Opinion & Commentary
Top quality pre-school is child's play
Giving more children access to kindergarten is undeniably a good thing.
There is strong evidence that part-time pre-school attendance before the first year of school has academic and behavioural benefits for children that may persist through to adolescence and even adulthood.
But there's an important caveat - quality is the key.
There is mixed evidence on the impact of low-to-average quality pre-schools.
Some studies show a negative impact of low-quality pre-school education, while others show a short-term benefit that "washes out" in the first few years of school.
Governments have attempted to improve quality by requiring childcare centre and kindergarten staff to have tertiary qualifications in early childhood education.
But research does not conclusively show that pre-school education quality is ensured by having early childhood teachers with university degrees and this is a very expensive reform, the cost of which is passed on to parents in the form of elevated fees.
In the effort to create perfect pre-schools, children can be pushed out of pre-school altogether.
The great shame of this is that the children most likely to miss out on pre-school education are those who need it most.
Numerous studies have found that good quality pre-school education has the most impact on reading and maths abilities of children with low socio-economic backgrounds and those with poor home literacy environments, which are often (but not always) the same families.
This is the challenge for policy makers - to raise quality without creating financial barriers to participation that undermine the objective.
That's where the next policy comes in.
The Federal Government pledged five years ago to increase funding to make it possible for all children to attend a pre-school program for at least 15 hours a week in the year before they begin school.
Though there is already a high rate of kindergarten attendance in Victoria, large numbers of four-year-old children have become eligible for new subsidies that allow them to enrol in kindergarten, or to attend for more hours.
With a finite number of places available in existing centres this is a zero-sum game, at least until supply can catch up to demand.
Not all centres can expand in the short or medium term and this newspaper has reported that in some centres three-year-olds' programs have been displaced to meet the need for four-year-old places.
The question then, is whether the lack of kindergarten places for three-year-olds is likely to have a negative impact.
Unfortunately, there is little research investigating the benefits of pre-school and age of entry, the exception being that most studies do not recommend pre-school attendance before the age of three.
Nonetheless, there is good evidence that individual differences in reading ability that are due to environmental variables (that is, not genetic ability) can be predicted as early as two years old and are stable - and often increase - into adolescence.
The literacy gaps evident in school have their roots in the development of pre-literacy skills at the age of two to three, or even before.
Research strongly points to early oral language ability as fundamental to literacy development.
Children from socially disadvantaged homes are at greater risk of having poor phonological skills, speech and language delays, and limited vocabularies when they begin school.
These skills develop in the first three to four years of life and are facilitated by frequent, responsive and word-rich conversation with adults who are themselves adept in the English language.
Children whose parents have low levels of education are especially vulnerable to missing out on these formative experiences.
As children get older, it gets more difficult to close the achievement gap.
High quality pre-school can significantly mediate the negative impact of a language and literacy-poor home environment, beginning at the age of three.
Government funding for pre-schools should not neglect the children most likely to benefit in the race to provide for all.
Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.
