Study of Early Education and Development: Wave 3, 2015-2016

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The Study of Early Education and Development (SEED) is a major study about early years education and its impacts on child development. It is funded by the Department for Education and is undertaken by NatCen Social Research, the University of Oxford, Action for Children and Frontier Economics. The study follows just under 6,000 children across England from the age of two, through to their early years at school. The aims of SEED are to:provide evidence of the impact of current early years provision on children’s outcomesprovide a basis for longitudinal assessment of the impact of early years provision on later attainmentinform policy development to improve children’s readiness for schoolassess the role and influence of the quality of early education provision on children’s outcomesassess the overall value for money of early education in England and the relative value for money associated with different types (e.g. private, voluntary, maintained) and quality of provisionexplore how parenting and the home learning environment interacts with early years education in affecting children’s outcomesThe longitudinal survey of families collects information at four time points: when the families’ child is about two years old (Wave 1 – baseline) (SN 8277) when the child is about three years old (Wave 2) (SN 8278) when the child is about four years old (Wave 3) when the child is about five years old (Wave 4) Data for Wave 4 are not available yet. Further information and research from the study are available on the GOV.UK and NatCen webpages. The Study of Early Education and Development: Wave 3, 2015-2016 is the third survey in the series. In total, 3,930 parents took part in the Wave 3 survey and the overall response rate was 86 percent. Parents were asked about formal childcare attended by children in the study at the time of the survey. The type of setting attended (e.g. private, voluntary or maintained) was classified using administrative records and this information has been added to the archived dataset.Once the data had been collated and cleaned, a weighting scheme was designed for the study to account for different selection probabilities and non-response bias. Once weighted, the wave 3 sample of families taking part in SEED is representative of all families with four-year-olds in England.Main Topics:The Wave 3 questionnaire includes the following sections: Childcare; Measures; Home Environment; Child Health; Parental/Carer Health and Cognitive Difficulties; Parenting/Caring; Socio-demographics; Child Development; Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders Task.