Prescription and practice: ECE participation, transitions into primary school, and back

• In Event: Early childhood education in rural India: how do parents navigate an unregulated system, and what implications does this have for equity?

Proposal

The aim of this paper is to explore how closely patterns of ECE participation mirror policy expectations. Under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) of 2009, children are expected to attend two years of early childhood education at ages 4–5, before then progressing uninterrupted through each school grade from age 6 onwards. This expectation of smooth transitions is mirrored by a commonplace assumption that children’s ECE participation is stable, i.e. that they go to a single ECE provider throughout this period of time. This paper questions these assumptions empirically, especially with a view to the most marginalised children.

There is good reason to think that participation patterns in ECE might not be straightforward. Since ECE is an important but often largely unregulated space within education policy, provision may differ drastically not only across providers, but also within the same provider from one year to the next. A lack of regulation also has implications for equity, as parents from different backgrounds might have differing preferences, levels and sources of information, and capabilities to ensure their children receive their preferred form of ECE.

In this paper, we undertake quantitative analyses of the IECEI data to explore patterns in ECE participation, and transitions to primary school, between ages 4–8. Specifically, we are interested in two concepts that we refer to as progress and stability. While progress refers to the timing of children’s transitions into ECE and primary education, stability refers to the extent to which children remain in or move between providers. These interests drive the following research questions:

1. To what extent do children follow prescribed progression through pre-primary and primary school grades? Does the timing of transitions differ between more and less advantaged children?
2. To what extent do children move between pre-primary providers? Do movement patterns differ between more and less advantaged children?

Results show that, in each of the three states, only a minority of students progress through the government-mandated two years of ECE and three years of primary education as expected. Many children are ‘ahead’ of this trajectory, especially the more advantaged, while many more are ‘behind’ (especially among the more disadvantaged). Also, there are clear differences in patterns of progress by state: whereas children from all groups in Assam complete more than the expected two years of ECE, in Rajasthan around a half of disadvantaged children attend no ECE, moving directly into primary a little earlier than expected. Regarding stability, the vast majority of children attend more than one ECE provider. In every state, more advantaged children are more likely to switch provider, especially into private institutions. Perhaps most interestingly, a sizeable proportion of children entered primary school, only to go back to an ECE provider.

Authors

• Ben Alcott, University of Cambridge

• Suman Bhattacharjea, ASER Centre

• Purnima Ramanujan, ASER Centre

• Manjistha Banerji, ASER Centre

• Mansi Nanda, ASER Centre