The Centre for Early Childhood was launched in June this year by the Duchess of Cambridge, as part of the activities of the charitable Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The centre's aim is to raise awareness of the extraordinary impact of the early years on child development and promote best practice and positive action in order to transform society for generations to come.
For the foreseeable future the centre will concentrate on three domains:
- Promoting and commissioning high-quality research to increase knowledge and share best practice
- Working with people across the private, public and voluntary sectors to collaborate on new solutions
- Developing creative campaigns to raise awareness and inspire action, driving real, positive change on the early years.
The centre's inaugural report, Big Change Starts Small (Centre for Early Childhood, 2021), highlights why early childhood matters, based on scientific evidence, and identifies existing opportunities for making positive changes to improve early years health and social care.
Background
Early childhood is defined by Unesco as the important period in a child's life from birth to aged 8 years. The first 5 years prior to a child entering primary school education are especially crucial because this is a period of rapid development—physically, psychologically and socially. Throughout this period, young children are influenced by the environment in which they live and the actions of the people in their immediate world, usually both parents but the primary carer is usually the mother. The environmental aspects in the early years are the foundation for future life and ongoing development towards full citizenship.
According to Unesco (Marope and Kaga, 2015), investing in early years' health and social care is one of the best ways a country can ensure that tomorrow's young people enter adulthood without the need for costly remedial action. Such investments in early years may compensate for other family disadvantages.
Serious attempts to improve the fabric of early years' family life in England perhaps began with the inspirational work of Victorian philanthropist such as Joseph Rowntree, a chocolatier and Quaker from York who used his wealth for charitable activities, but primarily for family social reform. Today the foundation continues endeavours to tackle social injustices in society.
Early years' health and social care is undoubtedly built on the bedrock of the family and Rowntree recognised that poverty and poor housing had serious detrimental effects on the fabric of the family. Rowntree's first report, Poverty, A Study of Town Life, (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cv2ekdg7), was published in 1901: it established that poverty in Britain was widespread and was a cause of early childhood years' problems.
Since then, other notable reports have reiterated the link been poverty and child health and social wellbeing. This includes, for example, the 1980 Black report, which set out the findings of the expert committee into health inequality chaired by Sir Douglas Black. The report showed that twice as many babies of ‘unskilled manual’ parents (class V) were dying compared with babies of professional class parents (class I) (Department of Health and Social Security, 1980). Similarly, former chief medical officer Donald Acheson, in his 1998 report, suggested that high priority should be given to the health of families and children in contemporary society (Acheson, 1998).
In contemporary societies such as the USA an estimated 20 million US citizens live in mobile homes or trailers, and in England some 46% of all children in privately rented homes live in poverty (National Housing Federation, 2019).
The importance of early years' experiences was underscored by the postwar work of British child psychologist John Bowlby (1958) and later by his research assistants James Robertson and Joyce Robertson (1971). Bowlby initially proposed that mental health and behavioural problems could be attributed to adverse early childhood experiences; his ‘attachment theory’ postulated that every child has an inborn need to form a bond or attachment to one main attachment figure, usually the mother. Bowlby suggested that this bond had to be cemented within the first 2–3 years of life and, if this were thwarted in some way, then the child's emotional development could be scarred for life.
Similarly, the subsequent work of Robertson and Robertson (1971), which documented the impact of separating children from their parents fundamentally changed the way in which children's hospital wards functioned across the NHS and further afield. Parents were no longer simply innocent bystanders prevented from visiting their sick children in hospital, but were embraced as partners in care.
In the USA, psychologist Harry Harlow demonstrated through experiments with rhesus monkey babies the importance of early attachments, affection, and emotional bonds on the course of healthy development (Harlow, 1958).
Despite the availability of this and much subsequent research on the importance of early childhood experiences and optimum childhood development, the importance of early years' health and social care has in many cases fallen on deaf ears. There is now no doubt that children who have experienced suboptimum health and social care environments in their early years who have lived in impoverished environments suffer negative sequelae, but especially those related to mental health.
In 2020, a group of academics from the University of Southampton and King's College London published research conducted with children originally from Romania who were adopted from orphanages in the wake of the fall of President Nicolae Ceauşescu's communist regime. This longitudinal study endeavoured to elucidate how early experiences in early life shaped individual development (Mackes et al, 2020). In this study, early life deprivation was statistically associated with lower IQ and a greater incidence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms among this group of children.
Can the new centre ameliorate damaging early years' experiences?
The Centre for Early Childhood (2021) report, Big Change Starts Small, was published to coincide with the charity's launch and constitutes a summary of decades of research pertinent to the importance of interventions to improve early years' experiences. It hopes that in collating this body of evidence it will demonstrate the importance of optimum early years' health and social care to society's movers and shakers.
Members of the royal family have traditionally supported children's charities and having a royal patron provides good publicity for their work. Princess Royal (Mary), the Queen Mother, and Princess Diana were both patrons of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. The family tradition continues, with the Duchess of Cambridge being the patron of the new Centre for Early Childhood. According to the Duchess: ‘The early years are not simply about how we raise our children. They are about the society we will become.’
Although the genetic aspects of child development are important not all development is predetermined. The Big Change Starts Small report shows that pre-conceptually, throughout pregnancy and beyond the context in which babies and children develop is crucial. Supporting healthy development in early childhood is more than simply addressing the physical aspects of life. Early relationships, environments and experiences can profoundly shape the developing brain, which in turn influence the behaviour of the adult and their own parenting profile.
Some aspects of social development will have been compromised by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during lockdown where the normal gregariousness of young children at play with one another will have been severely limited. The impact of the pandemic is especially challenging and failures in early years' care provision is now being seen, with primary school teachers perceiving signs of language and other developmental delays (Centre for Early Childhood, 2021).
So is it our ‘nostra culpa’?
If the finger of blame is to be proportional to the harms inflicted on the developing child in society, then yes we are culpable. The report from the Centre for Early Childhood suggests that the cost of neglecting early year's development in society amounts to £16.13 billion a year. This is the real cost of endeavouring to put right the failures of early preventive measures.
With more than 120 years' worth of reports that have evidenced the need for greater investment in early years' development, costs such as these can and must be avoided in the future.
This inaugural report from the Centre for Early Childhood highlights six areas where there is an opportunity to make a difference:
- Raising awareness of the extraordinary impact of the early years
- Building a mentally healthier and more nurturing society
- Creating communities of support
- Strengthening the early years' workforce
- Putting the data to work for early years
- Supporting long-term and inter-generational change.
The centre plans to build and consolidate the evidence from research to inform early years' programmes and practice and, unquestionably, the Duchess of Cambridge will keep the charity's work in the limelight.
However, it should be noted that many other laudable schemes have been launched to address early years' problems, not least being the Sure Start programme introduced by the Blair Labour government in the late 1990s. However, local authorities have suffered a 62% spending cuts in early’ spending sine 2010, with a the past 4 years seeing a 20% fall in the number of youngsters using Sure Start children's centres.
KEY POINTS
- The Centre for Early Childhood, part of the Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, is a new initiative aimed at improving early years' health and social care
- The centre aims to increase awareness of the extraordinary impact of the early years on child development and promote best practice and positive action
- Unesco has stated that investment in early years' health and social care is one of the best ways to ensure that tomorrow's young people enter adulthood without the need for costly remedial action
- Investment in early years' development offers potential lifelong benefits for mental and physical health
- The cost of neglecting early years' development in society amounts to £16.13 billion a year