TY - JOUR
T1 - Measuring and forecasting progress in education
T2 - what about early childhood?
AU - Richter, Linda M.
AU - Behrman, Jere R.
AU - Britto, Pia
AU - Cappa, Claudia
AU - Cohrssen, Caroline
AU - Cuartas, Jorge
AU - Daelmans, Bernadette
AU - Devercelli, Amanda E.
AU - Fink, Günther
AU - Fredman, Sandra
AU - Heymann, Jody
AU - Boo, Florencia Lopez
AU - Lu, Chunling
AU - Lule, Elizabeth
AU - McCoy, Dana Charles
AU - Naicker, Sara N.
AU - Rao, Nirmalo
AU - Raikes, Abbie
AU - Stein, Alan
AU - Vazquez, Claudia
AU - Yoshikawa, Hirokazu
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - A recent Nature article modelled within-country inequalities in primary, secondary, and tertiary education and forecast progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets related to education (SDG 4). However, their paper entirely overlooks inequalities in achieving Target 4.2, which aims to achieve universal access to quality early childhood development, care and preschool education by 2030. This is an important omission because of the substantial brain, cognitive and socioemotional developments that occur in early life and because of increasing evidence of early-life learning’s large impacts on subsequent education and lifetime wellbeing. We provide an overview of this evidence and use new analyses to illustrate medium- and long-term implications of early learning, first by presenting associations between pre-primary programme participation and adolescent mathematics and science test scores in 73 countries and secondly, by estimating the costs of inaction (not making pre-primary programmes universal) in terms of forgone lifetime earnings in 134 countries. We find considerable losses, comparable to or greater than current governmental expenditures on all education (as percentages of GDP), particularly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. In addition to improving primary, secondary and tertiary schooling, we conclude that to attain SDG 4 and reduce inequalities in a post-COVID era, it is essential to prioritize quality early childhood care and education, including adopting policies that support families to promote early learning and their children’s education.
AB - A recent Nature article modelled within-country inequalities in primary, secondary, and tertiary education and forecast progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets related to education (SDG 4). However, their paper entirely overlooks inequalities in achieving Target 4.2, which aims to achieve universal access to quality early childhood development, care and preschool education by 2030. This is an important omission because of the substantial brain, cognitive and socioemotional developments that occur in early life and because of increasing evidence of early-life learning’s large impacts on subsequent education and lifetime wellbeing. We provide an overview of this evidence and use new analyses to illustrate medium- and long-term implications of early learning, first by presenting associations between pre-primary programme participation and adolescent mathematics and science test scores in 73 countries and secondly, by estimating the costs of inaction (not making pre-primary programmes universal) in terms of forgone lifetime earnings in 134 countries. We find considerable losses, comparable to or greater than current governmental expenditures on all education (as percentages of GDP), particularly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. In addition to improving primary, secondary and tertiary schooling, we conclude that to attain SDG 4 and reduce inequalities in a post-COVID era, it is essential to prioritize quality early childhood care and education, including adopting policies that support families to promote early learning and their children’s education.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41539-021-00106-7
DO - 10.1038/s41539-021-00106-7
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85114896946
SN - 2056-7936
VL - 6
JO - npj Science of Learning
JF - npj Science of Learning
IS - 1
M1 - 27
ER -