ABSTRACT
This chapter start's by considering the evidence on why the early years are so important to children's development and how to improve the early environments of children. The chapter review's the effectiveness of a number of different large-scale programmes that have been trialled in various locations and to consider the limited evidence available on their relative costs and benefits. The literature on the impact of genes on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills is growing rapidly. The home-learning environment, the financial resources available to the family, the cultural resources available to the family and the level of the parents' education have all been found to be important in determining the cognitive and non-cognitive skills of the child. One of the first experiments to determine whether a high quality pre-school education could make a difference was the Perry Pre-school random experiment conducted in the 1960s. Not all attempts to improve children's cognitive skills in the early years have been successful.
