You’ll notice something that isn’t immediately apparent in a data set if you walk into any kindergarten classroom in the middle of the morning. In roughly ninety seconds, a four-year-old carefully stacks blocks, bargains with a peer over who gets the red one, and then quietly solves a problem when the tower collapses. It doesn’t appear to be learning. It really is.
Although the idea of extending early childhood education to two full years prior to school is not new, the body of evidence in favor of it has significantly increased. More time spent in high-quality early learning programs leaves measurable marks that follow children well into their school years and, in some cases, beyond. This evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore.
Roughly 90% of a child’s brain development is finished by the time they are five years old. That number, which is frequently mentioned by both researchers and proponents of early education, is the kind of statistic that, while initially frightening, gradually becomes ingrained in your thoughts. The unsettling but obvious implication is that the years leading up to school are not a waiting area. They may be the most important classroom a child will ever attend.
Children who attend preschool or kindergarten for two years outperform those who attend for just one year in terms of literacy, numeracy, social skills, and emotional regulation, according to research from Australia’s Mitchell Institute. These are not insignificant variations. The disparities are significant, especially for kids from low-income families, where a good early education can help mitigate the developmental disparities that often worsen over time.
It is worthwhile to focus on nations that have already discovered this. Children in Estonia have access to free or inexpensive early childhood education starting at age three, which frequently lasts longer than thirty hours a week. The findings—stronger literacy foundations, improved self-regulation, and smaller socioeconomic background gaps—indicate that this wasn’t an accident. Finland provides a comparable model. Notably, the advantages of early attendance have been seen to persist until the age of fifteen. That’s a long echo for something that occurred in a room filled with wooden puzzles and finger paint.
In 2010, Ontario implemented a teacher-led, play-based early learning program lasting thirty hours per week. Children in the longer program demonstrated measurably improved early literacy, numeracy, and self-regulation when compared to the previous fifteen-hour model. More work, better results. At this point, the relationship seems to be fairly simple.
Australia’s Victoria is currently experiencing its own growth. Compared to the 600 hours most families had access to in 2019, children there could receive up to 1,800 hours of funded kindergarten before school by 2036. There is always a disconnect between the aspirations of policy and the actual situation, and the rollout is lengthy. It is an honest and unanswered question whether services can reliably provide quality on that scale.
Hours alone don’t tell the whole story, as the research consistently demonstrates. The caliber of those hours—trained instructors, play-based curricula, and accommodating surroundings—matters a great deal. If a longer program is implemented poorly, it won’t yield the same results as a shorter, better-designed program. In early education circles, there is a perception that the volume conversation occasionally takes precedence over the quality conversation, which is probably the wrong trade-off.
However, it’s difficult to avoid feeling that societies have historically undervalued what takes place in those early classrooms as this evidence mounts over time. It’s not just play when the child bargains over the red block. They are honing a lifelong skill.
