Quality Early Education for All

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Missed Opportunities: The benefit of early
education for all
It is well-established that the early years are a crucial window for fostering positive
health and wellbeing and for establishing the foundations that enable all children to
become creative, entrepreneurial, resilient and capable learners. Yet current policy
settings are not meeting the needs of the children who could benefit most.
Successive reports have identified the need for a coherent policy and service delivery framework that integrates
effective health, learning, wellbeing and parenting support for children, and their families, from birth to school
age (and beyond) delivered with an intensity proportionate to need (Marmot, 2010; Moore, 2008; Moore et al,
2014; Fox et al, 2015).
Despite various attempts to move from rhetoric to practice, and the existence of many pockets of excellent
practice, the service system as a whole remains characterised by fragmentation, inaccessibility, the delivery of
poorly-evidenced interventions, a lack of clarity about what
outcomes are being achieved, and uncertainty about where to
target investment to optimise outcomes (DHS, 2011; Cassells et
al, 2014; valentine and Hilferty, 2011).
One of the most significant opportunities to improve practice and
outcomes in early childhood is by expanding access to quality
early education and better equipping the early education and
care (ECEC) sector to support children’s learning, development
and wellbeing. 1
Children are learning from the moment they are born and
relationships provide the context in which they are supported to
explore, learn and develop positively (National Scientific Council
on the Developing Child, 2004). This report focuses on the role of
early education in the two years prior to entering school, but
recognises the importance of children’s learning in their earliest
years and the crucial role families play as children’s first teachers.
Early education is especially important for the cohort of children
The service system as a whole
remains characterised by
fragmentation, inaccessibility,
the delivery of poorlyevidenced
interventions, a
lack of clarity about what
outcomes are being achieved,
and uncertainty about where
to target investment to
optimise outcomes
1 A quality early learning experience ideally follows high-quality child and family healthcare, including sustained nurse home
visiting from the antenatal period to age 2 for families who stand to benefit from a more intensive service (Moore et al,
2012), augmented by access to parenting skill development, support to provide a rich home learning environment and early
intervention for emerging language and social and emotional wellbeing issues (Fox et al, 2015).
Quality Early Education for All 1