Why early childhood education and care matter

Decades of evidence show that the first few years of a child's life are critical in supporting their physical, mental, and emotional development long-term. Because of how quickly children's brains and bodies are growing – particularly in the first three years of life – the experiences they have can have lifelong effects. One of the experiences that can help is high-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC).

This can be especially important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. For example, poverty can have wide-ranging effects on a child's long-term development, from a greater risk of mental health issues to poorer cognitive skills. When they start school, children who come from lower-income backgrounds or from non-majority communities are at greater risk of learning delays and of falling behind their peers from more affluent backgrounds. In the longer term, they have a greater risk of repeating grades and of not graduating from high school.

High-quality ECEC has been shown to make up for many of these gaps. While well-designed, long-term experimental studies providing definitive causal evidence on its impacts into adulthood are rare, those that have been done have found that when children from disadvantaged backgrounds attend high-quality ECEC, they experience a variety of long-term benefits.

One of the clearest is in terms of academic and cognitive outcomes. Several randomized controlled trials have found that when children from disadvantaged backgrounds attend high-quality ECEC, they are better prepared for starting school, with better cognitive development and more academic skills. Long-term, they achieve higher educational qualifications and higher job earnings. They also have a reduced likelihood of involvement in the criminal justice system.

Attending high-quality ECEC can also improve physical health long-term. One randomized controlled trial, for example, found that when children participated in full-time, high-quality ECEC programs for the first five years of life, the health benefits lasted into adulthood. When they were 21 years old, those who had been enrolled in ECEC were less likely to exhibit risky health behaviors, such as smoking marijuana or not wearing a seatbelt; had better health; and had lower rates of depression than children who had not been enrolled. At 30 years old, they had lower rates of various risk factors for heart disease, such as better blood pressure readings.

The research is also clear, however, that the quality of ECEC is key. When ECEC has been rolled out large-scale without ensuring that every program features low child-teacher ratios, components of family support, better-trained teachers, and child-centred instruction, the benefits have been more mixed or unclear. UNICEF's report highlights the need not just to provide more equitable and affordable access to ECEC, but to ensure it is high quality. Indeed, UNICEF's analysis finds that in Europe and Central Asia, of ECEC centres that report their figures, there is a child to teacher ratio of ten to one – a high ratio that can inhibit how much quality time and attention a staff member can provide each child. Qualifications also tend to be lower for staff members who work with younger children, despite how much we know about how much the early years matter.