An Early Childhood Intervention Programme and the Long-term Outcomes for Students

Abstract

Early childhood education has increasingly been identified as a mechanism to alleviate educational disadvantage in areas of social exclusion. This study aims to add to the understanding of the nature and distribution of long-term benefits from early childhood intervention programmes and provides a detailed analysis of both the cognitive and non-cognitive progress of children from an early childhood intervention programme in Ireland, the Early Start project. Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory has been drawn on as a theoretical framework for this study, and the research sought to explore the outcomes of the Early Start programme from a systems theory perspective and to develop a holistic picture of the programme participants' social and educational development. The research presented in this article is based on a doctoral thesis and the article will focus on one particular aspect of this study in relation to the long-term academic and social outcomes for students who participated in the Early Start programme in 1994/95 and were aged 15 at the time of data collection for this research. The study found that Early Start appears to have improved the students' academic attainment in mathematics and science at age 15 years, and these findings may demonstrate the importance of early childhood intervention in supporting the acquisition of numeracy. The Early Start participants were also more likely to perceive college attendance as something that was very important to their parents, which might indicate that these parents have higher aspirations for their children in terms of educational attainment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shirley Martin

Dr Shirley Martin is Lecturer at the Department of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork