Examining an early intervention policy that could improve education, gender and socioeconomic equity
This week, the NSW and Victorian Governments in Australia announced their plan to introduce an extra year of early education. The plan has implications for education, gender and socioeconomic equity. Dr Rhiannon Parker and Dr Meera Varadharajan consider why this plan is so important and what the Government and policy makers need to consider when implementing it.
People often think that the best time to intervene to close the inequity gap in education and life opportunity is during high school. This is when young people are making critical decisions about work, relationships, and further education. In fact, the most critical period to intervene is the early years of a child’s life.
This week the NSW and Victorian Governments announced their plan to introduce an extra year of free early education within the next decade. Within this scheme:
Parents/carers will have access to free early education when their child turns four. This will be available 5 days a week allowing more parents to take part in the workforce
The scheme will be set up in areas and communities where parents’ access to childcare is low or absent.
This marks one of the biggest educational reforms in a generation. It has the potential to help disadvantaged families in two important ways. First, it will play a significant role in closing the inequity gap by improving all children’s education outcomes. Second, it will help working parents to increase their participation in the workforce.
Early childhood education and care is crucial to the life and educational outcomes of all children. American economist James Heckman says that the root of inequality in our society lies in early childhood experiences. Further, early interventions are one of the most powerful ways of addressing this disadvantage. There have been several long-term interventions that have shown just that. For example, the US government introduced a preschool program called Head Start in 1965. The program provided young children from low-income backgrounds with access to early education. Adults who had participated in Head Start had higher incomes and more years of education compared to their peers.
There is also growing evidence that high quality experiences in preschool significantly improve children’s life outcomes. This research has made it clear that the impact of early intervention has lifelong implications.
Providing free early childhood education will also have implications for gender and socioeconomic equity. Providing more support for parents to take part in the workforce will benefit low-income families and women. Our current economic system disincentivises women with children to work. Due to the cost of childcare, families are often worse off when a child’s primary carer (often the mother) works more hours. This loss is particularly difficult for low-income families to parse. That is why free early education is so important.
Nevertheless, there are both benefits and challenges to the path forward.
The benefits
Providing free early education during the critical years of a young child’s life will have a huge impact on reducing the gap in educational and life opportunity outcomes. Furthermore, the scheme will likely:
Increase women’s workforce participation with flow on socio-economic benefits to society
Provide access to high quality early childhood education and improve educational outcomes in specific locations/for groups of children who would otherwise have missed out
Improve engagement, participation and learning particularly during the important transition years from pre-school to kindergarten
Improve education and other important social and emotional learning outcomes resulting in flow on benefits in primary and secondary years and beyond.
The challenges
Despite these benefits, the scheme to increase early education also comes with a number of challenges. To begin with, while this extra year of education will be free to access, there are no plans to make it compulsory. This will likely impact the level of access and the reach of the scheme. It’s implementation will need to consider a number of factors including:
Existing systems of stratification—If current educational stratification extends to the additional year of school, this approach could widen the education inequity gap.
Context—The ability to understand the potential and contribution of the scheme in the context of local communities and other early learning centres is integral to its success.
Staff shortages—The current staff shortage crisis and the professional status of the (predominantly female) workforce in the early education sector will need to be addressed.
Engagement with families and communities—Outcomes are far better when parents/carers are engaged and involved in their child’s education and schooling.
Program impact—Understanding and responding to the short, medium and long term outcomes of the scheme will be pivotal to its success
What needs to be considered going forward
The NSW and Victorian Governments will benefit from considering the following factors as the scheme is being planned and finalised:
Ensure the program reaches as many children as possible (for example, governments can consider short-term incentives as a mechanism to boost buy-in to the scheme)
Have a strong knowledge of and a collaborative approach to understanding local contexts, current early education options and community needs
Create a system of training, rewarding and valuing early education staff to build a pipeline of attracting and retaining a qualified and diverse workforce in the sector
Lay the foundations for creating and maintaining a strong partnership with families and communities
Establish a strong evidence base to capture various outcomes (for example, rate of women’s workforce participation, rate of attendance, learning outcomes)
Put in place initiatives and policy designed to reduce Australia’s sky rocketing education stratification.
The NSW and Victorian Governments have come up with an ambitious plan to hit two birds with one stone—improving education and life outcomes while also increasing carers/women’s workforce participation. In order to achieve these two interlinked outcomes, and to ensure maximum and sustained uptake of this opportunity, it is important that the building blocks are set up right. It is important that we not only address the early years of a child’s life, but that we do so by ensuring the inequity gaps aren’t widened.
About the authors:
Dr Rhiannon Parker is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Impact whose work in education includes research on school belonging, career aspirations, gender differences in self-belief, and influences on educational attainment and interest. She has also worked with many organisations within the for-purpose industry to identify and evaluate the outcomes of in-school mentoring, leadership and wellbeing programs. You can follow her on Twitter here: @DrRhiannonBree
Dr Meera Varadharajan is a Research Fellow (Education) at the Centre for Social Impact. Meera’s research is about education accessibility and equity, and the use of a systems thinking approach to build sector and organisational capacity to create social impact. As a qualitative researcher, she is passionate about connecting human stories and experiences in projects and program evaluations that serve to drive purposeful change. Her research interests also include vulnerable students’ well-being, teacher education, teachers’ lives and educational philosophy
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