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Funded places for the early years should be aimed at the poorest families, according to a new report from the OECD.

 

The international policy thinktank has released a report titled Starting Strong 2017, arguing in favour of high-quality early education and care. The OECD says that government investments in early childhood education will improve social mobility and benefit disadvantaged children the most.

 

The report says: “In well-functioning systems, governments develop clear and consistent strategies for efficiently allocating resources, including investment in long-term planning and quality initiatives. Investment should be directed towards achieving high-quality pedagogical goals rather than the simple creation of places.”

 

It added: "Increasing diversity can also be a challenge for getting parents engaged in ECEC services. Often reported barriers include different cultural needs, views or languages. Uneven parental engagement with different socio-economic backgrounds can result in greater inequity. It is therefore particularly important that real efforts are made to reach out to the most deprived families."

 

Gabriela Ramos, chief of staff at the OECD, added: “Giving all children access to high quality early education and care will lay the foundations for future skill development, boost social mobility and support inclusive growth.”

 

The Alliance has welcomed the reports’ findings. Chief excutive, Neil Leitch, said: “Over recent years, government policy in England has been increasingly preoccupied with making more, cheaper places available to parents, with nowhere near enough attention paid to whether or not these places are of good enough quality. As this report highlights, early years education can have a significantly positive impact on children’s long-term attainment, but only if the quality of the services provided is sufficiently high.”

 

The OECD has also warned that the current 30-hours approach of focusing on working families can reduce the benefits of early education as it means that the most disadvantaged families miss out.

 

Neil added: “We have long argued that, given the current limited resources, the government should focus on its spending on where it is needed most. As such, we remain at a loss as to why there has been no attempt to rethink the current eligibility criteria for the 30-hour offer. As it stands, a family with a household income of nearly £200,000 will be eligible for the scheme, while another where, for example, one partner works 15 hours a week at the minimum wage in addition to volunteering, training or further education, will not. How is the an effective use of government funding?”