Levelling down? Understanding the decline of the maintained nursery sector in England

Stewart, Kitty ORCID: 0000-0001-7744-8741, Gambaro, Ludovica and Reader, Mary ORCID: 0000-0002-2154-1813 (2024) Levelling down? Understanding the decline of the maintained nursery sector in England. British Educational Research Journal. ISSN 0141-1926 (In Press)

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Abstract

Early education provision in the state-maintained sector has historically played an important role in ensuring equitable access to high quality early education in England. These settings have higher qualification requirements than other providers, and as they have been concentrated in areas of higher disadvantage, children from lower income households have been more likely to attend them. This paper shows that this phenomenon is changing: children from lower income households are considerably less likely to attend maintained settings than they were in 2010. Their higher likelihood compared to other children is also declining, while the share attending private nursery settings has increased sharply. Using the National Pupil Database, the paper explores the reasons why, identifying three main factors: a general decline in maintained provision across the country, likely linked to changes in national funding practices; changes in the geography of poverty; and the extension of free early education places to disadvantaged two-year-olds, which inadvertently led to children entering and remaining in lower quality settings. The paper illustrates the inherent trade-off policymakers face between expanding Early Childhood Education and Care provision and maintaining the quality necessary for services to function as social investment. It contributes both to ECEC policy studies in England and to the wider international literature on mixed economy approaches to ECEC.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Social Policy Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion STICERD
Subjects:	L Education
Date Deposited:	27 Nov 2024 11:18
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 04:35
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126192

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