ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter gives the research and policy context of early childhood education in the late 1980s and early 1990s leading up to the start of EPPE.
EPPE is Europe’s largest longitudinal investigation into the effects of pre-school education and care. The EPPE research examines a group of 2,800 children drawn from randomly selected pre-school settings in England toward the end of the 1990s; a group of ‘home’ children (who had no pre-school experience) were also recruited, bringing the sample up to 3,000. The developmental trajectories of children have been carefully investigated, with many ‘enjoying, achieving and making a contribution’ in the ways described so powerfully in the government’s Every Child Matters policy (DfES, 2003). But some children have struggled in their cognitive and social/behavioural development and EPPE explores the possible reasons behind the different trajectories. It does this by collecting information not only on the children but on the educational, familial and neighbourhood contexts in which they have developed. The families and educators of the children have been interviewed for detailed information about the education and care practices that children have experienced in both home and pre-school/school contexts. At the core of EPPE are questions about how the individual characteristics of children are shaped by the environments in which they develop. The view of reciprocal influences between the child and the environment owes much to the work of Bronfenbrenner (1979) whose theory puts the child at the centre of a series of nested spheres of social and cultural influence, including home and education.
