and national government work to share examples of best practice and learn from each other where they can, but this research aims to make it easier to understand which approaches are likely to work in different parts of the country.

The research programme will comprise four phases:

1. A scoping exercise, gathering insight from existing evidence and experts in the field to inform the design of the rest of the project.
2. A survey of local authority early years staff to understand the local early childhood education and care (ECEC) market and what different local authorities are doing to support families to take up early education.
3. Data analysis at an individual level from the Early Years Census to understand variation in take-up, and at a local authority level to understand structural features and interventions associated with different levels of take-up.
4. Qualitative research with parents, ECEC providers and local authorities to provide detailed insights into barriers among local authorities with take-up rates below what might be expected on the basis of the characteristics of their local population, and the facilitators of take-up among local authorities with take-up rates above what might be expected.

Through this work, we aim to:

• Construct richer measures of take-up of the early education entitlements and explore how these vary across families and local authorities.
• Produce new evidence on structural features of local ECEC systems that seem to support (or undermine) take-up of the early education entitlements among different groups of children.
• Identify local authority interventions used to support take-up of the entitlements among different families, with a view to identifying promising approaches that could be adopted more widely.

We will be sharing our findings as we go to help inform activity, so please let us know if you would like to be hear updates on this project by emailing megan.jarvie@coramfamilyandchildcare.org.uk.