Nursery education: What is it for?

At what age should school start? Does some kind of preschool experience enable children to perform better at school? Is it more efficient and therefore more economical to foster and harness the potential and eagerness for learning that young children seem to possess rather than to expend the same money elsewhere in the education system? If so, what teaching techniques work best? Should early education pre-figure more formal schooling and be regarded as a means of easing children into school? Or should it be regarded as a stage in its own right, with its own developmental and pedagogic imperatives?

These questions are usually treated by educationists as empirical questions. Depending on one's point of view, research either has or soon will determine the answer to these questions. Woodhead[1] has questioned the relevance of much of the research on early education, and in particular the evidence of the American longitudinal studies which are the most frequently quoted sources. But other, more recent UK reports have concluded that early learning is efficient and economical, and that such learning can be delivered as a discrete and recognizable package[2]. The National Commission on Education argued that although the weight of evidence is impressive in favour of nursery education, the debate would be conclusively resolved by "a specially designed and well-controlled longitudinal research project"[3]. A recent video training package produced by the British Association for Early Childhood Education claims to demonstrate that early childhood learning has a recognizable and identifiable content or curriculum which can be delivered in a variety of settings by appropriately trained teachers, or by others working to teacher's instructions[4]. Put at its crudest, the view is that children should get into an educationally-oriented setting from the age of three upwards to start their learning.

The implicit or explicit value of such an educational perspective is that a major function of early childhood education is to enhance learning skills to enable children to perform well at school and that later educational careers will reflect early education. What "later" means is not always clear. Some studies suggest there is a washout effect, and although there may be immediate differences in starting school between those who have received nursery education and those who have not, these may fade away...