The name is absent

It can be seen that monthly development varies between type of outcome and sector of provider.
The largest ‘gain’ in months of development is in language for children attending
combined/integrated centres. Language skills are widely recognised as one of the best
predictors of overall academic attainment throughout education and adulthood, and are a
particular focus of current policy interest in the reception period given concerns about poor
language skills of many young children at school entry.

Table B12 presents the results from contextualised models where home children are included as
the reference group. Thus the comparisons are against no pre-school experience rather than
relative between different provider types.

Table B12 Contextualised Model: Effect sizes by type of provider

The contextualised model makes comparisons to no pre-school centre experience and measures
impact on attainment. It is clear that the effect sizes are larger than in the models of progress.
This is because comparisons are made against the ‘home’ group for whom no cost has been
incurred. It must be noted that the larger effect sizes for private day nurseries are likely to be
partly due to higher prior attainment of this group (not included in this model) and impact of social
advantage of composition (% mothers with a degree or above), which can only be controlled in
the value added analyses.

Figures on the basic annual costs per pre-school place (supplied by Sure Start) are shown in
Table A. Pre-school providers differ in the number of weeks that they operate, and in the number
of sessions a week that they provide. Hence it is appropriate to show how pre-school providers
vary in terms of cost per session and this is also shown in Table A. In the final column of Table A
the sessional costs are shown as a ratio where playgroup costs (lowest) are taken as unity.

Table A Comparative costs of pre-school providers

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