Innovation charity Nesta tracked the attendance of 800 two-year-olds eligible for the 15 hours of free childcare entitlement and found that attendance was at 79 per cent, compared with 85 per cent among their peers.
When combined with the hours missed by eligible children whose families fail to take up the two-year-old-offer, researchers estimate that disadvantaged children could be missing out on as many as ‘45 million hours of lost learning’ per year.
The study, which took place over a seven week period last summer, involved staff in each setting tracking the planned hours that families had signed up for against the number of hours children attended.
Its aim was to respond to the evidence gap around absence and attendance rates among disadvantaged children and explore the challenges facing take-up of the two-year-old offer, which is ‘persistently’ hovering at 72 percent.
'This is an important challenge for one of the Government's major early years initiatives.'
Tom Symons, deputy director of Nesta’s Fairer Start team, which ran the study, said, ‘We need to do more to help eligible families use the two-year-old offer. In the three councils Nesta worked with, children eligible for free early education were less likely to attend consistently and much more likely to have low attendance. This is an important challenge for one of the Government’s major early-years initiatives.’
He added, ‘Lower income families are under particular strain in terms of time, money and help. If we can do more to understand the pressures they face, we can help take the burden off families and design the programme in a more effective way.’
Tweaks to existing communications about the two-year-old offer alone are ‘not sufficient’ to substantially improve take-up rates, researchers said. Instead, ‘alternative approaches, bolder action and consideration of larger-scale policy changes’ are needed to bring about a step-change in take-up rates.
- Download the report here