The purpose of the review was to identify those areas of early years childcare practice that are well evidenced and where the main evidence gaps are, providing an accessible overview of the research in the field for policy-makers and practitioners.
Overall, the studies reported favourable outcomes for children who were attending the examined programmes, across the domains of language and literacy, mathematics, cognitive, socio-emotional and physical outcomes.
However, the literature reviewed did not allow for a more fine-grained assessment of the specific pedagogical practices that work for improving outcomes.
The most frequently tested outcome domain was language and literacy, with findings against this outcome being reported in around half of all the studies included.
There was, however, limited evidence reported on programmes that had longer-term impacts, and programmes that might benefit at-risk groups of children more.
Recommendations:
- More rigorous research into the effectiveness of programmes in England is needed. Knowing that a programme or practice has been shown to be effective is a good starting point. But given that the majority of the studies reviewed were conducted in the US, this severely limits the generalisability of the existing findings to England. There is increasing consensus in the prevention and implementation science field on the challenges of importing programmes developed overseas, specifically: the need to carefully consider the fit with the local context; to make appropriate adaptations while maintaining fidelity with the core elements of the original programme; and, to rigorously evaluate to see if findings are replicated .
- Future research should provide sufficient details on implementation. Disentangling the core aspects of early childhood provision and process quality that are involved in promoting equity in developmental opportunities should be a priority in future research. This is only possible if researchers are able to assess in more detail the variation across programmes and how they were implemented.
- More research is needed for children below the age of 3, and children at risk. There is relatively little research that examines the specific impact of interventions and programmes on children below the age of 3 years and on at-risk groups of children. The relative scarcity of studies investigating these areas means that policy-makers and practitioners are not able to focus their attention on children at greatest risk of falling behind their peers in terms of key developmental milestones. In particular, further evidence on the impact of specific practices for children under the age of 3 would be very relevant to help maximise the impact of government’s disadvantaged 2-year-old free childcare offer.
- A greater focus is needed on assessing the possible sustained impacts of programmes. Notwithstanding the logistical difficulties in conducting longitudinal studies with children across age groups and settings, future studies should prioritise conducting more follow-up measurements with children over longer periods of time. Without such evidence, policy-makers and practitioners are not able to focus their attention on programmes with the longest impacts.
- There is an opportunity to develop research focusing on key areas of early years teaching and practice. There are a range of pedagogical practices and principles – such as scaffolding and child-centred learning – which are widely accepted as being part of effective early years education. However, we found few studies that considered the impact of these practices in isolation. Given the increased focus in the UK in recent years on piloting and trialling interventions in the early years, there is an opportunity to design, pilot and evaluate interventions that build practitioners’ skills in these areas in order to assess whether it is possible to codify and improve practice and if such a change leads to improvements in children’s outcomes.
- Work should be done to disentangle the common elements across the most effective interventions. As noted, the studies identified through this review provide few examples where individual elements of programmes have been tested for effectiveness in isolation. However, it would be possible to take a more forensic look at the content of interventions, going beyond the peer-reviewed literature and to systematically identify common processes and practices deployed by the most effective programmes.
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Teaching, Pedagogy And Practice In Early Years Childcare: An Evidence Review