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In May 1997, the New Labour government in Britain announced plans to provide universal and free preschool for all four-year-olds within two years. The new entitlement, expanded to include three-year-olds in 2004, dramatically raised preschool enrollment rates (previously among the lowest in Europe) and narrowed gaps in enrollment between richer and poorer families. In her book, Britain's War on Poverty, Jane Waldfogel reviews Britain's preschool experiment and suggests lessons for the United States, an instructive exercise as President Obama now begins his own push to expand access to preschool education. An excerpt from the Waldfogel's book is published below:
A large body of evidence documents that high-quality preschool programs increase children’s school readiness, with particularly large effects for the most-disadvantaged children. Hence, expanding quality preschool programs can raise overall school readiness as well as close gaps between low-income children and their more-affluent peers. However, not all preschool programs are alike; the evidence suggests that higher-quality programs yield larger gains. Research in Britain, for example, strongly suggests that children learn more in preschool when they are in school- or center-based settings (as opposed to less formal types of child care settings) and when those programs are led by staff who have a university degree.Yet, as I highlighted in my discussion of the reforms, some of the programs that British three- and four-year-olds attend are not formal school- or center-based programs, and relatively few are led by university-educated staff. In this regard, the British experience offers a cautionary note for the United States, which, like Britain, has a heavily privatized child care system and one in which the type and quality of provision is highly variable. If the United States follows the British example and provides subsidies that parents can take to a wide range of child care programs, the quality of that provision will vary widely, and the gains that have been seen from the best-quality preschool programs will not be realized. Fortunately, there are many other models to draw on, including the universal pre-kindergarten programs in the United States itself, which are now operating in several states, with programs located in the public schools or in approved preschool settings that meet standards set by the public schools. These universal pre-kindergarten programs have a strong track record of promoting children’s school readiness and have been well received by parents, who view them as part of the public education system. Thus my recommendation: The United States should draw inspiration from how quickly and decisively Britain moved to universal preschool provision, but should draw on the best evidence on U.S. preschool and pre-kindergarten programs in deciding what type of provision to support.