Journal article
Measuring and forecasting progress in education: what about early childhood?
- Abstract:
- A recent Nature article modelled within-country inequalities in primary, secondary, and tertiary education and forecast progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets related to education (SDG 4). However, their paper entirely overlooks inequalities in achieving Target 4.2, which aims to achieve universal access to quality early childhood development, care and preschool education by 2030. This is an important omission because of the substantial brain, cognitive and socioemotional developments that occur in early life and because of increasing evidence of early-life learning’s large impacts on subsequent education and lifetime wellbeing. We provide an overview of this evidence and use new analyses to illustrate medium- and long-term implications of early learning, first by presenting associations between pre-primary programme participation and adolescent mathematics and science test scores in 73 countries and secondly, by estimating the costs of inaction (not making pre-primary programmes universal) in terms of forgone lifetime earnings in 134 countries. We find considerable losses, comparable to or greater than current governmental expenditures on all education (as percentages of GDP), particularly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. In addition to improving primary, secondary and tertiary schooling, we conclude that to attain SDG 4 and reduce inequalities in a post-COVID era, it is essential to prioritize quality early childhood care and education, including adopting policies that support families to promote early learning and their children’s education.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 1.6MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41539-021-00106-7
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- npj Science of Learning More from this journal
- Volume:
- 6
- Article number:
- 27
- Publication date:
- 2021-09-10
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-08-16
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2056-7936
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1194303
- Local pid:
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pubs:1194303
- Deposit date:
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2021-09-23
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Richter et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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