However, there was a significant improvement among those three- and four-year-olds who only took up the early education because it was free, according to researchers from the universities of Essex and Surrey.
The children given the free 15 hours who would otherwise have had no pre-school experience (one in four), upped their scores by six percentage points in the Foundation Stage Profile, measured at age five.
The small overall benefits did not continue through to the ages of seven and 11, found the study, called ‘Universal Pre-school Education: The Case for Public Funding with Private Provision’, published in the May 2016 issue of the Economic Journal of the Royal Economic Society.
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