Childcare and early years

Early childhood is a period of rapid growth and development, which lays the foundations for later life, but it is also a period in which children are at their most vulnerable. Poverty, poor nutrition and under-stimulating and unhygienic surroundings, which affect millions of children in developing countries, hamper and stifle child health and development.

This paper provides new estimates of the medium- and long-term impacts of Head Start on health and behavioral problems.

This report describes new research on the impact of different pre-school experiences on academic outcomes at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4, age 16) and relates this to the potential longer-term economic benefits for both the individuals themselves and the exchequer.

This note summarises the results of two related research projects. With funding from the ESRC through its Secondary Data Analysis Initiative, and the Nuffield Foundation, Jo Blanden (University of Surrey), Emilia Del Bono (University of Essex), Kirstine Hansen (Institute of Education), Sandra McNally (University of Surrey) and Birgitta Rabe (University of Essex) investigated the impact of free early education on children’s development.

This report estimates the impact of free, universal pre-school education for three year olds on maternal labour supply in England.

The objective of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of an integrated early child development intervention, combining stimulation and micronutrient supplementation and delivered on a large scale in Colombia, for children’s development, growth, and hemoglobin levels.

The authors aim to determine the timing and size of the cognitive deficit associated with poverty in the first 5 years of life and to examine the role of parental characteristics, pre- and postnatal growth, and stimulation in the home in Bangladeshi children.

This paper finds differences in the age at which cognitive skills are tested accounts for the vast majority of the difference in outcomes between children who are born at different times of the year.

We study the socio-economic gradient of child development on a representative sample of low- and middle-income children aged 6-42 months in Bogota, using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, a high quality test based on direct observation of the child’s abilities.

Early childhood investments substantially boost adult health

In this paper we examine the link between wage inequality and consumption inequality using a life cycle model that incorporates household consumption and family labor supply decisions.

Nutrition, information, and household behaviour: experimental evidence from Malawi

This report considers the extent to which differences in parental characteristics explain gaps in cognitive and socio-emotional development between children at older ages.