Excerpts from the press release:
Daycare Trust today urged caution following media claims, in response to a Durham University research study, that the Government's early years investment was failing to improve children's educational outcomes at school. The national childcare charity pointed to longer-term studies of children which show clear benefits from high-quality nursery education.
"The Durham research may point to continuing problems in ensuring that poorer children get the early years care and education they're entitled to, rather than to a failure of early years education to deliver educational benefits," says Policy and Research Manager Maxine Hill.
"Programmes like Sure Start were intended as a ladder of opportunity for disadvantaged children. Only when these children are being reached, and we know that many of them are not, will the gap in educational attainment between middle class children and their poorer contemporaries start to close."
"It is absolutely clear that there are positive cognitive outcomes for children who attend early years education, which increase depending on the length of time in months and years spent in these settings. As disadvantaged children already lag behind their middle-class contemporaries in terms of cognitive development at the age of three, the provision of high quality early years education is one very important way to counter this."
The Durham research is a snapshot of children at a particular point in their development, and the author cautions that it may be too soon to see the benefits of recent investment and changes in policy.