The Irish Government’s free pre-school programme has been criticised as “a placebo” after a study found it is failing to close the education gap between children from different social classes, The Sunday Times reports.
According to the study, the first to examine the Government’s annual €175 million spend on providing every child with a free year of pre-school education, the programme has had no positive effect on the educational gap between children from higher and lower socio-economic groups. The study looked at 448 children catered for in 70 facilities and found that children with better language and learning skills – resulting from development in the years before the pre-school programme – tended to do best in that year, while children with poorer skills made no improvement. The overall result, the study found, is a widening of the gap between children.
The study concluded that the biggest influences on early child development are family and social class, while participation in a childcare setting prior to the pre-school year was also referenced as having an effect.
“The amount of time spent in an early-years centre, prior to the free pre-school year, had a small but beneficial effect, proportional to the time spent there,” the study authors concluded.
The study comes as the Government is working on plans for a second pre-school year as part of its election pledges, a move which has prompted the study authors to suggest that, based on their findings, the proposed two-year pre-school scheme should be targeted at children earlier in their development.
Meanwhile, in a similar study in Quebec, Canada, researchers examining the province’s universal, State-subsidised childcare system have found that while many children gain academically from the system initially, they later display worse outcomes in terms of health, life satisfaction and crime rates.
Released by Canada’s National Bureau of Economic Research, the study found that while subsidised childcare offers Quebec short-term financial benefits through, for example, greater female participation in the workplace, it also revealed evidence that participation in the scheme led to higher crime rates, especially among boys who also displayed greater hyperactivity and aggression. Girls, meanwhile, displayed declines in pro-social behaviours.
In a similar situation to Ireland, the Quebec study comes as Canada’s New Democrats party has made a national extension of Quebec’s childcare system a central plank of its election pledge.
The Quebec study can be accessed at http://www.nber.org/digest/jun06/w11832.html
