According to ‘Starting out right: early education and looked after children’, which has been published by the University of Oxford and Family and Childcare Trust, before children in care even start school they are ‘well-behind’ their peers and this achievement gap only widens as they get older.
However, despite numerous studies demonstrating how high-quality early education vastly improves outcomes for disadvantaged children, it says that take-up of the free early education places for two-, three- and four-year-olds is at least 14 percent lower among children in care.
It suggests that the figure could be even lower due to a lack of accessible national data on take-up and the quality of settings attended by looked-after children under five.
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