Government switches focus from childcare to child development

We welcome today’s “Plan for Change” government targets which bring a renewed emphasis on improving child development outcomes in the early years. While still committed to delivering the roll-out of the entitlements for children of working parents, the new target announced today represents an important shift of emphasis away from the number of places delivered to the outcomes achieved by children. The commitment to integrated family support services is also welcome.

The target is specifically for 75% of children to achieve the so-called “Good Level of Development” at the end of Reception by 2028. The figure in 2023 was 67.7%. To put this in context, between 2013 and 2019 (the last period for which we have a continuous time series of EYFS Profile data), the percentage of children achieving the GLD rose from 51.7% to 71.8%, but the majority of that change was in the first three years from a low base.  Between 2016 and 2019, the change was from 69.3% to 71.8%.  So that suggests that a rise from 67.7% to 75% would be challenging but achievable if resources are well-targeted.

There are currently significant differences in the percentage of children achieving a GLD according to characteristics such as socio-economic background, age, gender, SEND and ethnicity.  Targeting resources better at the most economically disadvantaged children would be one way of achieving this outcome, for example by raising the Early Years Pupil Premium in early years settings to match the level in schools.  There’s also a gap between the GLD outcomes of girls and boys and when children have SEND, so these are also possibilities to explore what could be done to ensure more inclusive outcomes.  For the former, that may mean needing resources for wider support services to ensure children with SEND get better support, as well as increasing training for early years practitioners to understand better how to support children with SEND. 

Additionally, there is a case for revisiting staff: child ratios for 2-year-olds (recently relaxed from 1:4 to 1:5) and in Reception (which allow for just 1 teacher to 30 children), especially given the growing number of children with SEND and other vulnerabilities. 

Scrapping the Reception Baseline Assessment at the beginning of the Reception year would also allow teachers to focus on getting children settled and getting to know their needs, instead of wasting time during children’s first weeks at school on a test with no value to children, families or teachers.

Most fundamentally, government needs to ensure that the most disadvantaged children are able to access their full entitlements and equalise the eligibility for them so that all children, at least from age two, have access to an equal amount of early childhood education. Under the current system, children of working parents have access to more hours than those of children who don’t, which risks entrenching the disadvantage gap.

Finally, resources need to be more targeted to ensure quality early childhood education, as we know that the way to raise outcomes and close the gap is through high quality provision. This requires investing in the professionals who educate and care for children, through improving qualifications, pay and conditions to create a stable, experienced and knowledgeable workforce.

We look forward to working with government to support this renewed emphasis on child development in the early years.