Effect of Universal Pre-primary Education on Pupil’s Development Outcomes: Evidence from Education Reform in Kenya

• In Event: Monitoring, evaluation, research and learning in ECD

Proposal

Since the early 2000s, the importance of pre-primary education has been increasingly recognized and attracted global attention due to its potential. From the economic point of view, empirical evidence has highlighted the substantial return from pre-primary education. Reflecting this trend, international communities encourage governments to ensure at least one year of universal pre-primary education by making it free and compulsory. Kenya is one of the countries that recently implemented national education reform. The reform shifts the education cycle from 8-4-4 to 2-6-3-3, and accordingly, the two years of pre-primary education are designed to be free and compulsory. More equitable access to pre-primary schools and higher development outcomes are expected through this reform. This study investigates how expanding pre-primary education in Kenya serves pupils' development.
This study contributes to the existing literature by addressing two issues. Firstly, this study provides new insight into the influence of pre-primary expansion on early childhood. Considering the effect of universal pre-primary education on early childhood development, there is an accumulation of empirical evidence. However, researchers have yielded contradictory results, and there has yet to be a clear consensus. Therefore, we empirically analyze the causal effects of the expansion by taking advantage of a nationally representative household survey. Secondly, this study sheds light on the effect of universal pre-primary education in a developing country’s context. Past studies analyzed universal pre-primary education policies mainly from US and Europe, and little evidence is from developing countries. Thus, the present study would be unique, using Kenya’s national education reform as a case.
The study conducts a two-stage least square (2SLS) analysis, one of the quantitative methods to estimate the causal effect. In general, children’s pre-primary attendance is a choice made by parents, and several factors determine it. The availability of schools is critical, and a universal pre-primary education policy would change parents’ preferences. Therefore, this study uses the staggered implementation of the policy in each county as an Instrument Variable (IV) and estimates the attendance probability of each child. The data used in this study comes from Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2022. The dataset is unique because it includes the Early Childhood Development Index (ECDI) 2030, which assesses whether the children are developmentally on track from three domains.
The findings confirm that increased pre-primary attendance due to the national reform increases children’s probability of being developmentally on track. Detailed analyses suggest that pre-primary attendance only significantly affected the learning domain but not socio-emotional and motor development. This result can be attributable to Kenya's pre-primary education usually stresses academic foundation. Also, the result must reflect parents’ expectations to ensure a smooth transition for their children to primary education. In addition, due to the data limitation, the present study focused only on four-year-old children. This limitation might underestimate socio-emotional and motor development differences, as they already developed enough.

Author

• Ayumu Yagi, Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies, Kobe University