Equity of Access to Pre-Primary Education and Long-Term Benefits: A Cross-Country Analysis

An early investment in education is likely to give more returns to society than a late investment (Heckman, Stixrud, & Urzua, 2006). One of the most comprehensive and articulated approaches comes from cross-disciplinary research from economics to developmental psychology and neurobiology. Those studies reveal that a series of common principles could explain the effects of the early schooling environment on the development of human abilities (Knudsen et al., 2006). Early childhood education environments are a good place to foster the social and cognitive development of children, an experience with a unique influence on the development of skills and the brain’s maturation (Knudsen et al., 2006). Starting from this cross-disciplinary framework, this chapter aim to understand, through cross-country data, to what extent formal schooling received during early childhood makes a significant difference in development for regular school achievement. Specifically, we explore how equitable is the access to early childhood education as well as the long-term associations between preschool experience and the students’ cognitive outcomes. First, we explore the students’ background factors associated with access to pre-primary education, that is, to what extent some key characteristics of the family background are associated with greater or lesser access to pre-primary education. Our study confirms that the probability of access to pre-primary education is higher among students of high socio-economic status. In addition, this probability varies depending on the immigrant background of the students with a low socio-economic status. Second, we analyze to what extent attending pre-primary education is associated with obtaining better academic outcomes in the subsequent levels of the school system, specifically among 15-year-old students, who are typically enrolled in the lower secondary education. Our results confirm that the attendance to pre-primary education is significantly associated with learning, especially for those students with low socio-economic status. All students benefit from having attended, but students with low socio-economic status seem to benefit the most, even if they attended for a short period of time. In the following paragraphs we will review the main results of the research literature on the impact of early childhood education on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, the conditions of implementation of effective pre-primary education programs, and the effects of early environments for disadvantaged students. Then we address the main research questions, the method and empirical strategies, the results and the key conclusions. We finally discuss the results in terms of policy implications.