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Early education provision in the state‐maintained sector has historically played an important role in ensuring equitable access to high‐quality early education in England. These settings have higher qualification requirements than other providers, and as they have been concentrated in areas of higher disadvantage, children from lower income households have been more likely to attend them. This paper shows that this phenomenon is changing: children from lower income households are considerably less likely to attend maintained settings than they were in 2010. Their higher likelihood compared with other children is also declining, while the share attending private nursery settings has increased sharply. Using the National Pupil Database, the paper explores the reasons why, identifying three main factors: a general decline in maintained provision across the country, probably linked to changes in national funding practices; changes in the geography of poverty; and the extension of free early education places to disadvantaged 2‐year‐olds, which inadvertently led to children entering and remaining in lower quality settings. The paper illustrates the inherent trade‐off policymakers face between expanding early childhood education and care provision and maintaining the quality necessary for services to function as social investment. It contributes both to early childhood education and care policy studies in England and to the wider international literature on mixed economy approaches to early childhood education and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 low-income 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.

This paper examines how the quality of early childhood education and care accessed by 3- and 4-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 2010-2011, 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 results point to the need for funding to support better qualified staff in PVI settings in disadvantaged areas.