LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author's final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. 1A question of quality: Do children from disadvantaged backgrounds receive lower quality early childhood education and care? accessed by three and four year olds in England varies by children's background.Focusing on the free entitlement to early education, the analysis combines information from three administrative datasets for 2010-11, the Early Years Census, the Schools Census and the Ofsted inspections dataset, to obtain two main indicators of quality: staff qualification levels and Ofsted ratings. These data are combined with child-level indicators of area deprivation (IDACI scores) as a proxy measure of children's background.The paper finds that children from more disadvantaged areas have access to better qualified staff, largely because they are more likely than children from richer areas to attend maintained nursery classes staffed by teachers, and less likely to attend services in the private, voluntary and independent (PVI) sectors.However, within both maintained and PVI sectors, services catering for more disadvantaged children receive poorer quality ratings from Ofsted, with a higher concentration of children from disadvantaged areas itself appearing to reduce the likelihood of top Ofsted grades. This may be in part because Ofsted ratings reflect levels of child development, and therefore reward settings where children enter at a more advanced starting point, but it may also be that it is genuinely harder to deliver an outstanding service to a more disadvantaged intake. The Questions therefore remain about the extent to which quality of provision is consistent across the sector. 4Our focus in this paper is on the way in which variations in quality are associated with children's background. If early education is to play a role in ensuring a more equal starting point for children from different backgrounds, it is important that the highest quality provision is accessible for the children who need it most. We ask how far this appears to be the case in practice in England. Are children who experience disadvantage at home more or less likely than children from richer households to access the highest quality early education?To address this question we combine information from three administrative dat...

This article investigates the influence of wealth, a frequently neglected aspect of the economic circumstances of families, on children's development. Using the UK Millennium Cohort Study, it explores whether parental wealth (net total wealth, net housing wealth, net financial wealth, and house value) is associated with children's cognitive ability, mental, and physical health at age 11 (N = 8,645), over and above parental socioeconomic status and economic resources, in particular permanent income. Housing wealth was associated with fewer emotional and behavioral problems, independent of the full set of controls. Children's verbal cognition and general health were more strongly associated with family permanent income and socioeconomic characteristics than with wealth.

This paper assesses how far residential moves can result in improvement or deterioration of the housing and neighbourhood circumstances for families with young children. It uses data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study concentrating on the time between infancy and age 5, 2001 to 2006. First, we ask which families moved home and in what circumstances. We then examine how moving changed several aspects of housing: space standards, damp problems, and tenure. We show that the majority of moves resulted in improvements to housing conditions, especially in reducing overcrowding. We also consider neighbourhood circumstances, proxied by a measure of local poverty at small‐area level. Movers generally ended up in neighbourhoods with lower levels of poverty, or no worse, but almost one fifth of moves were downward or remained in the 30 percent poorest areas. We ask whether locating in an area with more local poverty may help achieve a larger home. There is evidence of such a trade‐off—1 in 5 families moved to a larger home, which was either in a poorer area than before or remained in the 30 percent poorest areas. We conclude by showing how the path of upward housing mobility, while numerically dominant, was far less common among families with relatively low resources and whose moves were attendant on partnership changes. For them, moves often result in smaller homes in poorer areas.

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This paper addresses the problem of measuring neighbourhood characteristics and change when working with individual level datasets to understand the effects of residential mobility. Currently available measures in Britain are in various respects unsuitable for this purpose. The paper explores a new indicator of small area poverty: the Unadjusted Means-tested Benefits Rate (UMBR), which divides claimants of means-tested benefits in a small area by the number of households. We describe changes in area poverty between 2001 and 2006, using UMBR. As often assumed, these are generally negligible, but small areas in Bdisadvantaged urban^and Bmulticultural city life^communities did change considerably in this period. We also link UMBR to the first three waves of the UK Millennium Cohort Study, a survey of families with children born at the beginning of the 2000s. We examine opinions about Appl. Spatial Analysis (2016) neighbourhood and find that parents living in areas of higher poverty did tend to express more negative views than those living elsewhere. Living in high poverty areas was also associated with moving home, and those families who retrospectively gave neighbourhood considerations as reasons for moving did move into areas with markedly lower poverty rates. Finally, we compare families' moving trajectories to trends in poverty within areas. We are able to show that a large proportion of families who moved to poorer neighbourhoods were at double disadvantage, as they often moved to areas with increasing poverty rates. We conclude that UMBR can be used to enhance understanding of changing neighbourhood contexts in cohort studies, at least for this period, although it still suffers from the same conceptual and technical difficulties as other available alternatives in terms of its ability to capture aspects of neighbourhood quality.

Most literature on the relationship between childcare availability and maternal labour force participation examines childcare for preschool aged children. Yet families must continue to arrange childcare once their children enter primary school, particularly in countries where the school day ends at lunchtime. In this paper we examine the case of Germany, a country that has moved from an exclusively half-day school system to one where formal afternoon care is increasingly available. We estimate the effect of afternoon care on maternal labour supply. To do so, we use a novel matching technique, entropy balancing, and draw on the rich and longitudinal data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We show that children's afternoon care increases mothers' employment rate and their working hours. To confirm the robustness of our results we conduct a series of sensitivity analysis and apply a newly proposed method to assess possible bias from omitted variables. Our findings highlight how childcare availability shapes maternal employment patterns well after school entry.

For over a decade, all three-year-olds in England have been entitled to a free part-time early education place. One aim of this policy is to close developmental gaps between higher-income and lowincome children. However, the success of the initiative depends on children accessing the places. Using the National Pupil Database, we examine all autumn-born four-year-olds attending in January 2011, and ask whether they started attending when first eligible, in January 2010. One in five children did not access their free place from the beginning, and the proportion is much higher among children from families with persistently low incomes. We also find differences by ethnicity and home language, but these factors explain only a small share of the income gradient. We go on to explore associations between non-take-up and local area factors. In areas with higher child poverty rates, take-up is lower overall, but the gap between low-income and other families is smaller. There are also various associations between take-up and local proportions of different provider types (maintained, private, voluntary, Sure Start). In particular, the voluntary sector seems to have more flexibility than maintained provision to offer places in January, and more success than private providers in reaching children from lower-income backgrounds. The analysis also highlights how take-up overall is relatively high and the gap by income level is smaller in areas with more Sure Start provision. This suggests that aspects of Sure Start facilitated access among low-income families, and could perhaps be replicated as implementation of the free entitlement continues to be expanded.

Devising appropriate policy measures for the integration of refugees is high on the agenda of many governments. This paper focuses on the social integration of families seeking asylum in Germany between 2013 and 2016. Exploiting differences in services availability across counties as an exogenous source of variation, we evaluate the effect of early education attendance by refugee children on their parents' integration. We find a significant and substantial positive effect, in particular on the social integration of mothers. The size of the estimate is on average around 52% and is mainly driven by improved language proficiency and employment prospects.