Early childhood inequalities - Sarah Cattan Emla Fitzsimons Alissa Goodman Angus Phimister

In light of the evidence on the origins and consequences of early inequalities in the UK gathered throughout the chapter, we conclude in Section 8 by highlighting key trends in the early years policy landscape since the turn of the century and sharing our reflections on where policy should go next. [...] 4 The estimates and standard errors of the coefficients of the multivariate regression models for cognitive development and socio-emotional and behavioural difficulties are reported in the first column of Appendix Tables 1 and 2, respectively. [...] We also see the model controls explain far more of the variation in socio- emotional development than in cognition: the R-squared, which measures the fraction of variation in the measure of development that is explained by variation in the correlates, is 0.45 for socio-emotional development and 0.22 for cognitive development. [...] In order to assess the extent to which the raw gaps in early development depicted in Figures 1 and 2 are explained by systematic differences in children’s environments, we report in Appendix Table 3 the raw association between each of the variables included in the model in the estimation sample, next to the adjusted association (i.e. [...] By contrast, looking at socio-emotional development in the lower part of the figure, the most dominant factor to emerge is the child’s emotional environment, which explains 35% of the variation in child socio-emotional and behavioural difficulties, or over three-quarters of the overall variation explained by the model.