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ABSTRACT
A growing evidence base highlights the value of high-quality early childhood education (ECE) to children’s cognitive and social development. However, far less is known about how families and children, especially in developing countries, participate in ECE or how these participation patterns reflect families’ thinking and decision-making. This paper utilises a mixed-methods approach to analyse longitudinal household survey and interview data (on 7336 and 180 children, respectively) from the India Early Childhood Education Impact study. Our results indicate that children’s participation trajectories in the early years (age four to eight) do not reflect the age or grade norms specified by national educational policies. And, far from being linear, children’s educational pathways entail considerable back and forth between home, preschool and school. The authors argue that these trajectories reflect both poor implementation of national norms as well as an inadequate understanding among both parents and service providers of how best to support young children’s cognitive development.
Acknowledgements
All data used in this paper were collected as part of the India Early Childhood Education Impact study (IECEI), which was conducted by ASER Centre, New Delhi, and the Centre for Early Childhood Education and Development at Ambedkar University Delhi in partnership with UNICEF. We are grateful to our reviewing editor, Germ Janmaat, and the three anonymous referees whose comments helped improve this manuscript. We would like to thank the partners, field investigators, families and children who made this study possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.