The success of higher education may depend on early childhood learning

For nearly nine years I was a member of Ireland’s National Competitiveness Council. During this time the Council at one point or another addressed most of the key economic and social issues affecting the country, and as you can imagine I frequently pushed the higher education agenda. The Council on several occasions emphasised the importance of discovery and learning in universities and colleges and issued recommendations in which this could be funded and made sustainable.

But in some ways I believe that the most important recommendation to which I contributed was not about universities, but about pre-school education. In the Council’s annual Competitiveness Challenge report in 2004, it offered the following observation:

‘Pre-primary development is a key determinant of performance at all levels of education: primary, secondary and tertiary. Research led by the Nobel Laureate Professor James Heckman has shown that the decision to remain in school, and consequently the ability to proceed to third level, is strongly influenced by development in the pre-primary years. Much learning occurs in the first six years of life and especially in the first three years. The Heckman research suggests that development during early childhood affects cognitive abilities, motivation and social skills in later life, and is a more important determinant of subsequent performance at primary or secondary level education than the standard of tuition or family income constraints during those periods.’

Having pointed out that Ireland’s investment in pre-school education was lower per capita than in virtually any other developed country, the Council then made the following recommendation:

‘The Minister for Education and Science should develop a programme for the roll out of pre-primary initiatives targeted towards areas of social and economic disadvantage. This should not be financed out of existing education programmes, but rather from a re-allocation of resources from other wider labour market programmes that are no longer needed in the current economic environment.’

Having made this recommendation, the Council followed it up with active lobbying of government ministers, none of whom disagreed with the analysis and the recommendation. But they did nothing. Over the seven years that have followed no new initiative and no funding has been introduced. Early childhood disadvantage still determines the educational fate of far too many children. It is still likely that most of those whose home lives or early private educational experiences don’t provide significant intellectual stimulation will under-achieve in education and will be trapped in the vicious cycle of disadvantage.

While Ireland’s performance is particularly dishonourable in this regard, it is not unique, and other countries also fail to focus on this vital aspect of social and educational policy. In California voters recently rejected a proposal that would have funded and made compulsory pre-school education for all children. China has also expressed concerns about the weakness of its early childhood education. In Britain there is state support for pre-school education, but too few children have access to it.

The risk is that now, during a time of economic stress, governments will be even less likely to provide proper support. But in fact, if the recession is not to lead to much greater educational disadvantage and resulting social issues, this is the time to develop early childhood provision most aggressively. Not doing so will not only create more disadvantage, it will also be hugely costly to the taxpayer who will have to pick up the bill for the problems caused by this neglect; it has been estimated that every dollar spent worldwide on early childhood education saves $7 later. It is time to act.

In memoriam the Celtic Tiger

In the debates about current events in Ireland, it is often now suggested that the ‘Celtic Tiger’ was all an illusion and that it never really existed, or that if it did it consisted almost entirely of a sleight of hand connected with a property bubble and banking misconduct.

Without wanting in any way to take away from the seriousness of what Ireland now faces, that kind of perspective on the Celtic Tiger is seriously misplaced. Even after all the stuff we are about to experience, Ireland will be an immeasurably richer country, with a wholly different infrastructure and economic capacity, than might have been expected back in the early 1980s. The property bubble was not the substance of the Celtic Tiger, but rather an aberration that resulted from it. Until 2004 or so the bulk of our economic activity was in exports of goods and services, rather than trading in property or domestic consumption. You can trace the transition from this to the more recent unviable distortion of the economy by reading the annual reports of the National Competitiveness Council (which correctly identified what was happening and warned about it early on).

It is worth making this point in order to remind ourselves that not everything that we did, or even that our politicians led us in doing, was wrong. It is just that eventually we all lost touch with reality. But we can, and I suspect we will, return to a more viable version of economic success. Our ability to do that will not be helped by enthusiastically adopting a hugely distorted vision of recent Irish history.