Providing free nursery care to three-year-olds has only temporary effects on children’s development and educational performance, with the advantages disappearing by the time a child reaches the age of 11, according to a new study.

Research presented to the House of Lords by the Institute of Education and the universities of Surrey and Essex found the policy had a “small beneficial impact” on children at age five, but the size of the effect then declined as the children got older before disappearing, the Daily Telegraph reports.

There was “modest” evidence that free nursery schools, a flagship policy of Tony Blair’s Labour government, had more impact on the most disadvantaged children, but it did not close the educational gap between richer and poorer families in the long term.

Dr Jo Blanden, senior lecturer in economics at the University of Surrey, wrote in the Telegraph that “The outcome of today’s report is not one I relish delivering. I had high hopes we would find that this policy did in fact positively impact those who needed it most. But the results we found were not so convenient.”

We know that children from disadvantaged families perform worse throughout education and have poorer life chances” she continued.

“Early interventions are frequently discussed as the best way to close these gaps.”

“We might therefore expect that this policy would have had more of an impact on disadvantaged children, providing them with an early education that would have otherwise been out of their reach. However, we actually found only limited evidence that the children who benefited the most were the poorest.”

“There is a large gap in performance between children who come from deprived areas and their richer peers, and increased access to nursery closed only a very small proportion of this by the end of (the first year of primary school). However, by age 11, even this small educational advantage from extra free places had disappeared.”

A separate study funded by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the University of Essex found that the free nursery place scheme had very little effect on labour force participation rates for mothers with children under three.

For every six children given a free place, only one was from a family that would otherwise not have made use of nursery school. For the other five, the policy was effectively giving parents “a discount on the early education which they would have paid to use anyway.”