Attending early childhood education and care (ECEC) is linked to positive gains for disadvantaged children across all learning domains. The strength of this association for disadvantaged children is particularly apparent in emergent literacy and emergent numeracy, and greater than that for advantaged children (Figure 6.1). This suggests that investments in ECEC should be a key component in any strategy to improve early equity.
Improving Early Equity
From Evidence to Action
Attending ECEC is linked to stronger cognitive development among disadvantaged children
Source: (OECD, 2020[9])OECD International Early Leaning Survey 2018 database https://www.oecd.org/education/school/early-learning-and-child-well-being-study/early-learning-and-child-well-being-3990407f-en.htm, (accessed on 6 June 2022).
While participation in ECEC has been increasing in many countries over the last two decades, universal access is still not available in a number of countries and communities. Where access to ECEC is not universal disadvantaged children are less likely to attend ECEC than advantaged children (OECD, 2020[6])).
The quality of ECEC matters a great deal for children’s development ( (Bartik and Hershbein, 2018[17]); (van Huizen and Plantenga, 2018[18]),). High-quality provision, compared to average-quality provision, can result in double the growth in children’s verbal comprehension, in addition to significant gains in numeracy and social-emotional development ( (Siraj, Kingston and Melhuish, 2020[19])). Thus, having reliable data on the quality and impact of ECEC provision is critical for assessing whether the potential benefits from ECEC are in fact being fully realised.
High-quality, compared to average quality ECEC provision, can result in double the growth in children’s verbal comprehension.
Accelerating Indigenous Children’s Learning in Manitoba
Indigenous children’s early years are a key period for addressing inequities in educational outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) included a call to action for governments to ensure culturally appropriate early childhood education programmes to enhance young children’s development. The Commission also noted the importance of parenting support to address legacies from residential schooling, which generations of Indigenous parents experienced as children.
As part of an effort to address early inequities, the Manitoba provincial government established a tailored early childhood education and care centre in an impoverished urban neighbourhood in Winnipeg, aimed at ‘levelling the playing field’ for vulnerable children and their families. Approximately 50 percent of the children in the programme are from Indigenous families.
Children enter the centre at three months of age and attend five days a week, full-time, until they start school. Each child has a primary caregiver at the centre, whose role is to provide individualised, relationship-based care. The focus is on language development, which supports greater subsequent cognitive and social-emotional development.
Engagement with children’s families is an important part of the programme, both to support parents in enhancing their children’s development and learning and to address any barriers or issues that families may be facing. Engagement with families is strength-based and occurs through regular home visits, involving parents in the centre, a monthly parent support group and a co-located drop-in resource centre.
Recognition of Indigenous cultures is also a key aspect of the programme. An Indigenous Programme Co-ordinator is on-staff, and Indigenous art, knowledge and cultural practices are woven into the day-to-day environment. Staff are drawn from the local community, including Indigenous staff, which helps to strengthen the connections with families and the community and keeps staff turnover relatively low.
Children’s language development is regularly tracked, alongside children in a control group from the same community. As illustrated in figure 14 below, the positive benefits of the programme over a two year period are slightly higher for Indigenous children than non-Indigenous children, although both groups of children make considerable learning gains in comparison with the control group.
StatLink 2 https://stat.link/69uwz0
Source: Adapted from (Stevens et al., 2019[20]) “The Abecedarian Approach in a Low-Resource Urban Neighborhood in Canada: An Impact Evaluation in a Child Care Setting”, International Journal of Early Childhood, Vol. 51/2, pp. 217-232, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-019-00245-