One in ten five-year-olds are ‘nursery NEETs’

66,000 children at risk of dropping out before they start school

Over one in ten five year-olds are already at severe risk of disengaging from education when they begin school, according to new Demos research published today.

The new study of over 15,000 children, which was supported by the Private Equity Foundation, found 11.5 per cent are starting school without the behavioural skills they need to learn in the classroom or build relationships with their peers.

Published on the same day as the government’s quarterly statistics on young people “not in employment, education or training” (NEETs), the report says the children are most likely to subsequently drop out of the education system and become ‘NEET’.

“One in ten children lack the tools to benefit from education before they even get to the school gate,” said author Sonia Sodha.

“These nursery NEETs show the same behaviour problems as older NEETs, like difficulty making friends and bad behaviour.”

The 66,000 children scored ‘borderline’ or ‘abnormal’ in the Millennium Cohort Study’s pre-school behavioural assessment. The test reveals behaviour problems, emotional issues, difficulty making friends and hyperactivity, problems that are strongly linked to under-achievement at school, risk of truanting and exclusion.

Disengagement from school is a major contributing factor to young people being NEET post-16. A quarter of those who truant in year 11 go onto become NEET, and over a quarter of those who get no GCSEs are NEET.

The report argues that early intervention to support ‘nursery NEETs’ is the key to reducing the 261,000, or 1 in 7, 16-18 year olds currently classified as ‘NEET’.

The current generation of 16-18 NEETs are estimated to cost society £4.6bn per year and £31bn over their lifetime, including the costs of unemployment, to health services and to the criminal justice system.

The report criticises current policy, calling for a greater focus on prevention alongside services for teenage NEETs, and proposes a ‘toddler pupil premium’ for Sure Start centres and nurseries – with more money going to Sure Start centres and nurseries serving children from deprived areas – and the trialling of financial incentives for at-risk parents to complete parenting courses.

Other measures would start at birth to protect children who are at risk of falling into the disengaged group, including universal screening by health visitors.

It says preventative measures must be targeted at the children who need it most – 18.4 per cent of children from the poorest fifth of families are ‘nursery NEETs’ compared to 4.4 per cent from the richest fifth.

Sodha added: “At the moment we tackle the NEET problem with jobs and post-16 training, but we are shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.”

Shaks Ghosh, Chief Executive of the Private Equity Foundation, commented: "Early intervention is not about branding children before they have even started school – it is about dealing with any emotional issues, family problems, literacy and numeracy before it's too late. I've seen firsthand how the third sector can extend lifelines to children and their families. We must avoid the young people of tomorrow becoming the NEET statistics of the future.

"There is no silver bullet - we take an integrated approach, backing programmes from birthplace to the workplace. However, getting the early years right will provide part of the answer to solving the issue of NEETs. This report from Demos provides many worthwhile recommendations to consider."

Early risk factors
The report indicates potential rises in disengagement among primary school children and identifies a range of risk factors:

Poor literacy and numeracy. Every year, 8 in 100 primary school pupils leave primary school in England with reading and/or maths skills below those of the average seven year old: over 46,000 11 year olds in 2009.
Communication problems. In some deprived areas, up to 50 per cent of children are starting primary school without the language and communication skills they need to learn effectively. A poll of parents in 2010 found that 1in 5boys (22 per cent) and 13 per cent of girls experience slight or significant difficulty when learning to talk or understand speech.
Mental health problems: Demos analysis has found that around 59,000 five year olds – 10.3 per cent – are starting school with emotional issues. Almost ten per cent of children aged 5-15 suffer from a mental health disorder.
Poor wellbeing: 1 in 5primary school children suffers from consistently low or declining wellbeing. These children are most likely to be boys, low achievers and from disadvantaged backgrounds, equating to approximately 820,000 children.

The research shows that family situations and background are crucially important to children’s post-16 outcomes:

Parenting and the home environment are the biggest factors influencing child outcomes. Who your parents are is strongly associated with outcomes: having a parent with a low level of education, a mother who is young and low-income parents are all factors associated with poorer behavioural and cognitive development.
Parental style. High levels of parental warmth between parent and child, combined with consistent enforcement of rules, are associated with better behavioural and cognitive development (Building Character, Demos 2009). Positive and warm family interactions at age 14 measured by factors like having meals together, going out as a family and lower frequency of arguments are associated with improved behavioural outcomes at age 16.
Data show that mothers who experience high anxiety late in their pregnancy (32 weeks) were twice as likely to have a child with behavioural difficulties at age 4 (10 per cent compared to 5 per cent). Boys with mothers experiencing high anxiety late in their pregnancy were also twice as likely to have ADHD (attention-deficit, hyperactivity disorders) (one in 10 rather than one in 20).
Parental expectations: Parental aspirations are closely linked to a child’s academic attainment. Parental aspirations has been found to be more important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, but are lower in poorer families: 76 per cent of parents of 14 year olds in the poorest fifth of families want their child to stay on in full-time education beyond the age of 16, compared to 91 per cent of parents in the top income quintile. The gap gets bigger as their children grow older – by the time their child is 16, 28 per cent of poor parents have stopped wanting their child to stay on in full-time education, compared to 10 per cent of parents from the top income quintile.
The impact of parental aspirations are felt right into adolescence: having a parent who wants their child to say in full-time education beyond the age of 16 is associated with an extra 22 points in GCSE score controlling for a wide range of other factors.
School factors: the most important factor in terms of a school’s impact on outcomes is the quality of teaching. Other factors that are important to both academic and behavioural outcomes are the emotional quality of the classroom, and the warmth of adult-child interactions in a school.
Poverty and schooling: Young people from the poorest fifth of families are less likely to go to a secondary school in England with an outstanding Ofsted report (16 per cent compared to 27 per cent from the richest fifth of families). They are less likely to say they are happy at school (84 per cent compared to 89 per cent from the richest fifth) and are less likely to say it is valuable (89 per cent compared to 80 per cent).

Recommendations
The report says that current policy is not based enough around prevention and early intervention.
Demos calls for a universal screening tool for all children in order to enable the most at-risk children to be identified early, and signposted to appropriate support from early years services.

It would cover a child’s physical, behavioural, cognitive and linguistic development at 6 months, age 1, age 2, age 3 and age 5.
It would be streamlined and light touch, making use of tools like a simple behaviour questionnaire that takes five minutes to complete but accurately predicts diagnosis of mental health issues in 90 per cent of children.
The tool could be used by health visitors, Sure Start workers and nursery nurses with basic training.
It would be used to flag up issues in the very early years and direct children who need them to additional services like speech and language therapy, child mental health services and family literacy and numeracy programmes.
It would be followed up with screening for literacy difficulties after one full year at school (age 6), and screening for numeracy difficulties after two full years at school (age 7).

The importance of parenting in tackling the NEET problem requires increased support for children and parents:

Improving access to early years services for the most at-risk families: the report recommends there should be pilots to test the effectiveness of financial incentives paid to at-risk, low-income parents who complete parenting programmes. The report suggests this could be funded by scrapping payments into the Child Trust Funds of children from affluent families, raising £165 million a year.
Sure Start. At the moment, Sure Start is a universal service – available to all families. The report argues Sure Start needs to become more progressively universal – providing some services to all families, but reserving expensive, intensive services for at-risk families.
A toddler pupil premium for Sure Start and nurseries. The report recommends that – like schools – Sure Start centres and nurseries should receive per-pupil funding based on the number of children they serve from poor backgrounds. The research revealed there are more low-quality nurseries in poorer areas than more affluent ones: 10.8 per cent of nurseries in the most 10 per cent deprived areas were judged as inadequate by Ofsted in 2009, compared to just 5.3 per cent in the 10 per cent most affluent. The extra funding would allow nurseries in poor areas to spend more on hiring more highly-qualified staff, and improving the staff to child ratio– both so important in improving the quality of care. Sure Start centres and nurseries would have to set out how they spend this deprivation funding in self-evaluation reports and in Ofsted inspections.
A public health approach to parenting. Building on international evidence from Australia and New Zealand that public health messaging around parenting using DVDs and television programmes can be very effective, the government should consult with parents to develop public health messaging on parenting such as the importance of talking to your child – for example, leaflets in GP surgeries and TV programmes.

For further information and images please contact Rosie Davey at rosie@privateequityfoundation.org or call 020 7749 5129 / 07827 804066