Scaling proven solutions to the early childhood skills gap 

From an article by Stanford Social Innovation

[ WOTS - For background, in 2022, 41% of year 6 pupils in England left primary school without meeting the expected standards in literacy and maths.]

Ariel Kalil, professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and Susan Mayer, professor emerita of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, recognise that, in the USA, the percentage of 13 year-olds failing to meet basic proficiency in math and reading has reached record highs. To address these problems, governments have poured billions of dollars into smaller class sizes, longer school days, enhanced curricula, and teacher training.

But the evidence increasingly points to a more fundamental challenge: The skills gaps that drive these outcomes start long before children ever reach a secondary school classroom - often before they reach any classroom at all. Parents are the people with whom young children spend most of their time, and it is within families, not schools, that early skill differences take root.

They say that people have spent too much time trying to improve schools and not enough time thinking about what happens at home. If leaders want to reduce gaps in reading and maths, they need to pay more attention to what parents and carers do with children every day.

Their main idea is simple: children spend far more time at home than they do in the classroom. Even if they go to nursery or preschool, most of their early lives are still spent with family members or other carers. This matters because children from poorer families are less likely to get the kind of support that builds early learning. They may hear fewer long conversations, do less shared reading, and have fewer chances to learn through play. Research shows that by the time children start school, big gaps in language and number skills have already appeared. Once those gaps are there, they can be very hard to close.

The problem is not just about money. They mention a study called Baby’s First Years, where low-income mothers were given regular cash payments. After four years, the extra money had not clearly improved the children’s thinking and learning skills. The authors use this to argue that money on its own is not enough.

What matters more is how adults spend time with children. Helpful activities can be very ordinary: asking questions, talking back and forth, reading together, and encouraging children to be curious. These everyday moments help children build vocabulary, confidence, and problem-solving skills before they even enter school.

Ariel and Susan believe simple digital tools can help parents do more of this. Based on years of research with low-income families, they describe several tools that worked well. In one case, parents received text messages with prompts that encouraged them to ask better questions and talk more with their children. In another, families used a digital library for just a few minutes each week, and children’s language skills improved.

Maths apps also helped reduce gaps, especially for children whose parents had not gone to university. These examples suggest that low-cost technology can help children learn, as long as it is well designed and used regularly.

Build the market first, then fund innovation

Even though the results are promising, these tools are still not used by many families. Ariel and Susan say this is not because parents do not care. The real problem is that there is no strong system for getting good tools to the people who need them. Many parents may never hear about them. Others may not know which ones are worth trusting. Some may not be able to get access at all.

Schools can buy technology in large numbers and decide which products are useful, but families do not have anything similar. Nurseries, doctors, and home-visiting services reach only some families, not everyone. That means there is no reliable way to buy, share, and check learning tools for young children at home.

This leads to a suggested main solution. Instead of waiting for companies to make better tools and hoping parents will find them, governments should first create a system that makes these tools easy to access. They suggest that each education department should set up a “Digital Tool Learning Centre”. This would register children from birth, give families access to a tablet or online platform with trusted learning tools, and offer support on how to use them. The platform would support hundreds of thousands, even millions of families. If government start buying and sharing these tools on a large scale, companies will have a reason to build better products and test them properly. In short, real innovation will happen once there is a clear public system behind it.

The comparison with school technology helps explain their point. Products used in the classroom became successful not only because they were useful, but because schools had money, staff, and clear systems for choosing and buying them. That created a real market, where companies could compete to serve schools.

Ariel and Susan think the same could happen for parents if education departments created one clear entry point for early learning support. They mention one state as an example, because it has set up a new Department of Early Childhood that could bring services and buying power together. 

Timing matters. Social programmes often start by funding a promising idea and only later try to work out how to get people to use it. In early childhood, Ariel and Susan say this has meant that many good ideas stay small and never reach most families. Their answer is to do things the other way round: build the public system first, then let researchers, charities, and companies fill it with tools that have been shown to work. They compare this to vaccine programmes, where a guaranteed market encourages people to develop and supply useful products.

Overall, they argue that if society really wants to reduce early learning gaps, it cannot focus only on schools. It also needs to support parents in practical, large-scale ways. They believe that we already know a lot about what helps young children learn, and some useful tools already exist. The missing piece is a trusted system that can get those tools to all families, not just a few. Their message is that improving education starts much earlier than school, and that helping families at home should be treated as a serious public priority.

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