IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ifs/ifsewp/26-30.html

Workforce quality and early childhood development at scale

Author

Listed:
  • Sarah Cattan

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies)

  • Gabriella Conti

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies)

  • Christine Farquharson

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies)

Abstract

Early childhood programmes frequently lose effectiveness at scale, yet the role of the workforce remains poorly understood. We document substantial heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness in England’s national home-visiting programme for first-time teenage mothers, despite a highlystructured curriculum and well-qualified staff. Exploiting quasi-random assignment of mothers to family nurses, we estimate that a one standard deviation increase in workforce effectiveness raises children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development by 0.20-0.23 SD. Structural quality — observable worker characteristics — does not predict effectiveness, but process quality — how visits are delivered — does. Greater effectiveness is linked with improvements in maternal mental health and risk behaviours.

Suggested Citation

  • Sarah Cattan & Gabriella Conti & Christine Farquharson, 2026. "Workforce quality and early childhood development at scale," IFS Working Papers W26/30, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:26/30
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2026-05/WP202630-Workforce-quality-and-early-childhood-development-at-scale.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:26/30. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Emma Hyman (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifsssuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.