Peers in ECEC centres: who are they and do they matter? An empirical analysis on ECEC group composition, its drivers and its effects

Project Information

PEARLE

Grant agreement ID: 705353

DOI

10.3030/705353

Project closed

EC signature date 15 March 2016

Start date 16 May 2016

End date 22 March 2020

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 171 460,80

EU contribution

€ 171 460,80

Coordinated by

DEUTSCHES INSTITUT FUR WIRTSCHAFTSFORSCHUNG DIW (INSTITUT FUR KONJUNKTURFORSCHUNG)
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PEARLE (Peers in ECEC centres: who are they and do they matter? An empirical analysis on ECEC group composition, its drivers and its effects)

Reporting period: 2016-05-16 to 2018-05-15

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The research project PEARLE focuses on the peer composition of early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres. Peers are a likely to be a key dimension of the children’s ECEC experience, as children in group-based early education and care spend considerable time interacting with each other. Children begin to develop social skills and establish peer relationships in the pre-school years. Indeed, promoting social competencies is an explicit objective of most early childhood practice, resulting in an emphasis on peer-to-peer communication.
And yet we know very little about who children’s peers in ECEC are. This is in stark contrast to research on school-age children, which has long documented schools’ composition and the extent to which children from similar backgrounds may be more on less concentrated in certain schools.
Knowing the composition of ECEC centres is crucial to evaluate possible peer effects and to deploy resources. It also helps understand what policy factors may be pushing towards clustering, for example priority criteria at the admission stage or funding formulas.
PEARLE’s aim has been to examine the composition of ECEC centres in Germany and to understand some of the factors underpinning it. Germany is an helpful case study for two main reasons. First, in the last decade Germany has been a “policy laboratory” in relation to ECEC – it has dramatically expanded its provision and has also invested in its quality. Second, in Germany, as in several other EU countries, children of foreign parents fare, on average, worse on a range of educational outcomes than their peers without any migrant background. Against this backdrop, PEARLE has been able to answer two highly policy-relevant questions: 1) To what extent are children of foreign parents who are not monolingual German concentrated together in ECEC centres? 2) Do ECEC centres with high concentration of non German monolingual children appear to be of low quality?
ECEC has the potential to reduce inequalities in children’s development and educational outcomes. To fulfil this potential ECEC provision needs to be of high quality and cater well for the needs of disadvantaged children. Knowing the composition of ECEC centres is a important piece of information to address this challenge.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

By examining how non-monolingual German children are distributed across ECEC centres, PEARLE has been able to establish the following three main findings. First, the level of concentration of non-monolingual German children is relatively high. In particular, approximately one third of non-monolingual German children are in an ECEC where the majority of their peers (more than 50%) is also from families where German is not the main language. This finding has been made public in a DIW report available in German, which has which has been extremely successful in terms of its downloads and the interest it has received, a testament to the relevance of PEARLE’s focus.
Second, the level of concentration of non-monolingual German children is only partly accounted for by where children live. So for example, in urban areas with a fairly high share of migrants, ECEC centres not far from each other would differ starkly in their intake, with some catering predominantly for non-monolingual children others almost exclusively for German monolingual ones. Although PEARLE could not investigate the specific factors leading to such uneven distribution, this finding is important because it challenges the assumption that ECEC composition mirrors residential clustering.
The third main finding uncovered by PEARLE has been that ECEC centres with a high concentration of non-monolingual German children do not appear to be of lower quality, as measured by a number of indicators capturing the level of qualifications of staff, the staff to children ratios, and the prevalence of short-term employment contracts among centres’ staff.
These findings have been presented at a number of academic conferences and are now being written up in an academic paper with the plan to disseminate a summary through a press release by DIW once the paper is published.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Potential impact on early childhood research and policy. PEARLE has the potential to impact ECEC policy and research in two main ways. First, it has provided much needed evidence on a theme that is relative neglected but increasingly recognised as very important: the peer composition of ECEC centres. It has done so for Germany only, but has nonetheless offered a useful template for research in other countries. The finding that residential segregation is can only partly explain the current distribution of non-monolingual German children across ECEC centres will also have important repercussions. It will draw attention to how admission policies and financial incentives may encourage high levels of concentration. Second, PEARLE has also contributed with some reflections on the topic of peers composition in ECEC. In particular, by reviewing the existing literature, it has argued that if participation in ECEC is considered essential for learning to live together in heterogeneous societies, ECEC centres need to achieve a balanced mix of children from different backgrounds.

Impact on researcher’s career. The Marie-Curie-Skłodowska fellowship has been an invaluable chance for my career. There have been two main benefits. First, at the start of the fellowship, I had published three papers in international peer-reviewed journals. By the end of it, my list of publications has grown by seven additional papers, all published in high-ranking journals such as Journal of Marriage and Family, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Child Development, with two more in the submission process, one revised and resubmitted at Developmental Psychology and one submitted at Labour Economics. In practice, the fellowship has given me the resources to craft a unique profile, maintaining an interdisciplinary but nonetheless coherent research agenda, focused on inequalities in childhood, and the way diverging developmental trajectories may relate to social policies affecting family and education services, housing and neighbourhoods. Second, the MCSA-IF has given me the financial resources to maintain and increase my network and my visibility. Drawing on the research funds available, I have been able to travel and take part in international conferences and seminars, establishing new connections and maintaining collaborations with colleagues in other countries.

showing the role of ECEC for refugee families in Germany

presenting at Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin

Weekly report showing the level of concentration of non monolingual German children in ECEC