Access, quality and equity in early childhood education and care: A South Australian study

Abstract

While much is known about the factors related to student performance beyond Grade 3 (e.g. Adams, 2012, Marks, 2015 less is known about factors that are related to student performance in early childhood education and the early years in primary school. As part of the 'I go to school' project in South Australia, this study tracked children attending integrated preschool/childcare centres -known as Children's Centres -as they made their transition to school. Results indicated that children who attended early childhood education programs that were of higher quality -as characterised by higher staff qualifications and a greater range and more engaging children's activities -showed a greater gain in cognitive development than children who attended lower quality programs. Findings also suggested that children who benefitted the most from attendance in these programs were children from backgrounds of greater social disadvantage than children from less disadvantaged backgrounds.

Impact of early childhood education settings on the systems thinking skills of preschool children through the lens of Bronfenbrenner's theory

“…The findings of the study showed that the children in the two German mainstream education cases benefited from the ECE service offered to them to similar degrees in spite of the differences in their parents' backgrounds. Overall, this finding underlines the potential of highquality preschool education to serve as one of the great equalizers in terms of reducing the impact of social inequalities on educational achievement (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006;Cebolla-Boado, Jonas, & Salazar, 2017;Krieg, Curtis, Hall, & Westenberg, 2015). Bronfenbrenner (1979) stressed the importance of the way environmental settings are constructed, because it has the potential to facilitate proximal processes that are mainly first-hand interactions (Bronfenbrenner, 1993).…”

Unpacking and unpicking the challenge of 600 hours of preschool attendance

“…Smaller State-based studies also point to lower-than-expected levels of ECE participation in disadvantaged communities. Krieg et al (2015), for example, collected attendance records for 99 children in their early weeks of attending 10 Department of Education funded integrated ECE services in metropolitan areas of South Australia. Results showed that 40% of children attended for less than 15 h per week.…”

“…The benefits of attending quality early childhood education (ECE) programs have been wellestablished for children from low socioeconomic and ethnically diverse backgrounds (Krieg et al, 2015;Yoshikawa et al, 2013;Zaslow et al, 2016) and also for the general population (D'Souza et al, 2023;Melhuish et al, 2015;Meloy et al, 2019). Studies have also confirmed that educational benefits accrue from attending a 2-year program beginning from age 3 years (Balladares & Kankaraš, 2020;Infurna & Montes, 2020;Sammons et al, 2002) for between 15 to 30 hours (h) per week (Gilley et al, 2015;Laurin et al, 2015;Loeb et al, 2007).…”

Relations between early childhood educators’ qualifications and experience and their beliefs about mathematics education for babies and toddlers

“…On the one hand, the diversity of the workforce provides more inclusive early childhood education services; on the other, it poses challenges in raising the quality of early childhood education (Cumming et al, 2015; Jackson, 2021). Several studies (for example, Krieg et al, 2015; OECD, 2006; Warren & Haisken-DeNew, 2013) have shown a link between early childhood educators’ qualifications and children’s learning outcomes, suggesting that a high or increasing proportion of more qualified staff is desirable. The introduction of an early childhood education and care reform agenda in 2009 brought substantial changes to the Australian early childhood education sector, including a requirement for a proportion of educators to hold Bachelor level teaching qualifications (Standing Council on School Education and Early Childhood, 2012).…”