Longitudinal Study of Early Education and Development (SEED) published

[FSFRebecca]

This research piece funded by DfE looked into the following:

• effect of early education on children’s outcomes
• quality of provision
• value for money of providing funded early years education to 2-year-olds from lower income families

With research notes dating back to 2014 you can read the full piece on the DfE site here

Nursery World have today published their comments, you can read their piece here

[mundia]

I've been away a little while, there seems to have been a few changes around here!

I went to one of the Learn Explore Debate sessions last week, with Sue Robb, and she updated us on the latest 'chapter' in the SEED package, which looks at Early Years provision quality. It came out in December. 

It's a really interesting read comparing provision for 2 year olds and 3to4 year olds. They used ECERS, ITERS and SSTEW scales. If you haven't come across it yet, have a look. The two things that struck me most were they found a narrower age gap better than a wide one, the complete opposite from 'Teaching and Play in the early years, a balancing act', which suggested integrated provision across the age groups was better particularly for 2 year olds. But then the SEED report did not look at progress or outcomes, so perhaps it's like comparing apples with carrots.

They found better quality in bigger settings. Hmm what's your view on that. I've yet to find in the report if there is an 'optimum size', whereby quality falls again if the setting gets too big.

What do you all think.

The report  can be found 

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-years-provision-quality